Bellingham shoppers dubious of US-Canada trade war

Canada and the United States agreed Monday to postpone a budding tariff war between the two nations for 30 days.
Consumers and officials on both sides of the northern border have been bracing for a trade war since Saturday, when U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order to impose a 25% border tax on most Canadian imports and a 10% import tax on Canadian oil, natural gas, and electricity. He similarly targeted Mexico with a 25% tariff on imports.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau replied the same day by imposing 25% tariffs on a range of U.S. products.
Canada is Washington state’s leading trade partner.
Few places illustrate the economic connections between the United States and Canada better than the crowded retail outlets of Bellingham, about 20 minutes south of the border with British Columbia.
A study published by Western Washington University’s Border Policy Research Institute in 2020 found that up to half the cars parked outside Bellingham stores like Ross, Costco, Walmart, and Sierra Trading Post had Canadian license plates. At least 12% of Whatcom County’s retail sales-taxes were paid by Canadian shoppers, the study estimated.
On Sunday, the day after the tariffs were announced, the busy parking lot outside the Bellingham Trader Joe’s hosted a mix of Washington and British Columbia license plates.
KUOW spoke with five shoppers outside the store. Though hardly a scientific sample, none of the shoppers had anything favorable to say about the tariffs that were slated to hit consumers in both countries on Feb. 1 and now might do so on March 3.
University of British Columbia-Okanagan students Darvesh Dhillon and Logan Clarke stopped for some American snacks on their way home from singing in an a capella competition in Tacoma.
“It’s going to affect everyone,” Dhillon said of the trade war. “Everything's going to go up in price, and that kind of hurts the everyday person.”
“It's kind of all around a not-great situation because it's really only going to affect people who are buying stuff, and not the corporations or anything like that,” Clarke said.
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Canadian filmmaker Sean Horlor was headed back to Vancouver after catching a concert south of the border. With the close relationship between the two countries, he said he just doesn't get why Canada would be targeted.
Beyond tariffs, Canadian officials have been calling on their citizens to boycott U.S. products.
Horlor said he’s game.
“Goodbye bourbon!” he said, laughing. “Once it's gone, I'm not gonna repurchase.”
Horlor’s partner, Rafael, said he’ll be avoiding American goods, too. He asked to be identified only by his first name since he works for a U.S. company.
“Prices of things are just gonna get more expensive, right?” Rafael said. “And I'll definitely have to do more conscientious grocery shopping.”
Rafael lives in Canada, hails from Brazil, and works remotely for a U.S. company.
He said Trump’s arguments for the tariffs were specious, especially the claim that illegal immigration from Canada is a big problem.
“You ask literally anyone, and they would say, ‘I would never want to live there.’ So, that's the part that I find incredibly hilarious,” Rafael said.
He said his American employer had repeatedly tried to get him to move to the United States, an invitation he refused due to the cost of health care.
“Also, I just feel like the political climate here is too vicious,” he said.

The White House says tariffs can leverage the United States’ economic position to secure the nation’s borders.
“Criminal networks are implicated in human trafficking and smuggling operations, enabling unvetted illegal migration across our northern border,” Trump’s executive order imposing the Canadian tariffs states.
“I mean, do you feel like there is a massive flow of migrants and fentanyl from Canada?” Horlor asked skeptically.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized 21,900 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2024, including 42 pounds at the Canadian border, or 0.2% of the total, according to the agency’s drug-seizure statistics. In addition, about 80% of people caught smuggling fentanyl into the United States between FY2019 and FY2024 were U.S. citizens, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.
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American shopper Deborah Hawley of Lummi Island was no more enthusiastic about a trade war.
“It's all absurd, because every country that he puts a tariff on is going to turn around and put the same tariff on U.S.,” she said. “It's, just as all of Trump's policies, absolutely ridiculous and doesn't make any sense.”
Hawley said she didn’t know how a tariff would affect her yet.
“Everything is happening so fast that we can hardly assimilate what's going on in time to think about what we're going to do about it,” she said.
In a GZERO/Abacus Data poll of 1,500 eligible U.S. voters in late January, 39% of Americans said the proposed tariff on Canadian products was a bad idea, while 28% said it was a good idea, and 19% said it was an okay idea.
On Monday, the White House said it would delay tariffs on Canada and Mexico for 30 days after both countries said they would beef up security along their U.S. borders.
Canada had announced a CA$1.3 billion border-security initiative in December. On Monday, after a phone call between Trudeau and Trump, Trudeau announced that Canada would invest CA$200 million in intelligence on organized crime and fentanyl. Trudeau said Canada would also create a “fentanyl czar” and a Canada- U.S. joint “strike force” to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was amended on Feb. 6, 2025, to remove the last name of a source, at his request, to avoid harming his career prospects.