Trump’s insane tariff battle hurts the very businesses who love his deregulation.
Today’s Seattle Times has an article detailing the crushing blow to Washington State businesses due to King Trump’s personal vendetta with our Canadian neighbors.
Washington State does a huge business with Canada, from exports of a wide variety of products to tourism. Canada is our number two trading partner (China of course is first but much a lot of that trade is made up of Boeing planes). Many of these tariffs hurt industries that have loved having Trump’s deregulation to do away with environmental concerns. It appears that Trump has bit the hand that has fed him.
Times columnist Danny Westneat stated in his article on the tariff war:
Last year, Canadian visitors to Seattle plunged by 600,000, from 1.7 million in 2024 to 1.1 million, Visit Seattle announced last month. Canadian tourist revenue dropped by $215 million just in Seattle, the group estimated.
We just were recovering from that previous fiasco in the last months, but now it may be even worse than that.
A separate article behind the Times paywall points out that the hardest hit agricultural industry is shellfish, and the largest shellfish grower is Taylor Shellfish. This blog has documented over the last twenty years the lobbying against regulations on their industry, including undermining Marine Resources Committees in the north Sound while buying their support by offering to help with the restoration of Olympia Oysters. Their employees showed up to jeer anti-net pen lecturers and a manager of their Jefferson County operations attacked anti-net pen leaders like Alexandra Morton. The company has fought lawsuits by local landowners in the Hood Canal and Puget Sound that have attempted to slow their relentless conversion of virgin bays and shorelines into industrial monoculture aquaculture farms. The industry has spent a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars lobbying in Olympia and Washington D.C. with success. As significant employers in these small rural counties they have supported both Democrat and Republican politicians who hew to their demands in Olympia. I have no doubt that they supported and were thrilled at Trump getting elected a second time. They likely saw his new regime as one that would finally eliminate environmental regulations entirely. And that has been happening.
Now, they unfortunately have found out the cost of that support.
Trump’s insane decisions have not only affected the shellfish industry but might also sink our local paper mill. While I am not clear how much of their output gets shipped to Canada, they are owned by a Wall Street firm (Atlas Holdings) that has also owned a Canadian paper mill that is a sister company to Port Townsend Paper. Crown Packaging is a large corrugated packaging facility in British Columbia. Additionally, there may be sawdust supply that comes from mills in Canada by barge, given the strength of the U.S. dollar to purchase Canadian raw materials at a discount to U.S. ones. The mill in Port Townsend runs on a slim profit margin, and a huge tariff could conceivably see the closure of the mill.
According to the Times article, Washington State sells $460 million in paper and paper board goods to Canada.
The closure of the Port Townsend mill would be an economic disaster to the town and the Peninsula. Many of the mill employees live out of town, due to high costs of living in Port Townsend. Their incomes help prop up not only P.T. but also the towns they live in, like Sequim and Port Angeles.
So we wait to see whether Trump wakes up tomorrow and is given a sound tongue lashing behind closed doors in the White House and changes his mind. He seems to take great relish in attacking “Blue” states like Washington, giving us far less FEMA support for our wildfire victims, the majority of whom likely voted for him, since they live in districts that went heavily Republican in all three of the last elections. While he thinks he is simply hurting Canada, the real victims are his supporters in industries across this state.
Filed under: Around the Sound, Clallam County, Government, Jefferson County, Jobs, legislation, Politics | Tagged: tariff, trump |
PTPC is vertically integrated with Crown Box plants in BC, who in turn export their finished products to the US. Now they get taxed both ways on the round trip.
As Atlas their holding company was likely getting ready to harvest (sell the stack) based on how many years they have held the plant, I suspect their best move is to quietly separate the newer BC box plants from this aging asset and quietly ramp things down.
I don’t have any connection to PTPC directly, but I have a family background in papermill operations, from what I hear, their recovery boiler is super old, and most money spent on the facility has been spent on other portions of the plant.
An old ass mill like this, starved for CAPEX is at serious risk to being shuttered. Stack on water risks due to low snowpack, climate mandates, and increasing power costs, Dynawave explosion inspection triggers, and now a 25-50% tariff bite, it may be over.
City of PT better CTA, their water supply depends on it and someone is going to hold the bag on cleanup like PA.
Are we great again?
thank you for your very cogent perspective on this. I agree with you that the outlook for the PTPC is not very good and given their margins it could look even worse. The one thing I would say in their favor is that I don’t know who else is processing cardboard at the quantities that they are anywhere in Washington state. They’re taking a vast load of these I drive by there on my bike multiple times a week and they do have an incredible inventory of raw cardboard. They may have an advantage in that recycling for many of these towns on the Peninsula probably is essentially giving them this cardboard material. They were not taking as much cardboard when I worked there a few years ago so I think that they’ve really stepped up the use of that. The other wildcard is I don’t know whether those tanks that are similar to the ones that failed down in south Washington are needing replacement anytime soon. I do know they did some work on them during the pandemic. It may have only been cosmetic.
We several have Canadian friends who’ve cancelled planned visits over the past year. One of them is an elderly lady whose children won’t allow her to cross the border because they fear for her safety. This is so bizarrely outrageous! Why…!?