The major Manitoba book printer Friesens Corp. and the Association of Canadian Publishers are pinning their hopes of avoiding new U.S. tariffs on an exemption buried deep in American emergency legislation.
President Donald Trump imposed his new 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian goods Tuesday through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Section 1702(b) declares that the President’s authority under the act “does not include the authority to regulate or prohibit” the importation of “informational materials” including “publications,” films, photographs and artwork.
In its Notice of Implementation issued Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wrote that the exemption would be honoured.
As such, “we’re 99 per cent confident that publishers and printers will have an exemption for cross-border transfer,” Friesens president and chief executive officer Chad Friesen said in a phone interview. The company says it prints about 25 million books a year.
Jack Illingworth, the executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, has been hoping for the exemption to be enforced since learning of it a month ago, after Trump delayed his tariff imposition by 30 days.
In an e-mail Tuesday, Illingworth said that as a result of the Notice of Implementation, and the exemption’s ties to First Amendment free-speech rights, books would likely not face tariffs – but that the U.S. court system or Customs and Border Protection officials may have the final say. Until then, he warned publishers and other shippers of books to make sure their shipments are labelled with the correct codes to avoid tariffs.
Enforcement mechanisms for different kinds of goods were not immediately clear on Tuesday as Trump’s tariffs began to take effect on cross-border shipments. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced retaliatory measures, which will include tariffs on $155-billion of U.S. goods to be rolled out over the next three weeks.
Small Canadian publishers told The Globe and Mail last month that they’d tried numerous tactics to avoid tariff hits, including pre-emptively moving books across the border, while others said any added costs would make them reconsider sending books to the United States at all.
Friesen told The Globe Tuesday that between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of the books his company prints in its Southern Manitoba facilities, including both trade books and yearbooks, are usually destined for the U.S. It works with a range of publishers, from the five major multinationals to some of Canada’s smallest shops. Decades of free trade have meant regular border crossings for books, he pointed out.
It’s not uncommon, for instance, for a U.S. publisher to print a book in Canada, ship it to a U.S. warehouse, then send shipments back to Canadian consumers. In other cases, Canadian-based publishers ship large volumes of their titles to the U.S.
Because Friesens is an employee-owned company, the CEO said, it socks away cash from profitable years into a reserve fund for unexpected opportunities and threats. He said he has been in touch with employee-owners about his plans for the coming days.
For the near future, at least, “you’re going to hear about job cuts and factory closures, but not at Friesens. Our objective is to keep our employee-owners as financially whole as we can for as long as we can.”
Friesen said that in the short to medium term, he has also told printing customers and key stakeholders that “we will bear the brunt of the tariffs ourselves” and absorb the costs. But if a trade war drags on for years, “that becomes more of an existential threat for many, many businesses.”
