COLUMN: From Lackawanna to Plattsburgh, New York pays for Trump’s tariffs and Ottawa’s retaliation

The Oswego lighthouse

A Sunday by the lake

On the last weekend of August, in Oswego, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, a local photographer was aiming his lens at Canada geese from Breitbeck Park, the student outlet The NewsHouse reports.

There is the lighthouse. There is the port. There are the sunsets another resident ranks among the most beautiful in the world.

And there are barges arriving half empty.

Half a barge

The Port of Oswego supports more than 2,200 jobs. It generates about $513 million in regional activity, according to a port authority study cited by The NewsHouse. It has long imported raw aluminum from Canada, much of it for the Novelis plant.

Barges that used to bring in 10,000 tonnes of aluminum now often unload half that, port director Tom Drumm told syracuse.com. All the aluminum that arrives by ship comes from Canada, he added. All of it pays 50%.

On a dock, an aluminum ingot has the cold of metal touched with bare hands. It has no nationality. It has a tariff.

Half. Remember that measure. It comes back all over the state.

By the lake, the scenery holds. The cargo does not.

Tuesday in Buffalo

Northland

On September 22, Representative Tim Kennedy gathered elected officials and manufacturers at the Northland training centre in east Buffalo.

The venue was chosen with care. Northland trains workers for advanced manufacturing. Manufacturing is the third-largest industry in the Buffalo-Niagara region, with tens of thousands of jobs, according to his office.

He spoke of a Trump tax on manufacturers. He spoke of a neighbour, not an enemy. He spoke of a petty war that has to stop.

Canada is our closest ally, he said. Not our enemy.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz was briefer. More than two hundred years of alliance, he said. Needless tariffs. Families who pay.

The consulate’s numbers

Kennedy’s release lines up figures from the Consulate General of Canada in New York.

Every year, New York exports $482 million of aluminum to Canada. And $254 million of iron and steel. It imports $1.1 billion of aluminum. And $586 million of copper.

In the first half of 2026, Canada supplied about 60% of the raw aluminum imported by the United States, according to the same document.

That Tuesday, every official at the microphone opposed the tariffs. The numbers belong to no party.

Numbers that cross, and a tax at every crossing.

Twenty-five in Lackawanna

The steel tube

There was also, that Tuesday, a plant manager.

Welded Tube USA makes steel pipe in Lackawanna, Buffalo Toronto Public Media reports. The company bought its steel from nearby Canadian mills.

It moved part of its production to Canada. To escape the retaliation. Then it cut its local workforce, plant manager Steve Vanasky explained.

“We lost about 25 jobs,” he said.

Heading north

Twenty-five jobs crossed north.

I stand with those paying this bill in New York. Against Trump’s decision to treat Canada as a trade adversary, through his 50% tariffs of August 22 and the bans he signed on September 8. Because the sequence his tariffs set off has already cost Lackawanna 25 jobs, according to the plant manager heard on September 22.

The promise was to bring the factories home. This one left the other way.

Twenty-five paycheques. Twenty-five lockers emptied.

They promised to bring jobs home. Lackawanna exported twenty-five.

Every crossing pays

The metal that goes back and forth

We have to understand the mechanics of western New York.

Materials cross the border several times during manufacturing, Kennedy’s office writes. They pay a tariff at every crossing.

The metal crosses once, raw. It crosses a second time, rolled. A third time, processed. It crosses again, assembled. Every time it crosses, the tariff falls.

Tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper can reach 50% depending on their classification, the release notes.

New York and Canada trade about $38 billion in goods, according to syracuse.com. That trade supports some 600,000 jobs on either side of the border.

Thirty-eight billion. Six hundred thousand jobs. One border.

Who fronts the money

Professor Ryan Monarch, of Syracuse University, gave syracuse.com a sense of scale. American companies absorb 85 cents of every tariff dollar, he says.

Eighty-five cents. On a dollar.

The share passed on to consumers is harder to track.

In the end, Kennedy told WBEN radio, consumers are the ones who pay.

An engine crosses. It comes back. It crosses again. The accountant crosses nothing. He adds.

Three crossings, three tariffs, one single part.

The impossible quote

GTI Fabrication

Another manufacturer spoke that Tuesday. He did not give the expected speech.

Dan Yousett, of GTI Fabrication, finds the question more complicated than a simple for or against, Buffalo Toronto Public Media reports. He qualifies. He calculates.

In theory, he says, the tariffs could bring business back to Buffalo. Over the long term.

In the short term, he says, the churn makes it “extremely difficult to quote a job.”

The price on the day of the order

How is he supposed to know what price to bid, he asks, if he does not know what materials will cost on the day the order comes in?

The question has no answer in Buffalo. It has one in Washington. It keeps changing.

Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan described the same waiting game to WBEN. The businesses he meets are waiting. At a standstill, he says. They do not know whether to grow or shrink.

Nobody builds a financial plan on uncertainty, said Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick. Manufacturers don’t either.

Nobody does.

An estimator’s desk is a calculator nobody dares to punch anymore.

The quote waits for a price nobody guarantees.

The White House’s answer

Reindustrialize

The defence of these tariffs deserves a hearing in its strongest form.

The administration argues that they strengthen American manufacturing. They would reduce dependence on foreign metals, Buffalo Toronto Public Media notes. The Section 232 tariffs rest on national security.

The White House lays out its numbers in its fact sheet of September 8. In August, for the eighth month in a row, American manufacturing activity expanded, it writes. In July, it grew at the fastest pace in more than four years.

Eight months. That is their number.

A New York voice

New York is not unanimous. This line has its defenders in New York itself. New York Representative Claudia Tenney introduced a bill in July to hold Canada accountable for provincial boycotts of American alcohol, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And Yousett, as we have read, does not reject the idea. He doubts it in the short term.

In Congress too, some members worry about rising costs, the same service notes. The debate exists in Washington.

The argument holds together. It deserves a check on the ground.

Promised factories are checked at the factory gate.

Backwards

The pipe that leaves

The check took place in Lackawanna.

A plant that bought Canadian steel moved part of its production to Canada. Twenty-five jobs disappeared on the American side, according to its manager.

That is the opposite of the promised reindustrialization.

The aluminum nobody replaces

Canada supplied about 60% of the raw aluminum imported in the first half, according to Kennedy’s office. A tariff does not grow a smelter in one summer.

So the aluminum comes anyway. More expensive. In smaller loads, by train or by truck, a former port director explained to syracuse.com.

And yet the White House fact sheet talks about manufacturing on the rise. It does not talk about Lackawanna.

Not one line.

The national curve rises. Lackawanna’s pipe has moved away.

Our countertariffs in Buffalo

Canada’s retaliation

Now I have to write what bothers my own camp.

Welded Tube did not first flee Trump’s tariffs. It fled ours, according to its manager, who was talking about Canada’s retaliatory tariffs. Ottawa added more on September 8.

Our countertariffs hit American steel and aluminum. Our countertariffs hit farm equipment and household appliances, Kennedy’s office specifies. Our countertariffs hit electronics. In all, $27.6 billion worth of goods, at 15, 25 or 50%, Buffalo Toronto Public Media reports.

Our boycott in Plattsburgh

And our holidays have a price too. At Ausable Chasm, near Plattsburgh, cancellations at the nearby campground jumped 400%, mostly among Canadians, Newsday reports.

Being boycotted when they are there to help people unplug is hard to understand, says manager Caleb Nappi.

That is true, and it does not change this: the sequence began with Washington’s tariffs. The Canadians who cancelled cited the tensions, Trump’s tariffs and the weak loonie, according to Nappi.

Both truths stand.

Our retaliation hits Buffalo too. We know it now.

Plattsburgh, suburb of Montreal

A bilingual town

Plattsburgh bills itself as Montreal’s American suburb, Garry Douglas, of the North Country Chamber of Commerce, tells Newsday.

French is heard in the restaurants. Most signs are in two languages. Quebec plates are everywhere, from the city beach to the airport.

Dozens of businesses there are subsidiaries of Quebec companies, Douglas says. The cost of materials has gone up. Growth has slowed.

Businesses do not make big decisions in uncertainty, he says.

Jon Thatcher bought the Shady Oaks campground in 2024. He dreamed of ready-to-camp sites and a bar. Prices keep changing, he tells Newsday. He no longer knows what he will be able to build.

A project. A quote. A doubt.

What Douglas hears

For many Canadians, he says, it is not the tariffs. It is Trump’s talk of annexing Canada.

The equivalent, Douglas says, of a betrayal within the family.

At the Irises café, Carol McLean has run her business for 29 years. The summer was good. Winter worries her, she tells Newsday. It is the slow season, and costs are rising.

Winter, as it happens, is coming.

Plattsburgh speaks two languages and counts one loss.

Malone, half a weekend

A thousand, then five hundred

In Malone, 15 miles from the border, the Monette family runs a hotel, gas stations, restaurants and a ski hill.

If 1,000 Canadians used to come on a weekend and now only 500 do, that is 500 fewer people spending, Bruce Monette III sums up for Newsday.

Half, again.

The family cut staff at the ski hill during the high season. It is advertising elsewhere.

Fewer Canadians on the slopes of the North Country. Fewer Canadian boats on Lake Champlain. Fewer hotel-and-golf packages booked in border towns, Newsday reports.

Fewer, everywhere.

The same family

Monette says he does not see Canadians as foreign tourists. A line on a map, as the joke goes there. We are so close that we are the same people.

At Cumberland Bay State Park, on Lake Champlain, Canadian reservations fell from 1,987 in 2024 to 955 last year, according to the state parks office cited by Newsday.

Less than half.

Statewide, nearly 3.6 million fewer Canadian travellers entered New York in 2025, according to Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, cited by Newsday. Their spending fell from $1.71 billion to $1.23 billion, according to state tourism data.

Millions less. Fewer streets repaved, a Buffalo professor warns.

An empty campground has a sound of its own. No trailer engine. No French in the lanes. The lapping of the lake, and that is all.

And yet the Monettes say it without resentment. They like it when the Canadians are there.

A weekend cut in half does not cut a family in two.

Orchards, milk, wine

The hundred-acre field

Farther west, in Niagara County, Jim Bittner has grown apples for more than 30 years, syracuse.com reports.

He would like to plant a hundred-acre field. Instead he rents it to a field-crop grower. A hundred acres without apple trees.

The uncertainty, he says, makes the investment too risky. He will not plant without knowing whether he can sell.

Federal aid helped him, he says. Not enough.

What no longer goes north

The same outlet reports that New York’s dairy exports to Canada fell 12% in the first half of 2025, citing the state comptroller. Wine sales to Canada plunged 91% last year, according to Governor Kathy Hochul.

The milk no longer goes north. Neither does the wine.

The legislature voted a $30 million fund for farmers. Thirty million. For the whole state.

A field left to other crops is an orchard that will not exist in ten years.

Who will plant the orchard of 2036?

What goes unplanted today is never harvested.

September 29, then January

What is coming

On September 29, the import bans Trump signed on September 8 will take effect, according to the White House. In two days.

In January, Washington is threatening to raise duties on Canadian steel, cars and trucks to 50%. A $50,000 pickup could cost $75,000, Cornell professor Art Wheaton illustrated for syracuse.com.

Fifty thousand. Seventy-five thousand.

The next bill is already written.

Power crosses too. New York draws about 3% of its electricity from Canada, and nearly 10% on peak days, according to a Cornell professor cited by syracuse.com. Ontario has threatened to halt its sales or impose a surcharge.

Routes that do not come back

Mayor Ryan said it on Tuesday to Buffalo Toronto Public Media. “There’s no reason to have gone down this path, but it’s reversible,” he said. Let us reverse it, he added, before our largest trading partner opens new routes to Europe, Asia and South America.

Once those routes are established, he went on, those customers and suppliers will not come back.

The governor launched a promotion in August called “NY Loves Canada.” New York and Canada are neighbours by geographic destiny but friends by choice, she said, according to Newsday.

And yet a slogan does not fill a barge.

Reversible today. Maybe not tomorrow.

The lake, the bill

The half that remains

I come back to the Oswego lighthouse.

Half a barge in Oswego. Half a weekend crowd in Malone. Half a harvest that will not be planted in Niagara. Fewer than half the campers at Cumberland Bay. Twenty-five jobs in Lackawanna, gone entirely.

An orchard nobody plants, a campground nobody fills, a barge loaded only halfway…

I admit it: for a long time I counted only what we were losing. Our plants. Our exports. Our jobs. Reading about Malone, I understood I was counting half the bill.

The counter in Plattsburgh

Will we go to Plattsburgh this winter, knowing that the person behind the counter pays the same bill we do?

The decision is ours. The bill has already crossed.

From Lackawanna to Plattsburgh, the bill crosses the border both ways.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Office of Representative Tim Kennedy — tariffs and western New York manufacturers, September 22, 2026
• Buffalo Toronto Public Media — Welded Tube, GTI and Mayor Ryan at Northland, September 22, 2026
• White House — import bans and manufacturing record, September 8, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Newsday — Canadian tourism falls in the North Country, September 21, 2026
• The NewsHouse — Oswego, its port and Lake Ontario, August 31, 2026
• Congressional Research Service — Section 338 and tariffs aimed at Canada, September 14, 2026