It has been more than a year since President Donald Trump’s first round of tariffs were imposed on Canada and trade tensions between the two countries have since escalated.
Following the initial tariffs on steel and automobiles in March 2025, researchers at the University of Toronto launched MappingTariffs, a website that displays the impact of tariffs across Canada.
Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities and co-founder of the mapping project, is co-leading a team of researchers examining the effects of tariffs. Chapple said the map is based on regional growth and decline from an “urban perspective.”
“As the trade war heated up last year, we began tracking tariff by tariff the impacts on Canadian businesses and jobs,” Chapple said.
“We track the firms that are impacted potentially, as well as the workers at that location, and then we also look at the workers based on where they live, because it doesn't just impact the workplace; it impacts people's spending around their homes.”
Since the website launched, researchers have identified significant impacts from the ongoing trade tensions between the United States and Canada across several provinces.
In Southern Ontario, several sectors are taking a hit.
“Because of the motor vehicle tariffs, we see very concentrated impacts in Southern Ontario, where the economy is very closely tied to the automotive industry in Michigan, and those are some of the strongest impacts we see,” Chapple said.
She adds that vineyards in the region could also be significantly affected.
“We see the potential for some quite serious impacts on the wine region, so we think that in the areas with a lot of wineries, we're going to see anything from a three to a seven percent job loss,” Chapple said. She projected places such as Niagara-on-the-Lake and St. Catharines could be among the hardest hit because of the current strain on U.S.-Canada relations.
“The wine business in Southern Ontario is a market that is actually pretty dependent on U.S. consumption, because you're not going to be exporting to France, you're not even going to be exporting to California, likely,” Chapple said. “But, upstate New York and New England, you do have those economic relationships.”
Chapple said sister cities are particularly affected because of their trade relationships and proximity. She said the steel and aluminum sectors have experienced significant impacts because of these connections.
“Steel and aluminum are the ones that tend to hit Ontario,” Chapple said. “Those jurisdictions that are hit tend to have very close connections to kind of sister manufacturers in the U.S.”
One example Chapple shared is the manufacturing of Canadian beer cans.
“Canadians don't manufacture beer cans, so that aluminum that's produced here since 2008 has been sent over the border to be manufactured into beer cans in the Northeast and then sent back to hold the beer. So, we have these supply chains which are really interconnected,” she said.
While the data and projections collected by Chapple and her team show significant impacts on the Canadian economy, she said the U.S. is experiencing consequences of its own.
In a recent CBRE report, Chapple said the impact of tariffs on construction costs in the U.S. was double that in Canada.
“So, if Canada has gone up one or two percent, the U.S. has gone up two or three percent in construction costs,” she said.
Chapple, who has also researched travel trends associated with declining Canadian travel to U.S. cities, stated she hopes to add U.S. cities to the map soon so people can understand how Americans are faring as well.
