At Jim Bittner’s apple farm on the shores of Lake Ontario sits an open 100-acre field.
Bittner would like to expand his orchard into that field, but instead he leases that land to a crop farmer. The Trump administration’s frequently shifting tariff policies and threatened new tariffs by the U.S. and Canada make investment too risky right now, Bittner said.
“That uncertainty is probably the biggest thing,” said Bittner, who has grown apples on the 400-acre orchard in Niagara County for more than 30 years. “I’m not going to make a substantial investment in a new apple planting when I have no idea if we’re going to be able to sell this stuff and make a profit at it.”
Tariffs imposed by Trump and retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada have cost consumers money and made it difficult to do business, economists and businesspeople say.
New York is uniquely at risk from tariffs because of its proximity to Canada and reliance on Canadian goods and energy. New York shares a 445-mile border with the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
New York and Canada exchange about $38 billion worth of goods, including aluminum, barley, cars and cheese. That trade supports an estimated 600,000 jobs in both regions combined, across dozens of industries.
The two neighbors are among each other’s most important trading partners. Canada is New York state’s biggest export market. Canada sends more goods to New York than to all but four other states.
Since the round of tariffs went into effect last year, Canadian tourists have stayed away from New York. Farmers and wineries in New York have sold much less milk and wine north of the border. Shipments of Canadian aluminum through the Port of Oswego fell by half.
As New York is still stinging from that first round of tariffs, a new, potentially more punishing round of tariffs threatens to cause more economic pain if the two countries can’t reach a new agreement.
President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 50% tariffs on steel, cars and trucks, among the biggest imports from Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has proposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on a wide range of goods.
“That would be hugely devastating,” said Art Wheaton, a labor studies professor at Cornell University. “Instead of being, say, a $50,000 pickup truck, now you’re talking a $75,000 pickup truck. It’s an entirely different market from the consumer.”
The impact of the first round of tariffs has been painful to New Yorkers.
Travel by Canadians dropped by more than 26% compared with 2024, according to the Empire State Development agency. That was blamed on tariffs, political divisions, and a stronger U.S. dollar, which made travel for Canadians more expensive.
New York farmers saw a drop of 12% in dairy exports to Canada in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to the New York State Comptroller’s Office. New York’s wine industry took a much bigger hit, selling 91% less wine last year to Canada, New York’s biggest export market for wine, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.
The state legislature approved a $30 million farmers relief fund in the 2026–2027 budget. The federal government has also offered relief packages to farmers.
Bittner, the apple grower, said he’s been able to get money from those federal packages, but not enough to offset the costs stemming from the tariffs.
As tariffs on aluminum went into effect a few years ago, shipments arriving by ship to the Port of Oswego fell by half, said former authority director William Scriber. Instead of bringing in huge shipments of aluminum by ship and paying the tariffs all at once, aluminum users like Novelis, in Scriba, imported smaller quantities by rail or truck, Scriber said.
Scriber retired from the port in 2024. The new director, Tom Drumm, said tariffs continue to hurt business. With 50% tariffs on prime aluminum, the grade most commonly unloaded at the port from Canadian mills, revenues and tonnage are down, Drumm said.
“Every piece of that aluminum that we receive here by vessel at the port is from Canada and is subsequently hit with the 50% tariff,” said Drumm, who started at the port in April. “It directly affects us because we’ve received less volume than we would traditionally see pre-tariff times.”
Drumm said he won’t have solid figures on the impact until the end of the shipping season, typically in late November. But he said it’s now common for barges that used to bring 10,000 metric tons of aluminum to the port to unload half that much.
And now a new round of tariffs has gone into effect over the past month.
So far, they’re imposed on a limited number of goods, economists say, and are unlikely to have major consequences on either side of the border. Each country is imposing tariffs on about $20 billion in goods, which account for about 5% of trade.
“The size of this particular round of tariffs is fairly small,” said Ryan Monarch, a professor of international trade at Syracuse University.
Trump responded this week to Canada’s retaliatory tariffs by announcing a ban on some Canadian imports, including liquor, wine, molasses and a number of milk byproducts. Those tariffs would kick in Sept. 29, Trump said.
If the two countries can’t reach an agreement by January, tariffs that could truly harm both economies will kick in.
The province of Ontario, which supplies New York with cheap power, has warned that it might stop selling energy to the U.S. or impose a surcharge.
New York gets about 3% of its electricity from Canada overall, but that rises to nearly 10% on hot days when New York’s energy use peaks, said Fengqi You, a professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell University.
“During these peak demands, Canada could be a very, very helpful buffer and a very, very helpful reserve,” You said. “If we suddenly lose this buffer, our energy system will become less resilient, less resilient to any unexpected or unintended events.”
If Canadian energy becomes too expensive, he said, New York grid operators could buy from other states, including Pennsylvania.
That would cost more, he said, although it’s hard to say how much.
Economists hold out hope that the threats between U.S. and Canadian leaders are merely bluster and that the two sides will work out a deal by the end of the year.
In Western New York, the three bridges to Canada are busy every day with trade between the two countries, Wheaton said.
Car parts move back and forth from factories on both sides of the border. Imposing tariffs each time could dramatically increase the cost of vehicle parts, including engines.
“With those engines, you’re talking like $10,000 a piece,” Wheaton said. “That just adds up really quickly.”
Trump has threatened tariffs of 50% starting next year on Canadian steel and vehicles made in Canada. Carney has said Canada would strike back with high tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods, including steel, dairy products and agricultural equipment.
That level of tariffs would sting on both sides of the border, Wheaton said.
“That would be devastating for the auto sector,” Wheaton said. “It would be devastating for Buffalo, Detroit, New York, Michigan. All of them send literally billions and billions of dollars across the border all the time.”
Research on Trump’s earlier rounds of tariffs shows they raise prices for consumers, said SU’s Monarch, although it’s difficult to pin down how much. He said U.S. businesses incur 85 cents of every dollar in tariff costs, but it’s not clear how much of that gets passed on to consumers.
“Every business has their own strategy, and it’s a lot harder to track the effects (of tariffs) into consumer prices,” he said. “What I think is fair is that it has not sort of been a catastrophe in terms of hyperinflation.”
Trump last year imposed tariffs on a number of countries under a 1977 law, but those were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in February. To issue the latest round of tariffs, Trump is relying on a 1930 law that allows the president to impose tariffs if a country discriminates against U.S. commerce.
Economists hold out hope that the U.S. and Canada will hash out a deal before the end of the year that will prevent more widespread tariffs from going into effect.
“If I was a betting person,” Wheaton said, “I would bet heavily that the tariffs will not go into effect because they will come to their senses before that time.”