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By now, many of you have heard the news.
Beginning August 19, the United States is placing a 50% tariff on Canadian-made goods, and this affects our notebooks and planners. A $60 planner would carry roughly $30 in tariffs before it ever reached an American doorstep. This is the biggest threat we've faced since I started on Kickstarter in 2020.
We are HS code 4820.10.20 in Annex I‑3. The other lists are Annex I‑2 and Annex I‑1.
What you need to know
Let's start with what you need to know before I run away with my feelings.
Q: What is happening to my 2027 pre-order?
A: If you pre-ordered a 2027 planner, your price is your price. Every pre-order will be honoured exactly as placed. Roughly 1,300 Americans trusted us with their orders months before any of this was announced, and we honour the checkout price for every customer, Canadian or American.
Q: What is the order deadline for American shipments?
A: Sunday, August 9. Order by then and your order has no tariff and no price change. The tariff applies to goods crossing the border on or after August 19, and our small team needs those ten days to pack and ship everything out. I'm expecting the border to be chaotic, so if an order placed by August 9 somehow crosses late anyway, we'll cover the duty ourselves.
Q: What happens after August 19th to American shipments?
A: Every book we send south gets hit with a 50% tariff unless something changes. That isn't something my seven-person company can absorb for long. I don't know how long this lasts or what it means for our prices, but I'm exploring every option at my disposal. So right now, the one thing you can control is timing: order by August 9, and none of this touches you.
Q: What are you doing in response to this?
- We're honouring every pre-order, as promised. We're racing any orders that are ready-to-go across the border ahead of the August 19 deadline. New U.S. orders placed by Sunday, August 9 are part of that race, at today's prices.
- We are deepening our roots at home, with a renewed focus on our Canadian community.
- Speaking up: I've taken this fight to national news, because the federal relief program for our province requires ten full-time employees to qualify. There are seven of us. Most Canadian makers are our size or smaller, so a program that skips over us isn't protecting Canadian manufacturing either.
- Researching how to continue serving our customers: we are taking steps to see how we can still offer our products to our American friends and customers.
Q: What can we do to help?
A: Share our small business and other small businesses. Word of mouth is genuinely how a team like ours survives. And when this comes up in conversation, tell the whole story: this tariff hurts regular people on both sides of the border (more on that below).
American friends: your orders and your kind messages are already helping more than you know.
And Canadians: thank you, always.
Stance
Now, my feelings. I have a lot of feelings right now.
None of them are aimed at the customers who have lovingly supported us since 2020. Half of the roughly 70,000 orders we've ever shipped went to American customers who went out of their way to choose Canadian-made and sustainable.
H&O has been Made in Canada from the very beginning, but I never saw Made in Canada as competing with Made in USA. I always saw them as the same movement: local manufacturing, real jobs, real sustainability, made close to home, on both sides of the border.
And here's something most people don't know: some of what I know about Canadian printing and binding, I learned from American manufacturers who were thrilled to point me in the right direction. These industries are not rivals. They are neighbours who lend each other tools. So many of them are partners in business, friends, and in some cases family.
Our countries don't just trade finished goods. We trade parts. For instance, auto parts cross the border up to eight times before a single vehicle is finished[1].
Paper is also interconnected. The strength in North American paper starts with Canadian softwood's long fibres, often pulped from the leftover chips of the very mills that cut the lumber. That pulp feeds paper machines on both sides of the border. At Twin Rivers Paper, the pulp made in Edmundston, New Brunswick travels by pipeline across the river to the company's century-old paper mill in Madawaska, Maine[2].
And we've seen the consequences of tariffs before: in 2018 the US taxed Canadian newsprint, and American newspapers paid for it. Prices rose about 30 percent. American publishers fought the tariff and won[3]. But The Gridley Herald in California was shut down after 137 years, two days after the tariff was struck down, with the publisher citing the rising cost of newsprint.
An American tariff caused American publishers to fight the tariff, and ultimately contributed to the closure of an American newspaper.
This is why tariffs hurt both sides. We build together. We are one another's biggest customers. Together, the goods, services, and investments crossing our border add up to a US$2.11 trillion trade and investment relationship[4]. Millions of jobs on both sides depend on it.
If you're like me, you believe in local manufacturing. But a 50% tariff doesn't reopen a single factory. Instead, it punishes the small businesses that never offshored in the first place, and it taxes customers like you who chose to buy something made well, close to home. Rather than building local manufacturing, it will squeeze the livelihoods of the people already doing it, in both countries.
Canada and America have built so much together. And I believe all of it, along with our kindness and support towards one another, will outlast this.
See you on the other side of this,
Tia Masic
Founder & CEO, Hemlock & Oak