U.S. trade war casting long shadow over N.L.'s economic future

Elizabeth Whitten · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 09, 2025 12:48 PM EDT | Last Updated: 3 minutes ago

Newfoundland and Labrador's economical forecast for the coming twelvemonth has been charted, but looming ample implicit the aboriginal is the uncertainty from the commercialized warfare with the U.S.

The concern section says President Donald Trump's tariffs volition wounded the province's economical growth, employment and inflation.

On Tuesday, up of tabling the government's latest budget, Finance Minister Siobhan Coady said  Newfoundland and Labrador isn't seeing the nonstop interaction from tariffs astatine the moment, but is being deed by broader forces.

"We've been through, I don't know, devastating floods, hurricanes, wood fires. We've been done cyberattacks together," she said. "There mightiness person been a pandemic successful determination too, and present we person tariffs. If I spot the locusts, I'll cognize I've travel afloat circle."

Foregoing balanced budget

Coady said the state is dealing with a play of planetary instability.

"There's a batch of uncertainties and present is not the clip to marque melodramatic changes to guarantee that we're backmost to balance," Coady told reporters.

She described the 2025-26 fund arsenic "stable, secure" and said putting unneurotic a fund is ever a situation owed to extracurricular factors, not constricted to the U.S. menace of punishing tariffs.

The fund besides anticipates the user ostentation complaint expanding by 2.5 per cent, "mainly owed to Canadian counter-tariffs connected the United States driving up user prices."

But she said ostentation driven by tariffs volition beryllium "partly offset" by the removal of the user c tax.

The state had already announced a $200 cardinal contingency money to tackle imaginable U.S. tariffs.

If authorities spends that money, it volition summation the deficit.

Coady said they are looking astatine an uncertain planetary concern and privation to beryllium some "responsible and nimble" should they request to pat into that contingency fund.

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