Could Tariffs Collapse Canadian Publishing?
Right now the Canadian book world is experiencing a fair amount of fear and uncertainty. As the new administration in the United States holds the threat of widespread tariffs over our heads here, we don’t quite know how to prepare. While books are currently exempt from tariffs in both Canada and America, they have been listed as an item that could be part of Canada’s next round of counter-tariffs.
If this happened, we’d likely see tariffs placed on the manufacturing cost of books coming into Canada, which generally means only the printing cost. Unfortunately, most of the books sold in our bookstores come from the US. One independent bookseller estimated that 70% of the books in her store would likely see a price increase if that counter-tariff comes to pass, and I’d say they have fewer American titles than most.
This doesn’t mean there are no 100% Canadian-made books. All our titles are 100% Canadian, which I define as a book written by a Canadian author, published by a wholly Canadian-owned publishing company and printed in Canada. There are lots of books like ours being produced in Canada.
So then why do our bookstores have so few Canadian-made books on their shelves? That’s due to the sheer size of the multinationals that dominate our business and the fact that Canada is a small market. It’s a lot of work to publish a 100% Canadian book and sell it across our rather large and thinly populated country. It’s easier to do a run of books for the US and tack on a few thousand copies for the Canadian stores. The result is that we have thousands of American titles flooding in, with American marketing campaigns that swamp our much smaller Canadian publishers. A lot of Canadian authors are published by the multinational publishers as well, as these companies are happy to recognize good writing from anywhere, as long as that writing can sell enough copies.
But smaller, more local writers, writers who are taking risks or are writing about topics that haven’t made it into the American media yet – really most writing by Canadian authors – our industry publishes those books and we do a very good job of it. If you see anyone saying the whole Canadian industry would collapse with tariffs, that’s ridiculous. As a press that publishes Canadian authors for the Canadian market, I can tell you the books will still be there. And we’ll still be selling them. But the American-made books would cost more in the bookstores with the tariffs and that would hurt the stores.
We’re not in favour of tariffs on books. I don’t think anyone in the Canadian publishing industry is. We support the free flow of ideas and know that there are brilliant books we want to read being published on both sides of the border, and around the world. Yet the fear that these tariffs have caused in one section of our industry should give us pause. Tariffs will never be a good thing, but when the threat of implementing them is considered an existential threat by some, perhaps something isn’t working quite right.
We’ve done up some stickers and signage to help people find those 100% Canadian books in our independent bookstores, which we’ll be sending out this week. People are looking for Canadian products in every facet of their lives right now and we’d like to help them find those books. If you do see a sticker or some signage, we’d love to see a photo on social media.
Happy Reading,
Noelle
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