When the United States imposed 50 per cent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian exports on August 22, after last-minute trade talks between Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government and the Trump administration collapsed, the headlines focused on the scale of the hit: economists now estimate the tariffs could cost Canada close to 90,000 jobs, with British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec facing the steepest losses. What that coverage has largely skipped over is a look at the safety net Ottawa already built for exactly this scenario — and how little runway is actually left on the part of it that matters most to a laid-off worker’s next paycheque.
Oxford Economics puts the provincial breakdown at roughly 36,000 jobs in Ontario, 18,000 in Quebec, 11,000 in British Columbia and 9,000 in Alberta, concentrated in machinery, electronics, plastics, furniture, wood and chemicals — sectors clustered in Ontario and Quebec. Losses on that scale would push the national unemployment rate up by an estimated 0.4 percentage points, to around 6.8 per cent.
A Safety Net Built Before This Crisis Hit
Since March 2025, Ottawa has run three temporary Employment Insurance measures aimed squarely at tariff-hit workers: the standard one-week EI waiting period is waived, workers no longer have to exhaust severance or separation pay before collecting benefits, and long-tenured employees get 20 additional weeks of regular benefits, for up to 65 weeks total. Ottawa extended all three in March 2026 specifically to keep them running through the kind of trade shock that hit this month. Alongside that, the Work-Sharing program — which lets employers cut hours instead of laying workers off, with EI topping up the difference — has approved roughly 1,500 agreements covering more than 54,000 workers since 2025, with the maximum agreement length stretched to 76 weeks. A Worker Retention Grant announced in November 2025 lets employers with active Work-Sharing agreements top up wages to about 70 per cent for staff who train during their newly freed-up hours.
The Clock Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s the gap the job-loss forecasts don’t mention: those three EI measures — the ones that put money directly in a laid-off worker’s pocket faster and for longer — are currently scheduled to expire on October 10, 2026. That’s less than seven weeks after the 50 per cent tariffs actually took effect, and with no announced timeline for when, or whether, trade talks resume. The Work-Sharing flexibilities have more runway, extended to March 31, 2027, but the income-support measures a newly laid-off worker would actually lean on run out first. Carney has said retaliating immediately would be “counterproductive” while the door to talks stays open, which implies this dispute could easily outlast an EI deadline set months before the tariffs escalated to 50 per cent.
What 2018-19 Suggests About What Happens Next
Canada has run this playbook before. During the 2018-19 steel and aluminum tariff fight, Washington’s tariffs stayed in place for roughly 11 months — from June 2018 to May 2019 — while Ottawa layered in a remission fund, Work-Sharing arrangements and lending support through the Business Development Bank of Canada and Export Development Canada. A Statistics Canada retrospective on that period found Canadian exporters made adjustments that outlasted the tariffs themselves, evidence that both the shock and the policy response tend to run longer than the initial announcement suggests.
If this dispute follows a similar arc, the October 10 EI deadline would land only about two months in — nowhere near a plausible endpoint. That makes another extension likely on past form, but it is not yet confirmed, and no announcement has been made. For the roughly 90,000 workers economists say are on the line, whether Ottawa moves before October 10 to extend the income-support half of its tariff safety net may end up mattering just as much as anything decided at the negotiating table.
via CTV News (https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trumps-tariffs/article/these-provinces-could-see-the-most-job-losses-with-new-us-tariffs-report/)
