Wool council gets $158,180 as U.S. tariff hits producers

The Canadian Wool Council will receive $158,180 over two years from Ottawa to promote Canadian wool, but its chairman said Oct. 7 the money does not solve the industry’s bigger problem: a 50 per cent U.S. tariff on raw wool that has cut producers off from the processing plants they relied on.

Council chairman Matthew Rowe announced the funding at the group’s annual Canadian Wool Conversations conference in Calgary, according to a report carried by Yahoo News Canada. It comes through the federal AgriMarketing program, in a release issued by Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald.

“Is that enough to solve our problem? Absolutely not,” Rowe said, describing the amount as a sign the industry is gaining recognition. The council said the money will pay for education and awareness work in Canada and abroad, and for efforts to get more Canadian wool products in front of consumers.

The U.S. began charging 50 per cent tariffs in August on greasy wool, which is raw, unwashed fleece, as well as some finished wool products. Rowe said wool has been swept into retaliatory tariffs even though prices are at record highs. “For some reason we’re included in retaliatory tariffs,” he said.

The reason the tariff stings is structural. Canada has few large-scale scouring plants, the facilities that wash fleece so it can be spun, so many producers have for years shipped raw wool south to U.S. processors. Rowe has said Alberta and other Western producers are especially exposed. Parts of that supply chain are “broken,” he told BNN Bloomberg this week, according to CP24.

The Canadian Press reported on Sept. 5 that some producers had already begun sending wool to China and the Czech Republic instead. Anna Hunter of Long Way Homestead in Manitoba, who processes about 5,000 pounds of wool a year, said she stopped shipping to the U.S. in 2025, after Washington ended the de minimis exemption for shipments under US$800. She asked how many more hits Canadian wool would take “before we start talking about creating a new system,” and called for regional processing and for wool to be treated as a commodity in its own right.

Smaller mills face a different squeeze. Leah Little, office manager at Briggs and Little, a New Brunswick mill founded in 1857, said the company still depends on some U.S.-made machine parts that carry tariffs. “We do hope this mess is resolved before we need to replace any of our machinery parts that are not available in Canada,” she said.

The industry is not large. According to the council’s website, Canada produces about 1.2 million kilograms of wool a year, and 75 per cent comes from Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Jolene Airth, executive director of Alberta Lamb Producers, said more than 1,600 Alberta producers contribute to the wool sector, which she described as “gaining momentum, driven by producer innovation.”

The new money is also modest next to the earlier federal support. The same AgriMarketing program put nearly $150,000 into the council in 2022, according to the Yahoo report, so the two-year top-up is only slightly larger than what the group received before the tariffs existed.

What the federal funding does not buy is processing capacity. Rowe has called for “significant investment” in domestic scouring, the piece of the chain that would let Canadian fleece be washed and sold without crossing the border. Neither the council nor Ottawa has said whether any such investment is planned, and the sources reviewed did not give a cost for building it.

The wool dispute is one corner of a wider trade fight. Canada put counter-tariffs on more than 700 U.S. products in September, as Canada News Media reported, and Washington widened its own tariffs in July to a range of Canadian goods. Whether wool gets relief will depend on that larger negotiation, not on a promotion grant.

For now, producers are choosing between overseas processors, small domestic mills and holding fleece. Rowe summed up the mood by quoting Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

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Via Yahoo News Canada, CP24 and Global News (The Canadian Press). Original reports: Yahoo News Canada, CP24, Global News.