As a producer of all America-made solar mounting goods, our supply partners bring most of their raw aluminum from Canada for processing, so the immediate effect is higher costs on our raw goods. Our raw goods cost is only about 30% of our total cost in production; the rest is value-add machine work and labor, so the increase is not “devastating”. But that is also not the worst of it. We also export finished goods to Canada. If Canada reciprocates like in kind on finished goods coming into their country from the US– that would be devastating, because we are now talking about four to six times more dollars. Our exports help the trade deficit many times more than the imports hurt it.

It’s not like there are a slew of bauxite mines in the U.S available to smelt in the U.S. So, it really does nothing intended by US policy– at least in our case. It just annihilates our exports to Canada increasing the trade deficit– the inverse of the intention.