Proposed Tariffs Make Strange Bedfellows

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Proposed Tariffs Make Strange Bedfellows

 

The Canadian Independent Booksellers’ Association has partnered with Canadian bookselling giant, Indigo? This is a sentence that very few Canadians would have ever expected to read but the new tariffs on products from the United States would affect books. CIBA and Indigo CEO, Heather Reisman, have written a joint letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney requesting that books be excluded from tariffs. 

The request in the letter is not an unusual one, according to Jack Illingworth, the Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Publishers in an interview with Quill and Quire. The organization is worried about “the long-term impact of abandoning Canada’s practice of keeping culture off the table in trade disputes.” Currently, books are not included in Trump’s broad tariffs, but congress can change that at any point, Illingworth warns. 

 

According to Quill and Quire, who first reported the issue earlier this week, nearly half of all books written by Canadian authors are printed in the United States. This is on top of the fact that authors not based in Canada account for nearly half of all books sold in stores in 2022, according to Statistics Canada. 

 

And asking readers to “Buy Canadian” will be of little help, according to the Vancouver Sun. Any reader knows that books are not interchangeable. A Cassandra Khaw book can only be written by them and there is no substitute for their story within those pages. For a fan of Stephen King, no other writer will do. The consensus across the industry in Canada is that it would be devastating for everyone from independent bookshops to the giant that they all struggle against. 

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