The chief executive of global mining giant Rio Tinto Group this spring praised his company’s hydroelectric-powered aluminum smelters in Canada, calling them irreplaceable. “Aluminum has actually been the best-performing base metal over the last 12 months,” Simon Callas Trott said at an industry conference in May, “and also year to date, with prices up 23 per cent this year.” But the boom in prices is hardly creating a boom for Canada’s aluminum sector , with a coalition of extruders — companies that buy raw aluminum logs and press them into shapes that can be used in window frames and various other products — saying their businesses are dying due to surging prices, United States tariffs on aluminum and rising imports from countries they claim are benefitting from non-market practices. “We’re getting hammered,” Mike Flynn, president of Apel Extrusions Ltd. in Calgary, said. “China almost killed our industry in Canada. We’re on that same track again.” He estimates the Canadian extrusion sector has shed 500 jobs since March 2025, or 12.5 per cent of its estimated 4,000-strong workforce. Absent a major policy shift, he projects another 800 jobs will be shed by year-end, which would amount to nearly a one-third contraction, which is one reason extruders are lobbying Ottawa for protective trade measures. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest aluminum producer behind China, India and Russia, accounting for 4.5 per cent of global production, but it has never produced the bauxite ore feedstock that becomes aluminum on a commercial scale. Its aluminum industry grew because engineers harnessed the power of the country’s rivers, particularly in Quebec, to create hydroelectric dams that can supply the enormous amount of electricity needed to create aluminum. Eight smelters in Quebec, concentrated in the Saguenay-Lac-St.-Jean region, and one in British Columbia produced 3.3 million pounds of aluminum in 2024. Of that, about three million tonnes were exported, of which 90 per cent went to the U.S., according to the Aluminum Association of Canada, a lobby group for the smelters. Three quarters of this country’s aluminum industry jobs, about 12,000 in total, depend on U.S. demand , according to Statistics Canada, so tariffs have been disruptive to companies operating smelters here. But Canadian smelters have among the world’s lowest carbon footprints, and as shipments to the U.S. declined after the tariffs were imposed, shipments to Europe have risen — up 51 per cent month over month in May on a price basis, according to Scotiabank Economics. “Everybody is making good profits right now,” said Jean Simard, chief executive of the Aluminum Association of Canada, adding that global trade disruptions have led to higher prices. Among the consequences of the U.S. war in Iran is that a significant percentage of global aluminum shipments have been unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby decreasing supplies. Aluminum extrusion under pressure But few consumers would notice what’s happening in the obscure aluminum extrusion sector, a middle layer of the supply chain that uses raw, primary ingots as feedstock, but does not produce finished end-consumer retail goods. Instead, aluminum extrusions are bulk, shaped industrial components that have been melted and then pushed through a die so that they can be directly used in manufacturing and construction. They show up in everything from window frames and walls to RVs and computer stands. “We‘re like the 2×4 manufacturers of aluminum,” Martin Gingras, general manager of Metra Aluminum Inc., in Laval, Que., said. “We take the aluminum billet and transform that into a shape that is useful for customers. Think of it as making macaroni or spaghetti.” Such manufacturers are also a group that has been particularly dependent on sales to the U.S., exporting close to 40 per cent of their products there, according to AluQuebec, a non-profit representing the aluminum cluster in the province. Historically, many Canadian extruding companies have also operated plants in the U.S., and many relied on the Aluminum Extruders Council to advocate for the industry in North America until last year. But that group splintered in 2025 when some members came out in support of U.S. tariffs on aluminum, according to Mike Kilby, chief executive of Chatham, Ont.-based Dajcor Aluminum Ltd. I n March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump invoked national security concerns to implement 25 per cent tariffs on all aluminum and aluminum products entering the U.S. By June of that year, he had raised the tariffs to 50 per cent. This April, Trump tightened the aluminum tariffs yet again, so the tariff assessment is now based on the full value of a product rather than an estimate of the aluminum contained within. For example, if a $100 lawnmower contains $10 of raw aluminum, its tariff would jump to $50. That shift is spooking Flynn and other extruders who say shipments across the border came to a near-halt. “We’re all scared,” he said. “Any of our customers that export (to the U.S.) … are being closed out of that market, so I can bust my ass to sell them more, but if the customers are selling less, I’m not going to sell more product.” Although Trump temporarily lowered some tariffs in June on agricultural machinery, HVAC and mobile industrial equipment such as forklifts, that only affected a narrow subset of what is produced in Canada. Aluminum extruders say that they’re not expecting tariff relief from the U.S. anytime soon and are hoping the Canadian government can devise a policy that allows them to continue competing in the U.S. The situation highlights how U.S. tariffs continue to impact the Canadian economy and are forcing Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet to make complex policy decisions to preserve the country’s industrial capacity. “The government, together with the Aluminum Trade Monitoring Task Force, is constantly evaluating and reassessing novel ways to support Canadian aluminium businesses and workers through this turbulent trade environment,” the Ministry of Finance said in a statement. “This includes promoting Canadian domestic production through the Buy Canadian policy, implementing tariffs on certain non-U.S. aluminum imports, including aluminum extrusions, containing aluminum smelt and cast in China.” One other option available to the government is to stand back since extrusion companies can always file a trade action, similar to a lawsuit, at the Canadian International Trade Tribunal (CITT), which can apply antidumping and countervailing duties on products from companies that sell at artificially low prices or countries that unfairly subsidize an industry. Flynn and others say the federal government has suggested extruders should do just that. Of course, aluminum extruders — like other sectors — generally prefer the government to intervene directly by applying tariffs or import quotas, saying this approach is faster and doesn’t force them to spend millions of dollars on lawyers. There is a precedent for the aluminum sector to ask the federal government for such protection, too. The federal government implemented progressively tighter tariff revenue quotas on foreign steel three times last year. Now, countries that lack a free trade agreement with Canada cannot ship more than 20 per cent of the steel volume they shipped here in 2024. Any steel above that triggers a 50 per cent duty. Free trade countries are limited to 75 per cent of what they shipped in 2024. The government also erected 25 per cent tariffs on a wide range of steel derivative products. “Our industry is asking for the same thing that the steel guys got,” Flynn said. In many ways, the aluminum and steel industries are similar: both sectors produce base metals that create fundamental industrial inputs essential to manufacturing, such as the auto sector, which is Canada’s second-largest export. The steel industry has for years complained about a global overcapacity of steel, led by production from China, which has depressed prices and made it difficult or even impossible for Canadian steel mills to compete. Similarly, the aluminum industry has complained about the effect of Chinese extrusions on prices. In 2008, Apel, along with other extrusion companies, filed a trade action against China at the CITT, which authorized both countervailing and antidumping duties and extended its ruling last year. The federal government also created tariffs on both Chinese steel and aluminum even before Trump assumed his second term in office and began his wide-ranging tariff campaign. Now, aluminum producers are alleging that aluminum from other countries is arriving on Canadian shores at artificially low prices, an example of the trade diversion that occurred after U.S. tariffs made it increasingly difficult to sell into the U.S. market. A group of eight Canadian extruders has flagged 12 products that they say are being dumped or sent into Canada from countries that provide unfair subsidies to their industry. Overall, excluding China and the U.S., imports of the products are up 36 per cent on a weight basis in the past 12 months, according to Flynn. Kilby said his sector’s chief concern is trade diversion since aluminum imports are rapidly eroding the Canadian market. “We’ve met with just about every office, finance, trade, industry,” he said. “I have sat on panels, been invited to meetings with Dominic LeBlanc and Kirsten Hillman. They’ve heard our message. We just want to shut the back door while we figure it all out.” In particular, the group is calling out Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates for significantly increasing their exports to Canada, and it provided data to support their assertions. Compared to the average monthly export volumes in 2023 and 2024, the last period before tariffs were implemented, Vietnam’s exports to Canada are up 60 per cent this year, or about 480 metric tons per month. Thailand’s exports are up 263 per cent, or about 280 metric tons per month, Turkey is up 43.5 per cent, or 225 metric tonnes per month, and the United Arab Emirates is up 105.6 per cent, or 188 metric tonnes per month. “Contrary to many other industries, we’re not asking for money, or capex funds,” Gingras said. “We simply want a fair and equitable market to compete. We can’t compete against people who buy at a fraction of the cost.” Whatever the government decides to do on aluminum extruded products could provide a window into how Carney and his cabinet see the economy developing. So far, after months of lobbying, the government has not erected tariffs on aluminum extrusions. But doing so may be difficult for various reasons, including that Canada has trade agreements with some of the countries exporting aluminum here, is actively trying to diversify its trade and there are other concerns such as inflation. “The issue with tariffs and tariff-rate quotas is that they raise prices, and those higher prices flow downstream to manufacturers,” Bentley Allan, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and a principal at the Transition Accelerator, a non-profit that studies decarbonization pathways in Canada, said. “This is the exact opposite of what you want when you are trying to reindustrialize and build competitiveness.” He suggested a possible fix involving upstream subsidies would be for the government to cover any gap between the market prices that imports sell for and domestic production prices, but only up to a certain volume of domestic production. That would help domestic producers compete against cheaper imports flooding the market without raising prices. Whatever happens, Flynn and others say their business model is being upended as the U.S. market and the Canadian market split apart. Before U.S. tariffs, he said he could consolidate orders to produce any given item so it all took place in a single plant. Regardless of whether it was in Canada or the U.S., it could be shipped to either country and the plants would be more efficient because they could achieve economies of scale. But Flynn said it’s no longer possible to ship across the U.S. or Canadian border because of the tariffs, leaving an unclear path forward for his business. “Carney is trying to diversify our economy,” he said. “I absolutely applaud that, but it takes a long time and there’s trouble now.” • Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com