Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., hosted his latest in a series of roundtables with small businesses around the Green Mountain State, and the attendees said the Trump administration’s tariff actions will hurt their operations directly and damage the state’s key tourism industry.
“These tariffs are a self-inflicted wound,” Welch, who also co-sponsored a bipartisan bill to repeal them, told Fox News Digital on Monday.
“And they’re already raising prices for businesses, farmers and working families across rural America. Everyone will be affected by President Trump’s trade war, it doesn’t matter what your political point of view is or where you live.”
The latter appeared to be the tenor at Welch’s latest roundtable in Stowe, near the Quebec border.
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“I think I speak for all of us when I say we don’t know how they’re going to affect us,” said Jen Kimmich, who runs Alchemist Brewery.
“What we do know is that these tariffs are happening. We do know prices are going to go up, but we don’t know how much.”
Kimmich shared an example of how intertwined her brewery is with global manufacturing.
Her aluminum is produced in the U.S., but the manufacturer sources some recycled metal from Brazil, metal that then transits through Canada to be made into sheets before crossing back into Vermont.
Alchemist raised its prices by 5% and absorbed another 10% hit, Kimmich told Welch.
Her brewery’s specialty malt, she said, is exempted for now because it is a food product from the United Kingdom.
The brewery, like the other businesses represented collectively, said the sudden decrease in visitors from across the northern border has hurt the tourism industry as well as stores where Canadians might regularly shop in Vermont.
“At every single level, these tariffs make no economic sense,” she said. “The tariffs are unfair, and they’re already creating enormous uncertainty. I’m working to help Vermont maintain the strength of its small businesses.”
Christa Bowdish, proprietor of the Old Stagecoach Inn, said in a statement that 95% of her business is via tourism and the rest from locals.
“Of that 95%, typically 15% are Canadian. We were all excited about having a banner ski season, and it was good, but it wasn’t amazing,” she said, adding that while January’s figures were up, skiing in February was down and the trend has continued.
At the same time, Bowdish said web traffic from Canada has been falling, which she suspects is tied to the tariff situation.
Bowdish also shared with Welch a letter from a Canadian tourist who canceled their trip because of American political rhetoric toward Canada.
“This is long-lasting damage to a relationship, and emotional damage takes time to heal. While people aren’t visiting Vermont, they’ll be finding new places to visit, making new memories, building new family traditions, and we will not recapture all of that,” the innkeeper told Welch.
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Power Play Sports owner Caleb Magoon added, “The big challenge for me is going to be supply chain issues. At my two stores, because we’re general sporting goods stores, I work with over 100 vendors who are making products literally across the globe, from Dubai to China to right down the road in Waterbury.”
Meanwhile, representatives of ski and snowsports businesses expressed uncertainty about how the tariffs would affect them, since many do not open their doors for the year until November.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for a response to the senator’s and business owners’ concerns.