'The people agenda does not sit separately from the business strategy'

For most Canadian HR leaders, the U.S. tariff battle is not necessarily playing out in layoffs or pay cuts. Instead, it's playing out in leadership caution, anxious peer conversations and an accelerating demand for HR to be present at the highest levels of business planning.

The federal government unveiled a $7.5-billion support package for employers and workers in August as Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on $27.6 billion in American imports.

Three Canadian HR leaders, spanning mining, automotive logistics and healthcare staffing, spoke with Canadian HR Reporter about what the tariff environment looks like from their vantage point.

Scenario planning becomes table stakes

For Eldorado Gold, the tariff environment has not meant “material impacts,” according to Stephanie Shaw, vice-president of human resources in Vancouver, but it does introduce greater uncertainty in the global business environment.

"It reinforces the importance of scenario-based workforce planning, disciplined cost management and having the right talent in the right places at the right time."

That means building the organizational capacity to respond appropriately: "From an HR perspective, we are focused on maintaining the flexibility to respond to different scenarios while continuing to invest in the critical skills and talent we need,” she says.

Employment lawyer Andrew Bratt says that calculation is increasingly shared among employers.

"Employers are slightly more comfortable with economic disruption and uncertainty now than they might have been in 2025 because it's been ongoing for quite some time," says the partner at Gowling in Toronto. "The more sophisticated ones are prepared to be patient and to take a wait-and-see approach."

Unlike in early 2025 — when the trade war first started and tariffs hit, and employers reacted impulsively with layoffs — employers today have learned the importance of using this time “to assess your business, to understand where you might possibly be exposed, directly or indirectly, and to contingency plan,” says Bratt.

Earlier in the year, RBC Economics analysis found that Canadian manufacturers in tariff-exposed industries were experiencing declining or stagnant employment, with auto, metals and forestry workforces under the greatest strain (Canadian HR Reporter, Feb. 4, 2026).

With the latest round of retaliatory tariffs, plastic products, electrical machinery, furniture and wood product sectors are among the most significantly impacted by the new measures, says RBC, with a higher concentration of economic impact in Quebec, BC, and Ontario.

People and strategy: no longer separate

Shaw is equally clear that the people agenda does not sit separately from the business strategy.

"Whether we are talking about growth, productivity, transformation or managing through uncertainty, the questions are ultimately: ‘What do we need to achieve? What organization do we need to do it?’ and ‘Do we have the right talent and capabilities?"

She describes her role as "increasingly as a strategic business partner that is helping shape the strategy and then making sure we can execute it through our people and organization."

Tammy Sergie, chief HR and privacy officer at EHN Canada, describes the same integration, saying, "a little bit of both” when asked whether the tariff environment is pulling her into business strategy or people and culture.

"It's really hard to have a meaningful business strategy conversation without taking into consideration the impact on people and culture. The two are interchangeable. People — whether at front-line level or leadership level — will influence how the business strategy is executed and its ultimate success."

Cost containment versus growth

Sergie says the pattern she's observing across organizations has a familiar shape: as business confidence wavers, leaders pull back from investment and innovation and tighten their focus on cost-containment, which “comes with its own challenges and impact to people and culture."

Plus, the tariffs war is hitting at the same time that baby boomers are exiting the workforce in large numbers, and AI is reshaping the pace and nature of work across a range of job families, she says.

"What's interesting is it's happening simultaneously to an already shifting labour market.”

For Sergie, HR's job right now is to maintain "higher levels of engagement and alignment among employees to mission-critical efforts.”

Employment lawyer Stephen Shore says one of the most important things employers can do right now is to communicate with their workforce.

"Employees read the news too," he says. "Being really transparent with their workforces, treating their employees as adults, and giving them the agency to understand... what the world may look like from their employer's perspective and being transparent that there may be a storm that we all will need to weather  — I think is a really important step."

Shore says one of the pain points employers felt in earlier rounds of tariff uncertainty was a failure to communicate clearly — often because they didn't know what to say.

"That uncertainty may have bred some employees, especially key employees or skilled employees, feeling like they had to start looking for other opportunities because they weren't hearing anything from their employer in terms of comfort or a plan or ‘We're going to weather this, we ask you to work with us.’”

Staying vigilant without being rattled

Annette Dhanasar, group director, human resources and privacy officer at Hansen's Group of Companies, says her company is in automotive vehicle relocation — not vehicle manufacturing — which has created some insulation from the tariffs, though she says competitors are facing job losses.

Overall, the company is trying to make sure they stay on top of things, says Dhanasar.

"Every one of us — whether me in HR or whether it's the senior manager on the trucking side or the logistics or even the shop where we have our mechanics — we have not really suffered from it, however, I would say we’re not shielded from it,” she says.

“So, we continue to stay vigilant."

And Dhanasar says she stays in tune with her HR peers in the industry to see what's happening in their space.

“We share, we talk… just looking out for each other. We have to — if you're not doing that, then you're just not keeping up with things."

Work sharing, retraining

The federal government has offered new supports through the new Workforce Retention and Retraining Program, which consolidates the existing EI Work-Sharing program and the Worker Retention Grant into a single offering, with employers eligible for up to $1,000 per participant to cover training and administrative costs.

Ontario has also expanded eligibility for its $1-billion tariff support program.

The work-sharing scenario is a welcome option, according to Bratt, in allowing employers that are facing a temporary setback to allocate work proportionally among employees, “so they have something rather than nothing, and then EI picks up the difference,” he says.

In retraining or redeploying workers to other areas of the business that are not impacted by tariffs, employers can “preserve the relationship,” says Bratt.

‘If you lose skilled workers, long-tenured people who you've invested in and trained, and then the disruption tends to be temporary or short-lived, it's really hard, if not impossible, to replace those people.”