Once every two weeks, I have fresh soup delivered to the door of my Toronto home. I discovered Cyril, the man who makes and delivers it, during the pandemic. The rare week he makes chilli, it sells out in short order, to my frustration. Cyril’s soups and chili are always delicious, and my weeks are made better by having them. 

I don’t buy Cyril’s soup through a courier service: I communicate directly with him and pay him by e-transfer. There are thousands of ‘soup guys’ in every city — small, independent vendors working for themselves, creating something beautiful from scratch to support their families. Buying from entrepreneurs like Cyril was one of the improvisational ways we invested in our local communities during the pandemic to cope with a global challenge.

Now, much like during COVID-19, we face pre-existing economic vulnerabilities that could be exacerbated in the weeks and months to come. This time, instead of a virus, it’s tariffs. United States President Donald Trump has threatened Canada with a 25 per cent tariff on every export except energy. And while a call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week led him to delay its implementation by a month, the state of negotiations remains murky. Now he’s moving to substantially raise tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, the latest salvo in what is gearing up to be a multi-front trade war. All of this while our independent business sector continues to recover from the pandemic, and a third of Canadian small businesses expect their capital investments to decrease over the next two years, according to a recent report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. 

As a country, we need to encourage the local investment, local purchasing, local consumption and local innovation needed to combat the threat we now face. At the Canadian Urban Institute, everyday we hear about the challenges faced by  main streets and independently owned local retail. Even before the pandemic, the rise in online shopping from e-commerce platforms like Amazon detached us from the process of making a purchase, with small businesses taking the biggest hit. When those small businesses were forced to close during COVID-19 lockdowns, they were more likely to see a decrease in profitability and sales compared to their larger counterparts.

As with COVID-19, the impact of a trade dispute will be particularly challenging for our main streets. Weaknesses already present will be magnified, and whether tariffs are ultimately applied in March or not, it’s important to understand that nearly two thirds of working Canadians are employed in—or run—small- and medium-sized businesses, according to Statistics Canada. 

The economy exists most clearly where you can see it, feel it and touch it. To encourage local investment and insulate ourselves from the potential fallout of tariffs and economic uncertainty, we need to focus on the physical places where local economies exist, not just the sectors that comprise it. Economies grow from the ground up. What happens at the street level impacts the whole system. 

As with any crisis, entrepreneurs must invest in new approaches to cope, like aggregate purchasing, where a larger entity buys large quantities in bulk on behalf of smaller businesses to reduce the price of things like raw materials or equipment. It’s the premise every rural farmers’ co-op is founded on. Community land trusts are built on the same principle: aggregating the ownership of land such that small businesses can compete with larger ones, as opposed to every one having to carry alone its own risks and costs.

In addition to aggregate purchasing, municipalities across the country should be looking carefully at zoning and planning rules that hinder the emergence of new businesses. For years, policymakers believed economic activities should be kept separate from other uses like commercial and residential.  Now, we have numerous outdated zoning and land-use restrictions in Canada that are 10, 20, even 50 years old and ought to be removed.

Every neighbourhood, every apartment block and every street does not need to look the same, we can draw in the consumers needed to make places of commerce thrive. This is an area Canada has historically fallen behind, but great cities and small towns alike are defined by their sense of place. Markets, outdoor plazas, waterfronts, beautiful parks and enlivened public squares give a place an economic advantage: Businesses and investment—like people—are attracted to beautiful places. 

To that end, municipalities are finding ways to make their public spaces more flexible and adaptive. London, Ontario revamped its main road—Dundas Street—to become a “flex street”, one that can be car-free, or can accommodate one- or two-way car traffic to accommodate festivals and special events while still allowing deliveries to retail businesses. Halifax, Nova Scotia has a beautiful central library with a large outdoor gathering space, which has become a hub for the community. Investments in streets and libraries are critical infrastructure to ensure the economic and social vibrancy of our local economies. We may also need to consider a different approach to property taxes for independent retailers located along Canada’s main streets, and institute measures that make keeping a storefront vacant too expensive. 

Our message to consumers is simple: “If you love to shop online, why not order from a business that’s three blocks away, rather than a large warehouse that’s sourcing products from many different places?” 

The next step needs to be creating financial incentives for consumers to shop local. Utility companies have, for years, made it cheaper to use electricity during off-peak hours. We need to develop similar tools that will reward local purchasing, compared with buying the same product from a large company in another city.  All of these recommendations ultimately serve the same goal: ensuring local products aren’t being disadvantaged because their producers face higher costs than competitors located elsewhere.

Related: Why Small Businesses Need Commercial Rent Control

We have a reprieve while our governments negotiate, but this is the moment for us to be thoughtful about how we spend our money and support our main streets and their businesses. Main streets are not a nostalgic idea that you only see in old television shows. Everybody has a main street, typically a central road that runs through the heart of a community. But a main street is not just a gathering place. It’s the notion that there is somewhere for people to go that is not their home, it’s not their workplace, but it’s somewhere transactions can happen for our betterment. 

Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said living next to the United States is like sleeping next to an elephant. This is our elephant moment. It is time for us to come to terms with the risks associated with that, but also the opportunities, and how our local business communities imagine themselves moving forward.

—As Told to Avery Mullen