Tuesday - March 4, 2025 - Tariff day in Canada

🌧 High 10C

Good morning!

My family, predictably, loves a good word game. We have all the standard board-and-paper games. But our most-played word game is an online form of Boggle. The site is called eWord Challenge and although it looks a little sketchy, the game works great and provides an easy way to organize a game, whether with a friend sitting next to you or a family member on another continent. We have games that span the globe, and others in which we’re all sitting next to each other on the couch. We could play our actual boggle game, but the online form requires less paper and hassle. Do you have a favourite unsung online word game? Let me know and if we get enough responses, I’ll collect and share them tomorrow.

Meanwhile, you can make sure you are an FVC member! Even better, if you’re a boss who is tired of your employees being uninformed about their region or their customers, you can buy them all gift memberships! (If you’re a passive aggressive employee, you could do the same for your uneducated boss.)

– Tyler

Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope 

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

The West Coast Express promise, four months later

Four months after promising to extend the West Coast Express to Chilliwack, there’s no indication of how—or when—the provincial government will deliver on its commitment.

In its platform for last fall’s election, the NDP pledged to extend the West Coast Express. It also promised a separate “new rail service” in the Fraser Valley. But details have been non-existent.

• Today, Tyler reports on what we know—and don’t know—about the pledge to bring commuter rail to the eastern Fraser Valley. Or if that’s even what was promised in the first place. 

Related

Need to Know

🔥 Police say a drug lab may have caused a Langley home explosion that killed a woman [Castanet]

👉 Activists want the City of Abbotsford to set aside land for homeless encampments [Abbotsford News]

💵 Hope’s CIBC location will close this summer, leaving Envision the only bank in town [Hope Standard]

🚐 BC Transit owns nearly 200 buses built by an Aldergrove company that has now gone bust [Langley Advance Times]

🚔 A reportedly naked man was arrested in a Chilliwack gymnastics building [Fraser Valley Today]

💰 It may take years for Mission’s new economic development corporation to begin generating revenue [Mission Record]

👉 The owner of a Hope computer business says he is running in this spring’s by-election [Hope Standard]

🏠 Rental rates in Abbotsford are among the cheapest in BC, according to one survey [Abbotsford News]

🩺 Renovations on Harrison Hot Springs new primary care facility could be finished by May [Agassiz-Harrison Observer]

👉 A Langley road damaged by a storm in October will remain closed for months [Langley Advance Times]

The Agenda

US tariffs to take effect today

Blanket tariffs on Canadian imports will take effect today.

US President Donald Trump announced yesterday that his long-promised 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico would be imposed on Tuesday. He had previously suggested they would be delayed until April. The tariffs will hit all goods Canada exports to the United States. Trump also suggested the US would also apply a tariff next month to all crop imports coming into the United States. Although details are unclear, Trump previously suggested tariffs would “stack,” meaning the food tariff could augment the general 25% tariff.

Canada’s federal government plans to respond with tariffs on an equal amount of American goods. Meanwhile, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he would stop energy produced in his province from being exported to the US.

The Current reported last week on what US tariffs could mean for Fraser Valley businesses.

Meanwhile, more data suggests that British Columbians are avoiding travelling to the US. In mid-February (after a tip from an FVC member—thanks Scott!), we reported on data showing a plunge in traffic during the Family Day weekend. After we broke the news, most other BC news organizations reported their own versions of the story, while adding new anecdotes.

On Sunday, the Seattle Times published the broadest analysis yet of the cross-border impact of the Canadian boycott. The Times spoke to an array of Bellingham businesspeople and community groups who confirmed that they were seeing a decline in Canadian customers.

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Catch up

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