The fresh wave of US tariffs rippling rapidly through Canada’s cleantech sector is compounding 18 months of trade war “uncertainty shock” and hitting start-ups and smaller companies hardest, according to a new survey.
The poll of 128 cleantech firms, conducted by the Canada Cleantech Alliance, an industry group, found 71 per cent had “already been affected” by tariffs, and 60 per cent “expect at least a moderate impact” over the next year.
Less clear is which businesses in the country’s $43.3 billion cleantech economy will suffer the most damage from the trade stand-off. The survey “confirmed there is no single cleantech tariff story,” CCTA executive director Lynn Côté said. “The impact really does follow a company’s supply chain, customers and project economics.”
“What surprised us somewhat was how quickly the effects move beyond the tariff itself — into customer decisions, delayed projects, investment and hiring,” she told Canada’s National Observer.
“The survey turned what we suspected from talking to individual companies into a much clearer pattern: trade disruption is travelling through the cleantech economy in very different ways,” Côté added.
That variation reinforces a point the CCTA has been making to Ottawa about its tariff response since January 2025, when the Trump administration imposed its first levies on Canadian goods, targeting major industries such as steel, aluminum, lumber and automotive, she said.
“You can’t design an effective response by treating cleantech as one homogeneous sector,” Côté said.
Wide-ranging tariff hit
When US-Canada trade talks broke down on Aug. 21, a cross-referencing of Canadian goods hit by the latest US tariffs and technologies linked to the Clean Economy Investment Tax Credits (ITCs) produced a broad list spanning battery, wind, hydro, critical minerals and carbon capture sectors, as well as industrial equipment such as transformers, pumps and compressors.
The responses from Canadian cleantech companies to the US trade war have been just as wide-ranging, the poll showed. Forty-five per cent of respondents are now pursuing non-US customers, with 42 per cent expanding into Europe. Another 42 per cent are increasing Canadian sourcing, and 38 per cent are switching away from US suppliers.
“Trade disruption is therefore influencing not only border costs, but also where companies sell, source, invest, hire and grow,” Côté said.
Looking ahead to this fall’s federal budget, the responses showed that “trade disruption is amplifying existing structural competitiveness challenges” for the cleantech sector, the CCTA said.
Côté highlighted the $750 million earmarked in last year’s budget for “early growth-stage” capital for cleantech.
“Budget 2026 is the opportunity to turn that commitment into something companies can actually use,” she said, noting the survey found 68 per cent of companies cited commercialization and scale-up financing as a top priority, versus 29 per cent who mentioned tariff remission or relief.
“The fall budget shouldn’t be designed simply to help cleantech companies survive a trade war. It should use this moment to make Canadian companies more competitive regardless of what happens next with the US,” Côté said.
“The clearest message from companies is that they don’t primarily want the government to compensate them for tariffs — they want the tools to compete,” she added.
Canada has spent years investing in innovation and technology development, Côté said. The next priority should be building up Canadian companies themselves.
“That means helping companies scale here, creating more Canadian customers and reference projects, and helping them reach markets beyond the US,” she said.
Canada’s cleantech sector has drawn $29 billion in government investment in technology development from 2016 to 2024. In the first half of 2026, the sector raised $365 million in private financing, about 13 per cent of total venture capital funding in the period, data research firm CPE Analytics said last month.
“We need to capture the return on that investment by building companies that grow here, create jobs here and sell Canadian technology to the world,” Côté said.
September 10th 2026
