Funds eye gold-fuelled trade shift while Canadian firms hedge against us tariff risks
Gold is doing almost all the work for Canada’s exporters just as the country’s reliance on the US quietly slips to a multi‑decade low.
According to Statistics Canada, merchandise exports rose 2.1 percent in October only because unwrought gold, silver and platinum group metals and their alloys surged; without that category, exports fell 2.5 percent.
Exports of metal and non‑metallic mineral products jumped 27.3 percent, led by a 47.4 percent spike in unwrought gold, silver and platinum group metals and their alloys, driven by gold shipments to the UK, and this group has more than doubled versus October 2024 in both price and volume terms.
At the same time, Canada’s exposure to the US is easing at the margin.
Statistics Canada said exports to the United States made up 67.3 percent of all exports in October, the lowest non‑pandemic share since this data series began in 1997, while exports to non‑US markets jumped 15.6 percent to a record high, led by gold to the UK and crude oil to China.
Overall, merchandise imports rose 3.4 percent and exports rose 2.1 percent, taking Canada from a $243m surplus in September to a $583m deficit in October, according to Statistics Canada, while Reuters noted analysts had expected a larger $1.36bn deficit.
Experts are already reading this as a risk‑management story rather than a clean diversification win.
BNN Bloomberg reports that trade lawyer William Pellerin at McMillan LLP sees “a rapid increase in imports into Canada for products that historically were going to the US,” including Malaysian kitchen cabinets and Chinese goods.
He says Canada is now more attractive on price in many commodity and manufactured goods, arguing that “Canada is becoming far more attractive at lower pricing in many commodity goods and in many manufactured sectors.”
He warned that for firms exposed to the US market under new sectoral tariffs, “it’s more about survival before we can diversify exports,” and said he expects upcoming data to “show a further erosion of sales and exports to the US across a broad swath of sectors.”
On the export side, that same tension shows up in metals versus everything else.
Pellerin told BNN Bloomberg that the broad shift in exports “may not be happening yet,” but he has already seen Canadian gold shipments “go to the UK instead of the US”—a concrete example of how companies are feeling their way into new markets under pressure.
Policy‑side, Reuters said that “there is definitely a pattern here,” citing Export Development Canada chief economist Stuart Bergman, who argued that companies are “looking at risk management and saying ‘We have got to start to think about diversification’.”
That mindset lines up with Ottawa’s push for trade diversification in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on a range of Canadian imports.
Under the surface, some categories hint at future domestic demand.
Statistics Canada reported that imports of electronic and electrical equipment and parts jumped 10.2 percent, with record imports of computers and computer peripherals up 32.2 percent.
Reuters noted that Capital Economics economist Alexandra Brown views “increases in imports of investment products” as positive for domestic demand.
