Canada's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods start September 8.

For a Canadian company, that is not just over two weeks of waiting. It is just over two weeks to find out which business cases quietly assumed U.S. inputs would keep costing what they cost yesterday.

Ottawa says the tariffs will be concentrated in steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Somewhere in a lot of Canadian companies, one of those is sitting inside an approved business case, and the number behind it was written before Friday.

The timeline is short and it is public:

August 21: talks collapse late Friday.

August 22: 50% U.S. tariffs take effect on roughly C$28 billion of Canadian goods.

September 8: Canada's response goes live.

Seventeen days from the U.S. escalation to Canada's response.

A tariff change like this is a cutover with a fixed date. The sectors are known and the date is public. The detailed product list is still coming.

The useful question now is how much of the work you do before it arrives.

- Pull the cases, not the P&L. Go back through what was approved in the last 18 months and search the cost assumptions for anything that crosses the border. You are not hunting for the big obvious import program, which somebody is already watching. You are hunting for the sub-line inside a project nobody ever classified as a trade exposure.

- Find out who owns the assumption. Usually finance owns the number and procurement owns the reality, and nobody has re-tested it since the day the case cleared.

- Sort your contracts by whether they have a price adjustment clause. The ones without are the ones that turn up as a surprise in Q4, in a meeting where everyone is surprised together.

- Decide now what you do if the hit is 10%, and what you do if it's 25%. Making that call badly in August beats making it under pressure in October.

Every clean go-live I have been part of looked boring on the day, and it looked boring because the arguments happened in the weeks before.

September 8 works the same way. You get just over two weeks to have the arguments, or you have them in front of a customer.

None of this requires knowing how long the tariffs last, and nobody knows that anyway.

It requires knowing which of your decisions are sitting on a cost assumption that now has an expiry date. 🇨🇦

After a business case gets approved, who in your shop actually owns re-testing the input cost assumption?

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