North American manufacturers and retailers haven't yet experienced widespread disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak. But contingency plans are in effect for industries that use Chinese suppliers — which, these days, means a lot of different businesses.
China was Canada's second biggest source of imports in 2019, trailing far behind the U.S. (which supplies half of what Canada buys) but supplying more than double the imports from Mexico or any European or Asian country. And a lot of those American products are made with Chinese supplies, too.
What happens if closed factories and transport restrictions in China mean all those products stop shipping to North America for a while?
"It's a unique challenge, in the sense that businesses are facing both supply and demand issues at the same time," Finance Minister Bill Morneau told a Toronto business audience Friday, as he previewed at his government's plan to mitigate the possible recessionary effects of the now-global outbreak...
Many businesses that rely on Chinese suppliers know to stock up before the holiday, so serious shortages in Canada may not emerge until later this month or next...
Even if a Chinese supplier was able to reopen, the Chinese trucking industry is not operating at regular capacity and may not be for weeks to come. Logistics operators have been hard-pressed to get official permission to ship out non-essential goods...
At the peak of Chinese efforts to control the COVID-19 outbreak, factories making 80 per cent of Chinese exports were shut down...
This is excerpted from 8 March 2020 edition of CBC News.