Questions & Answers

CMCO Group is an informal coalition of Canada’s five Canadian-owned electrical and electronic wire and cable manufacturers: Domtech, Northern Cables, Deca Cables, PTI Cables and Shawflex. Together we employ more than 700 people at plants in Ontario and Quebec.

We are not an incorporated body. Our members are independent businesses that compete with each other, and speak together only on matters affecting Canadian-owned cable manufacturing as a whole.

CMCO Group exists for one purpose: to speak jointly on trade and procurement policy affecting Canadian-owned cable manufacturing. Outside that, our members are direct competitors and conduct themselves accordingly.

We do not discuss pricing, quotations, bids, customers, volumes, capacity or any other commercially sensitive information. Those subjects are not on the agenda of this group and never will be.

Customers should expect to be quoted independently by each company, on the same competitive basis as before. Nothing about this coalition changes how our members compete for business.

It means ownership of the business rests in Canada, so the decisions about these plants and these jobs are taken here. Our five members represent the entire Canadian-owned segment of this industry.

Other cable manufacturers operate in Canada under foreign ownership. Our argument is not that they make poor product — it is that a Canadian-owned manufacturer has no other country to retreat to when conditions get hard.

Two pressures arrived together. Since 22 August 2026 a 50% United States tariff imposed under Section 338 has applied to Canadian-made residential, commercial and industrial cable (HTS 8544.49.30), with no exemption under CUSMA. At the same time our members face dumped and unfairly priced imports from non-market economies in the domestic market.

One squeezes what we can sell abroad. The other undercuts what we sell at home.

Four things: require Canadian-made cable in publicly funded infrastructure and clean-energy projects; press Washington for removal of the Section 338 tariffs; remove Canada’s own 50% tariffs on the raw material inputs we buy to manufacture here; and resource trade-remedy action so it moves faster against dumped imports.

Each is set out in full on the What We’re Asking For page.

No. Every one of our requests points the same way: a level playing field for all manufacturers. We are not asking to be advantaged. We are asking that the field not be tilted against manufacturing in Canada.

The tariffs we want removed are taxes on our own inputs and a foreign tariff on our exports — both tilt the field against production here. Trade-remedy action addresses product sold into Canada below its fair value, which tilts it the same way. Removing a distortion and enforcing an existing rule are not protection; they are the conditions under which competition means something.

It is a fair question. The answer is that public procurement is not a market. It is a policy choice about what public money should achieve.

When a government buys cable for a transit line, a hospital or a transmission project, it is spending money raised from Canadian taxpayers. It is entitled to decide what that spending should build beyond the asset itself — domestic capacity, skilled employment, security of supply in a crisis. Other governments already make the same choice with their own procurement, the United States among them.

The level playing field we are asking for concerns trade measures: tariffs on the inputs we buy, tariffs on the products we export, and goods sold into Canada below their fair value. Those determine whether manufacturing here is viable at all. What a government does with its own budget is a separate question, and a legitimate one to answer differently.

Canadian manufacturers already supply this market and compete on price. What currently distorts our costs is Canada’s own 50% tariff on imported raw material inputs, which is one of the four changes we are asking for.

The longer-term consideration is supply. If domestic capacity is allowed to close, public projects lose the option of buying Canadian at any price.

The tariff applies to cable classified under HTS 8544.49.30, which covers residential, commercial and industrial electrical cable.

It is an informal coalition with no separate legal entity, no staff and no membership fee. Each member company bears its own costs.

The joint industry letter of 31 August 2026, signed by all five member companies, is available here: Joint Canadian Wire and Cable Industry Letter (PDF).