New trades deals between Calgary-based companies and the United States hit an all-time low in 2025 after President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian goods.
According to new data from Calgary Economic Development (CED), less than a quarter of the trade deals it secured in 2025 were with the U.S., down from 35 per cent in 2024.
The decline represented the “smallest share of trade deals on record” for the city-owned business development organization, CED said.
According to Brad Parry, president of CED, the move is in response to the tariffs and growing uncertainty in the U.S. market.
“We’re still working with our U.S. partners, we’re never going to lose them as a key trading partner,” he said. “But I think it’s about making the pie bigger and finding other markets for our local companies to go in and sell their products and services.”
The organization said CED-supported companies expanded into 21 countries across six continents, and secured 45 trade deals generating $60 million in revenue — a 500-per cent increase in revenue year-over-year, according to CED.
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Various sectors were involved in the trade deals, CED said, including clean energy, advanced manufacturing, agri-food, digital technologies, life sciences and aerospace.
The majority of businesses opened up new trade in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Oceania.
“At the end of the day, it’s creating jobs back here,” Parry told Global News. “If they have more capacity and more clients, it means they need more production, which means they have to hire more people.
In 2025, 187 jobs were through business expansions, CED said.
One of the companies involved in Calgary’s international expansion efforts last year was ZeroSound Systems, which uses a patented digital platform to supress large-scale industrial noise near communities.
Its founder and CEO, Norm Bogner, said the company has been targeting international markets from nearly the outset due to demand, with its technology deployed in the U.S. oil and gas sector and the utility market in Latin America.
Bogner said the company has been able to establish a regional presence in Australia and the UAE over the last year with the help of Calgary Economic Development.
“We are CUSMA-compliant, so these tariff elements haven’t impacted us yet, but we have to understand that they might,” he told Global News. “We are looking at other markets and were concurrently anyway.”
Bogner said there’s been immediate impact and relationship growth in those new markets because of “what’s going on down south.”
Casa Bonita Foods, which produces corn tortilla chips, said it secured new trading partners in Japan, Korea, Thailand and Australia over the last year, after a trade mission with Calgary Economic Development.
“Once realizing that our neighbours became unreliable, we started looking elsewhere for new commercial partners,” Casa Bonita’s director Sergio Llerena said in a statement.
A big factor behind the expansion to international markets, according to Parry, is CED’s Trade Accelerator Program (TAP), partly funded by the Government of Alberta.
According to CED, services will be expanded in 2026 to help local companies “diversify faster and enter priority markets amid ongoing economic shifts.”
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