“CHAOS”: How a Shuswap guitar maker navigates trade disruptions with US

Across BC, companies and people depending on those companies are bracing for whatever may come next in Canada’s trade war with the United States.

Governments for both sides like to target specific items to tariff, as specific as hockey sticks or as general as steel. Or maybe they won’t, or maybe they’ll add another 50% because of wildfire smoke….

It’s a mess and a gamble for anyone doing business across the border.

Mike Miltimore is the owner of Riversong Guitars, manufacturer of award-winning, internationally recognized acoustic guitars in Kamloops and Sicamous.

“There have been huge impacts. It has created uncertainty in the market, and division between Canada and the US with our customers,” he said.

When the first rounds of tariff talks started, Miltimore had just signed on a new distributor in the states.

“We had a shipment of 100 guitars ready to ship into the states and we actually stalled it for several months waiting to see what would happen,” he said. “It turned out we were OK being under (Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement), but not knowing what the actual outcome would be.”

Technically nothing has changed, no tariffs, no new real barriers to trade, but that’s part of the frustration, he says, because everything has still changed.

“It’s chaos. They could have a 50% tariff on them tomorrow, we don’t know,” he said.

“Our distributor in the states orders a hundred guitars. It takes us two to three months to produce them, and in that time, they could cancel or delay the order but I’ve spent all the energy, time and money building them.”   

He and his team went to a trade show in California in January.

“The day the trade show opened, The States announced they were going to put 100% tariffs on Canadian made products,” he said. “It never transpired, but it sure made it difficult to make sales at an international trade show.”

Riversong Guitars produces four different lines of guitars, proudly using BC maples, Sitka and Engelmann spruce from the Revelstoke area and cedar and spruce from the Sicamous area. One line is almost 100% Canadian-made and qualifies as a product of Canada.

“I try to source as much as I can from around BC,” Miltimore said. “Many parts I make in-house or try to source within Western Canada so the impacts of tariffs on importing products are not there, the impacts are on exports.”

Miltimore said his team has taken extraordinary steps to deal with tariff uncertainty and diversify by moving manufacturing and parts supply. But tariffs and barriers aren’t limited to Canada and US disputes.

“The Canadian government says to diversify our markets, but the problem is if I go to sell into, say Australia, every guitar we ship costs $600 in shipping for that size of box, so it makes us not competitive.

“If we’re shipping into China there’s a 40% tariff on products going there from Canada yet our competitors like Australian makers have a free trade agreement with China.”

Originating in Kamloops, Riversong Guitars is known in the music industry for their patented neck technology. The company moved to a second factory in Sicamous in 2024 but still has some production out of the Kamloops outlet.

He says the highs, the lows — the chaos — isn’t limited to nation states, it’s felt on the ground too.

“We get apologies from some customers, and people that just don’t know what to think and the odd person that tells us if we treated their president better, we wouldn’t be in this mess, so I’ve gotten all the responses,” he said.

“I try to stay centre line if I can, because all I want to do is sell guitars. Maybe if the president played a little more guitar, he’d be easier to get along with.”