The 30-day reprieve from Trump tariffs announced this week may have come as welcome news for consumers and businesses alike. But ongoing uncertainty will continue to weigh on investments and should be a wake-up call for policymakers and businesses, experts say.

Over the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would impose a 25 per cent tariff on non-energy imports from Canada, and a 10 per cent duty on Canadian energy. Late Monday afternoon, he walked back the threat, agreeing to a pause for at least 30 days while the two countries work on border-related issues.

While the reprieve may have avoided a worst-case tariff scenario, Robert Asselin, senior vice-president of policy at the Business Council of Canada, says it’s “not much of a relief” for businesses.

“The uncertainty itself creates a situation where we don’t really know what we’re faced with going forward. It’s almost like a tariff is already in place,” Asselin said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Canada.

“Maybe it’s not 25 per cent. I’ll quantify it as maybe 10 per cent. Essentially, investors in this climate of uncertainty… are just going to wait for more clarity, for more certainty.”

But he says the reprieve is “absolutely a wake-up call,” particularly for policymakers.

“In a situation like this, there’s an opportunity to become much more resilient, and do the stuff that we’ve been complacent about on economic growth that will allow us to get through this crisis,” Asselin added.

“I think what we are lacking right now is an economic plan that will put us on a path so that we don’t have these dependencies, where we go through these existential crises with the U.S.”

That’s a message echoed by the Chamber of Commerce. In a speech given in Winnipeg on Tuesday, president and CEO Candace Laing called for the government to reconvene Parliament and focus on addressing “the critical roadblocks that have until now left us far too dependent on trade with the United States.” These include identifying and removing internal trade barriers, expanding trade infrastructure to help reach more overseas markets, reducing red tape, and lowering taxes on businesses and individuals so as to be competitive with the U.S.

How businesses are coping with the uncertainty

In the meantime, many businesses have been preparing for the possibility of tariffs since shortly after Trump was elected, says Colin Mowatt, a tax policy leader at PwC Canada. Mowatt works with large public and private companies, including multinationals and private equity funds, largely in the engineering, construction and product industries.