While the City of Calgary is keeping a watchful eye on tariffs from a procurement perspective, they’re also staying vigilant on their investments.
Councillors were given tariff update at the April 15 Executive Committee Meeting, with admin saying that since February, the City of Calgary has awarded 131 procurements and 3,500 purchase orders, with 99 per cent of the contract value given to Canadian suppliers.
The often confusing and fluctuating state of tariffs between the US and Canada is one of the most challenging aspects of managing tariff-related impacts, according to Amit Patil, director of supply management with the City of Calgary.
“What’s impacting us, mostly today, is the challenging direction in tariffs and the market uncertainty that it has created,” he told councillors.
“The impact we may begin to see if the tariff situation continues in the long term, is the inflated costs.”
Tools that were created two years ago are helping the City of Calgary navigate the situation today, Patil told councillors.
He said their supply chain resiliency dashboard provides insight on daily shortages, disruptions and cost escalations for daily procurement. It allows them to pre-program different scenarios, in the 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminum.
It also includes a tariff estimator calculator, he said.
“This interactive dashboard is available to all city contract owners to make data-driven decisions based on the estimated tariff impacts,” Patil said.
“It includes pre-programmed tariff scenarios. For example, we can select latest scenario of 25 per cent to the steel and aluminum and we know exactly which city contracts are vulnerable and have potential impact of tariffs on those contracts.”
Patil said they will continue their revamped procurement policies, which were altered in response to the threat of tariffs. That includes increasing the weighting of the social procurement aspect of contract bids.
Long-term approach to investments
The City of Calgary has more than $7 billion in investment assets under management at the end of 2024, according to a report coming to Thursday’s Audit Committee Meeting.
The net return in 2024 was 9.19 per cent.
Bond and equity markets have been volatile, to say the least, since the start of 2025, with both the TSX and S&P 500 being down nearly 13.5 per cent at one point this year. Both have recovered some since then.
Acting Chief Financial Officer Aaron Brown said that they continually monitor with a professional staff who review the city’s investment allocations.
“There’s a lot of noise in the market, and it’s difficult to cut through that at times, but we have some of the best investment managers from all over the world,” he said.
Brown said that while they do manage this every day with people who are “plugged into the market,” they haven’t done anything from an administrative perspective to change the instrument allocations for city investments.
“We see (tariffs) very much as short term and we’re invested for the long term, but there are constant movements in our portfolio to either move into more defensive sectors that don’t see tariffs, or to move in between different types of bonds to try and take advantage or to protect ourselves on the downside, whichever way the manager sees that they need to go,” Brown said.
“That is how we manage this exposure at this time.”
Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek said that she was happy to see that the City of Calgary has built a good system to manage the uncertainty with US tariffs.
“I would say that none of us can rest on our laurels right now and say that we’re fine,” she said.
“I think we have to be very aware that things could change tomorrow, and I’m really pleased that the team has built a methodology by which they can run the numbers and figure out exactly what this means to the City of Calgary.”
