Canadian supply delays come as a warning that future interruptions could be worse

Despite a growing income from his own business, Daryl Wier and his spouse have been trying and failing to spend their money on new kitchen appliances that now face a back order delay of many months.

Wier's income and his inability to spend it may be connected. For Wier, who runs 49th Apparel in Sault Ste. Marie, an Ontario city of about 70,000 where Lake Superior meets Lake Huron, his business of making nightshirts and selling them by mail order has never been better.

"Should I really say my sales are up by 360 per cent?" Wier said over the phone last week, as if afraid of courting bad luck by being too boastful.

Within the discipline of supply chain management, Wier's business, unlike those of appliance and automakers and many others, is considered "resilient."

Because his labour supply is local and his stockpile of imported cloth is enough to see him through his busiest season, Wier can keep making and selling his product while many others who are waiting for goods or essential components trapped in a container far away have no product to offer.

According to supply chain experts, the bright side of the current breakdown in the exchange of labour, components and ingredients is that it comes as a warning to Canadian businesses to become more supply-resilient.

WATCH | A surge in imports is straining Canada's supply chain:

Not only is resilience crucial to keeping the Canadian and North American economy ticking when foreign supplies of essential components are cut off by pandemics or bottlenecks, but a growing number of advocates also say techniques such as stockpiling, making more of what we need at home, controlling transportation links and having multiple sources for crucial manufacturing inputs are a vital security concern.

Those who accidentally — like Wier — or intentionally — such as Winnipeg's Precision ADM or Waterloo's Eclipse Automation — have made themselves more supply-resilient are now reaping the rewards.

The crisis in supply chains — a term seldom uttered outside specialist circles before the pandemic — has launched a flurry of deliberation and debate in Canada, including at a conference last week, over how to deal with similar predicaments in the future.

According to a report from Thomas Insights, a firm that helps companies track down suppliers of the components they need, 83 per cent of North American manufacturers are looking for ways to source their inputs from closer to home, compared to 54 per cent in 2020. 

"Nobody ever understood what a supply chain was until the pandemic," Pat Campbell said in a few minutes snatched away from helping to run a week-long Supply Chain Canada conference that ended Friday. Campbell, whose duties included booking speakers for the conference, lives and breathes supply chains but said most people were like her grandchildren and really didn't get it.

"I used to say that it was from the time the farmer picked the tomato in the field and puts it on the truck to go to market to the time my grandchildren pick up the bottle of ketchup off the retail store shelf, everything that happens along that path is part of the supply chain," said Campbell.

Of course, it is more complicated than that because a detailed look at a supply chain would have to go back to examine the equipment used to farm the tomatoes, the fertilizers, the pesticides and the temporary foreign workers who picked them.