Donald Trump’s tariff threats spark fear on the frontlines of Canada’s looming trade war
Times are good in Windsor, Ont. — the portal through which a quarter of our trade with the United States flows. But all that could change with a stroke of the presidential pen
Peter Piazza didn’t set out in life to become the chief executive of a family-owned cheese company in Windsor, Ont., but his fate, both in marriage and career path, was sealed when life put him in front of Joe Galati’s daughter Franca some 40 years ago. “Joe,” as Piazza’s father-in-law is known around town, is the founder of the Galati Cheese Co. Ltd.
If you have ever found yourself in the Canadian border town directly across the river from Detroit and had a hankering for some Windsor-style pizza, which, as far as food items go, inspires near-religious devotion amongst the locals and has achieved a degree of national renown in foodie circles, the pizza was most assuredly topped by Galati’s mozzarella, famously made with pure milk sourced from nearby dairy farms.
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In Piazza’s early years with the company, there were eight employees. Everyone did every job, from making and packaging the cheese to selling the cheese and making deliveries. Galati has 24 employees today, and the guy who married the boss’s daughter way back when is now the boss himself.
Piazza oversaw the family-owned company’s majority purchase by Kirtland Capital Partners LLC, a Cleveland-based private-equity firm, in 2023. The master plan going forward is to grow Galati’s market reach beyond the regional Canadian pizza scene it already dominates and perhaps take a nibble out of the Detroit pizzeria business on the Michigan side of the Ambassador Bridge.
But expansion wasn’t what was eating at Piazza’s mind on a chilly morning in mid-January. As famous as Windsor is for its pizza, it is even more renowned as a manufacturing hub, with deep ties to the automobile industry, including the NextStar Energy Inc. battery plant that has just come online and is expected to employ 2,500 workers once fully operational.
More than 42,000 area residents work so-called blue collar jobs, giving the city its feisty and resilient sense of pride. That scrappiness was sorely tested during the great financial crisis in 2008, when the major automakers teetered on the edge of oblivion and mass layoffs rippled across the city. Windsor’s unemployment rate topped 16 per cent. Money grew tight. Families cut back on spending — some moved away altogether — and people stopped ordering pizza.
