OTTAWA — For supply chain management company Kinaxis, the hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration were like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: good for business.

Andrew Bell, the company’s chief product officer, was a little abashed about it in an interview in the cafeteria at Kinaxis’s nearly new headquarters in the west end of Ottawa. The mass tariffs Trump has threatened would be deeply damaging to Canada’s economy, people are frightened and he said he doesn’t want to sound happy about it. But the facts are the facts.

“Disruptions tend to be positive for our business, because customers realize that they need us more than ever,” said Bell.

As Trump has threatened U.S. trading partners, Kinaxis’s customers—the company is global but 60 per cent of its business is in North America—have flocked to a scenario modelling tool it offers, he said. In the hours after Trump’s inauguration, Kinaxis saw use of that tool double, an increase mirroring what it saw when governments started slamming their borders shut and ordering workers out of factories and offices in 2020.

“You can change anything about your supply chain and see what the impact would be,” Bell said. “What options do I have to shift manufacturing from here to there, to procure goods from here or there, whatever it might be.”

In the auto industry, for instance, materials can cross the Canada-U.S. border repeatedly as they’re made into parts and then assembled into finished cars. How high does a tariff on some vehicle part have to be to make it worthwhile to switch to a more expensive supplier on the “right” side of the frontier?

What if that supplier is farther away, or can meet only two-thirds of your usual need? What if the tariff on raw steel is higher (or lower) than the tariff on the part it’s made into? What if Canada vows retaliatory tariffs on other inputs your business needs, but they won’t kick in for 30 days—how do you prepare?

The businesses Kinaxis deals with are already affected, as Trump and his inner circle bat around different dates and percentages for tariffs. “The uncertainty associated with it is another disruption for supply chains,” Bell said.

Kinaxis is a 40-year stalwart of Ottawa’s tech scene, one of just a handful of publicly traded companies headquartered in the city. It’s living through its own period of disruption, currently between permanent CEOs and with its board considering strategic options after one of Kinaxis’s larger investors called for directors to look for a buyer.

Over five years of supply-chain craziness, Kinaxis’s share price has outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index—but not as much as a composite of companies that PitchBook considers to be Kinaxis competitors. Over the past three years, you’d have done much better by investing in an index fund, while Kinaxis’s competitors have kept outperforming the market as a whole.

The company has seen revenue consistently increase and quarterly profits typically in the single-digit millions for several years, but it laid off six per cent of its workforce in 2024.

Yet that Kinaxis cafeteria feels like a throwback to the ’90s tech boom, down to the Generation X alt-rock hits on the sound system. (The Presidents of the United States of America’s “Lump,” for instance.) Kitchen workers bustled around a salad bar in one corner as lunchtime approached. Big screens advertised the health benefits of quick exercise “snacks”—little bursts of activity to get your pulse rate up. And Bell projected optimism.

Supply chains rebuilt using the lessons of COVID-19, with multiple suppliers and transportation methods to make them more resilient rather than merely cheap, might be better able to withstand a Trump-induced shock. But that makes them more complex and harder to monitor—especially for the big, complicated enterprises Kinaxis considers its bread and butter.

Bell told a story about a Kinaxis customer, Procter & Gamble, owner of Tide and Tampax and Old Spice. In 2017, P&G saw Hurricane Harvey heading north toward the plastics manufacturers that cluster around the petrochemical refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“They were able to simulate what would happen to their supply chain if all these bottling manufacturers went offline. What options did they have in their existing network, and what should they do within a course of minutes and hours—not days?” he said.

P&G bought up spare bottle production capacity in the Midwest, Bell said, and was able to keep its products on store shelves when competitors couldn’t.

“Replace ‘hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico’ with a tariff that affects the way goods move. The people who are able to understand the impact and understand what options they have and then take advantage of the options really fast are the ones who are going to come out ahead,” he said.

That’s true whether you’re dealing with a storm, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal, spiking demand for N95 masks—or for tiny beads because Taylor Swift is coming to town.

“At the end of the day, you can’t change reality,” Bell said.