If you are looking to buy upholstered furniture from overseas, expect to now pay up to three times more money than before.

The Canadian government put a tariff on imported furniture so Canadian manufacturers could stay competitive.

Dylan Wiens from Wiens Furniture in Niverville says they were expecting this to happen, but the size of the tariff was a shock.

"We were expecting maybe something twenty to thirty per cent, just to keep everybody competitive," admits Wiens. "It was probably about time something like this happened."

But, Wiens says tariffs as high as 300 per cent, is not something they have ever seen before. Having said that, not all furniture is impacted. These high tariffs are on motion furniture, so anything with a mechanism.

"So you're talking about a reclining chair or reclining sofa, a lift chair, a sleeper," he says. "So anything like that that's coming from factories in China or Vietnam. We really stepped back in the past two years and started to focus more on our domestic manufacturing. So that's why we actually didn't have a whole lot of things that were affected by this issue."

Using a real life example, Wiens says a reclining sofa priced at $2,000, would now be sold for $6,000, because of the tariffs.

According to Wiens, the Canadian government issued this tariff based on when it lands on Canadian soil, not based on when you ordered it.

"If you are buying furniture and you're bringing it in from overseas, you have to put your order in months in advance because it has to be made and then put on a container and then brought over," he explains. "So, what the Canadian government said is that anything that gets to the Canadian shore by this deadline that would be tariff, no matter when you ordered the product."