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Paul Shelestowsky is a senior investment advisor at Meridian Credit Union in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. He’s been in the business close to 30 years — 23 of them at Meridian. Many of his clients are farmers in the region, along with business owners and older folks who’ve packed up their Toronto homes and downsized.

Like people across the country, they’re on edge. It feels as though their life savings are in play, at the whim of politicians in Washington and Ottawa. Local businesses are laying off staff. Shelestowsky’s retirees are white-knuckling it.

“They’re the most anxious right now,” he said. “They’re drawing on their savings.”

And they’re calling Shelestowsky, with questions about taking risk off the table. He’s managing those calls by talking about two recent periods of time — 2020, when the economy turned down and 2022, when inflation started rising.

There was plenty of noise in both cases, but investors who stayed in the market came out the other end in good shape.

“I’m getting a lot of calls, and I’m saying, ‘here’s how you did in 2020, you were just fine. Here’s how you did in 2022. it wasn’t great, but you bounced back in 2023.'”

Shelestowsky said his clients are asking about moving some of their portfolio into cash instruments. Others want to up their Canadian holdings, not as a buy-local move but as a means of shedding risk. They’re wrong of course, which takes a bit of explaining.

“The U.S. is still expected to be the best place to make money,” he said. “I’ve got to have that argument with everybody.”

Fundamentals aside, there’s an emotional element to what Shelestowsky is hearing from clients that is even greater than he experienced during the pandemic. “It does feel different this time,” he said.

“It’s because of the chaos that [U.S. President Donald] Trump is creating. Markets can handle good news. Markets can handle bad news. They can’t handle chaos. … I can tell you that most of the companies on the S&P 500 are still showing good profits, good margins and all that. But it’s changing, and we just don’t know. It’s not even day to day, it’s like hour to hour.”