I’d like you to cast your mind all the way back to… er… a month ago — was it only that recent? — when Trump started his second term as president and evidently decided that a wrecking ball made a handy tool to get some things changed.
I won’t bother with a list of those changes, because it would be lengthy and angering and exhausting and I’d surely miss some of the items anyway. Relevant to this particular post was the widely ill-advised tariffs Trump threatened to put on incoming Canadian goods.
The Canadian response was a bit of a patchwork. Only weeks earlier, Justin Trudeau had announced his resignation as prime minister once a replacement was named, and he frankly dragged his heels on any federal response to the tariff threat. The individual provinces and territories, meanwhile, came up with their own retaliations for if and when the tariffs went into effect. In Ontario, that included the plan to pull all American products from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). That’s no small response: The LCBO is among the largest single organizations on the planet — at times the world leader — in terms of purchasing international alcohol.
Trump then put the tariffs on hold, to be reconsidered in a month’s time, and so LCBO staff hands were paused just shy of taking everything relevant off the sales floor. But paused or not, the threat itself — paired in no small part by Trump sometimes idly and sometimes more seriously talking about making Canada “the 51st state” — was enough to get people in Canada riled. We have plenty of problems and disagreements going on here amongst ourselves, but if there’s anything that’ll bring Canadians together, it’s a threat to our very sovereignty.
Not only have I noticed, during my shifts at the LCBO, that there’s been a huge uptick in questions about what we carry as alternates to American brands from people wanting to make the switch to Canadian (or at least not American) options, but there’s also been a whole movement in the rest of the country, across a lot of sectors, toward buying Canadian products instead of American ones.
I didn’t particularly want to get caught up in the momentum, mainly because there’s going to be a lot of fallout from that kind of financial shift that will hurt small businesses and individuals on both sides of the border, and none of them may care in the least about politics but just be trying to make a living. A trade war will hurt the little guy first and most severely.
But the flipside that has swayed me at least somewhat toward the Buy Canadian sentiment is that there may be some legitimate safety issues shaping up with some American imports.
Here’s the thing: Elon Musk is, ostensibly (there’s been recent suggestion it’s someone else), heading up the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the U.S., and in mere weeks has spearheaded the firing of what has already been hundreds of thousands of government employees, all in the apparent name of saving government spending.
The problem is that, as always, sweeping gestures by their nature miss nuances. Using Trump’s wrecking ball to approve mass firings of entire departments that were created for reasons decades ago could create some problems. For instance, DOGE has recently tried to hire back key staff members who it fired but who had been operating nuclear facilities.
Oops.
Among the people fired as well were staff members at the CDC, long-time world leader of research into diseases and developer of methods for how we can all, globally, most effectively combat them. This was shortly followed up just a few days ago by Robert Kennedy, Jr. — an ardent antivaxxer and critic of science-based policies, who has gained a powerful post in Trump’s administration — declaring a hold on country-wide administration of flu vaccines. This happening in a big flu season, and when Texas is dealing with a measles outbreak (in, to hammer the point home, areas of the state with high rates of unvaccinated people), underscores how short-sighted and dangerous it can be to make broad job cuts and to put extremists in positions of power over hundreds of millions of peoples’ health and well being.
And that was the point for me and my writerbrain, amid the groundswell of this Buy Canadian movement, where I started thinking that… Huh, while there’s no evident problem yet with, let’s say, American food products, it’s not totally outlandish to think that with mass firings going on south of the border leaving entire government departments literally unstaffed, there may soon be problems with their food quality and safety. For better or worse, my “What If…?” concerns were confirmed soon after that, when I verified that yes, indeed, the broad federal employee firings also included staff at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where food safety guidelines are established and enforced. Some of those people were, again, later contacted to bring them back to work.
Oops.
But as an interesting offshoot of all that happening, the related question has come up that while there may be something (certainly patriotic and at times sensibly cautious) to prioritize buying Canadian where possible, is it realistically sustainable?
Renée Sylvestre-Williams explains that issue very well among the current articles of The Walrus. In brief, the article argues that boycotts only work if they’re sizable and sustained, and it questions how long either of those aspects can be in this case.
After all, Canadians can certainly get by in many ways without American products, but not for nearly everything we’re used to having readily available (think WalMart, Costco, and Home Depot; think cell phones, domestic car brands, and entertainment brands and media streaming companies, just as a start). And further, at what point will Canadian buyers get tired of finding alternates even when they can, and just fall back into old, convenient buying habits?
Using our wallets to speak for us with this new Buy Canadian movement will definitely have an effect. But how loud and proud can we be for how long?
Interesting times.