Boycotting U.S. products is a challenge — but worth it

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As I snapped a photo of a hand-painted “BOYCOTT USA” sign that someone had recently affixed to a telephone pole on Main Street, a passing motorist honked his horn and lent an encouraging thumb’s-up. Game on, his friendly gesture seemed to say. We’re in this together.

It was a heart-warming moment — the kind of collective nationalism I haven’t seen since Canadians took up metaphorical torches and pitchforks to defend the long-form census.

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But how far will that supportive passerby go to keep U.S.-made products out of his fridge, pantry and car? What measures, for that matter, will I be willing to take, beyond the easy ones like not replenishing my bourbon supply, to send President Trump a stern message?

And what about you? Will you forego your U.S.-made Crest toothpaste in favour of a tube of Mexican-manufactured Colgate? Or, given that both are products of huge U.S. corporations (Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, respectively), will you put your money where your mouth (literally) is and switch your allegiance to the pricier but family-owned, Hawkesbury-based, Canadian-made organic Green Beaver toothpaste?

And what about where you shop? Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand includes many Canadian products — honey, lasagna and maple syrup, for example — and non-American ones as well, so is it still OK to shop at the behemoth U.S. retail chain as long as you buy Canadian. Or should you switch to Loblaws, which we were boycotting for other reasons just months ago?

In short, how much discomfort are we willing to endure to make a point, and for how long?

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And what about the many goods outside the grocery store? Will you cancel your Disney streaming service and sign up instead for BritBox? When it drops on March 7, will you purchase Lady Gaga’s new album, Mayhem, or will you opt instead to support P.E.I.’s The Burning Hell and their new release, Ghost Palace, also out on March 7?

And what about transportation? Uber and Lyft are American, but they create jobs for people here in Ottawa. Should we boycott them and instead wait in the wintery weather for an OC Transpo No. 11 bus that never comes when it’s supposed to?

Encouragingly, online forums, such as Facebook’s Buy Canadian, Help Our Economy,  Boycott USA – Buy Canadian! and Made in Canada – Canadian Products, have been bursting lately with people trying to figure out what products are and aren’t Canadian (oops – Facebook is owned by Meta) so we can, in response to U.S. tariffs announced on our products, buy more homegrown and less of whatever is currently filling our fridges and pantries.

It’s not always a simple determination. If a package has the Dairy Farmers of Canada’s blue cow logo on it, for example, we can be assured that it’s made from 100 per cent Canadian milk and milk ingredients. The reverse, though, isn’t necessarily true: the absence of said blue bovine doesn’t mean the product isn’t Canadian.

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Then there is the multitude of confusing phrases on labels. Made in Canada. Product of Canada. Packaged for. Distributed by. As many Canadians are only now learning, product labelling is an opaque dust storm of Wild-West proportions.

The only source listed on the label of the No Name dark roast peanut butter in my cupboard, for example, is “Loblaws Inc. Toronto M4T 2S8 Canada.” Am I to assume that there exist in Canada hectares of hitherto unknown peanut fields — perhaps right at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair? Well, not according to the Peanut Bureau of Canada (a real thing, I swear), which notes on its website that peanut production in Canada “may be as small as a couple hundred tonnes” — or, in other words, peanuts, at least compared to the 128,000+ metric tonnes of peanut products Canada imported from the U.S. in 2023, making us their third-largest single-country customer for that particular legume. (It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that China and India produce more peanuts than does the U.S., which, while not helping solve the mystery of the no-name, no-source nuts, does suggest that we have options. Although the moral contortions necessary to accept that China — notorious for its human-rights abuses like, say, kidnapping Canadians named Michael — benefits from all this makes boycotts much more complicated.)

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Which brings us around to the general conundrum of boycotts, retaliatory tariffs and standing up to bullies.

Not being an economist, I can only echo the dire warnings from those who are and say that U.S.-imposed tariffs, while devastating for Canada, will also significantly hurt Americans by making their lives much more expensive. If that’s true, it stands to reason that Canadian counter-tariffs will do the same for those of us north of the 49th parallel.

As for standing up to bullies, sure, it’s mighty satisfying to see the world’s Goliaths and Louis XVIs meet their comeuppance now and then or realize the errors of their ways, but as 98-pound weaklings have always known, the more likely outcome of confronting oppressors is getting your nose bloodied and your lunch money stolen. That may be why we should prefer boycotts to tariffs, if they’re meaningfully done.

Plus, this grassroots boycott/buy-Canadian campaign is genuinely uplifting.

It’s inspiring to think that one of the most divisive world leaders has unwittingly unified Canadians anew, opening up a spring-loaded can of (Canadian) whoop-ass and self-respect. Note, for example, the current campaign led by five former prime ministers of different parties — Joe Clark, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper — urging Canadians to proudly fly our flag on Saturday to mark Flag Day.

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The gesture carries no economic sanctions, but it does send a message. So consider running your maple leaf up your flagpole (at this stage, our emblem no longer belongs to the convoy protesters). If you don’t have a flag, you can make one easily enough. You can even do it using crayons manufactured from Canadian beeswax, from Made By Bees in Brockville.

After all, we haven’t waited for our elected officials to launch measured responses and red-state-targeted counter-offensives. Instead, we’ve honked our horns, given one another the thumb’s-up, and gotten to work to show we take being Canadian seriously.

Let’s keep it up, eh?

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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