Canadians Begin Boycotting US Goods
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sat, 08/04/2018
With Trump’s trade war against China progressing and escalating seemingly every day, culminating for now with China’s Friday announcement of another $60 billion in tariffs on US imports in response to Trump’s threat to tax $200 billion of Chinese imports at a 25% rate, some China watchers expected that one of China’s qualitative responses would be to appeal to local nationalist sentiment, urging for a “soft boycott” of US products – in line with the country’s response to Japanese products during the 2013 East China Sea diplomatic clash. However, while China has so far resisted a US boycott, the same can not be said for another target of Trump’s tariffs: Canada.
Exposing the growing backlash against Trump’s trade policies, the WSJ writes that “ticked-off Canadians”, angered by U.S. metals tariffs and Trump’s harsh words for their prime minister, are boycotting American products and buying Canadian.
Take Garland Coulson, a 58-year-old Alberta entrepreneur, who admits that while usually he doesn’t pay much attention to where the goods he buys are coming from, saying that “you tend to buy the products that taste good or you buy the products that are low in price where taste isn’t an issue”, he believes the tariffs from Canada’s neighbor are a “slap in the face,” and added that in recent he has put more Canadian products into his shopping cart.
Or take Calgary resident Tracy Martell, who “replaced her Betty Crocker brownie mix with a homemade recipe and hasn’t visited the U.S. since shortly after President Trump’s inauguration.”
Or take Ontario resident Beth Mouratidis is trying out Strub’s pickles as a replacement for her longtime favorite, Bick’s.
The push to ” boycott America” and buy more Canadian products gained strength after the U.S. levied 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and 10% on aluminum starting June 1 and President Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “Very dishonest & weak” on Twitter following a Group of Seven meeting the following week. Canada in turn imposed retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. products, including foodstuffs such as ketchup, orange juice and yogurt.
“People sort of feel that we’re getting a raw deal from the U.S. and we have to stick up for ourselves,“ said Tom Legere, marketing manager for Ontario-based Kawartha Dairy Ltd., which has seen more interest in its ice cream recently. ”And this is their way at the supermarket of trying to do so.”
However, in their attempt to exclude US produce, Canadians have run into a problem: what is American, and what is really Canadian?
The logistical spiderweb of global supply chains has made even something as simple as a boycott surprisingly complex. It shouldn’t be: after all, Canada is the U.S.’s top export market, taking a little more than 18% of all U.S. exports. According to some estimates, roughly 40% to 60% of food on Canada’s grocery shelves is from the US, while closely linked production chains make it tough to determine how much of any given item was produced domestically.
That has left would-be boycotters scratching their heads as they untangle how much of a given product was made or grown outside the country.
The Rest…HERE
