‘Trendy to be patriotic’: Canadians everywhere are hitting back at Trump

Montreal: At a subterranean bar in Montreal’s Chinatown, Wil Hanbridge has just restocked his shelf with a Scotch whisky. The barman was in the market for a cheap bottle, and would usually buy an American rye. But these days, Canadians everywhere are giving American products a second thought.

“People are actually looking at labels now,” Hanbridge says. “They’ll buy crackers that are not made in the US. The tariffs brought this huge swell of patriotism across Canada that was pretty lacking. It’s not that deep, but it’s trendy to be patriotic.”

Bartenders Teo Diaz and Wil Hanbridge at their Bar Leonor in Montreal.Credit: Michael Koziol

Literally. Ahead of Canada’s “Flag Day” last weekend – marking the 60th anniversary of the Maple Leaf design – flag sales reportedly doubled compared with the previous year.

US President Donald Trump may have paused his plan to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian imports, but the threat lingers – and Canadians aren’t waiting around to find out. They’re taking matters into their own hands with a newfound national resolve to buy Canadian – which stands to hurt US producers whether Trump enacts the tariffs or not.

A Facebook group dedicated to buying made-in-Canada goods has exploded to more than 1.1 million members and is growing by the day, with shoppers sharing recommendations of home-grown products – or warning others about brands inflating their Canadian credentials.

“It’s so wonderful to see products I never knew existed,” wrote Krystine Watson, one of the top contributors to the group, along with a picture of a boxed chicken curry. “Picked these up on a whim while shopping today and they are sooo good.”

At the Nuvo Express grocery store in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles, manager Anthony Esposito says more customers are conscious of what they’re purchasing. He sees them loitering in the aisles to read product labels.

“Before, people would just grab and go. Now, people turn [the product] around and actually check. I wouldn’t say everyone, but definitely a bigger percentage,” he says. “People are always asking: ‘Do you have a Canadian alternative for this?’ ”

Some substitutions are easy: McDonald’s is out, Tim Horton’s is in. No to Starbucks, yes to Second Cup. But for Canadians looking to buy home-grown products at the supermarket, it can be trickier to know which is which.

To that end, two twenty-something tech entrepreneurs in Montreal have created an app to help shoppers navigate the maze. Buy Beaver, launched this month, has already notched 25,000 downloads and reached No.3 on Apple’s top free apps chart in Canada.

Grocery store manager Anthony Esposito in Montreal, Canada, says customers have become more conscious about the origin of the products they are buying.Credit: Michael Koziol

“We didn’t even think it was going to be big,” says co-creator Christopher Dip. “With the recent Trump tariff talks, we really felt like we needed to do something to unite around the same mission and keep our sovereignty.

“Once we found out how hard it is to get proper labels and packing information, that’s when we decided we might be on to something.”

The premise is simple: you scan the barcode on a product or price label, and the app provides a scorecard based on three factors: manufacturing location, materials and ingredients, and brand ownership.

At a Montreal grocery store, this correspondent found a bottle of Oasis orange juice with an overall rating of 4.2 (very Canadian), a tin of green beans that was a mixed bag of 2.4, and a carton of Silk milk that rated just 1.2, which generated a red warning message: “This product is not Canadian.” (It is an American brand.)

Christopher Dip (left) and Alexandre Hamila created the Buy Beaver app to guide Canadian shoppers to home-grown products.Credit:

The information is crowdsourced, which has its pros and cons. “There are two guys who are actively trying to mislabel products,” Dip says of some of the contributions. “We don’t know their motivation, but it’s kind of annoying.”

To improve accuracy, Dip and co-creator Alexandre Hamila want to use government databases and information from major Canadian producers and manufacturers. For now, the app rates only a product’s Canadian-ness – it doesn’t reveal the origin or sound an alarm if the product is from the US.

“We’re trying to be like apolitical,” Dip says. “We just want to give information to people and let them decide. We don’t want to be anti-American – we’re for free trade. This is a response directly to the threat of tariffs.”

Buy Beaver is not available in the US at present, though Hamila says quite a few Americans have contacted them saying they would like to use it and support their northerly neighbour.

US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a NATO meeting in England in 2019.Credit: AP

The impact of Trump’s tariff threat has been turbocharged by Canadian elections. The governing Liberal Party is about to choose a new leader after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to step down, and an election could be called at any moment. The country’s most populous province, Ontario, goes to the polls on Thursday.

Even at the provincial level, candidates have faced questions about how they will respond to Trump, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford of the Progressive Conservative Party has been a high-profile critic of the tariffs.

In the US, some are worried about the impact of Canadians voting with their feet or imposing retaliatory tariffs. Canada’s leaders have promised retaliation on products such as Florida oranges and Kentucky bourbon – states that voted decisively for Trump.

Kentucky, ravaged by deadly floods at present, produces 95 per cent of the world’s bourbon, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, and the biggest export destination is Canada. Some Canadian liquor stores have already put up signs pointing drinkers towards Canadian rye alternatives.

A Nanos Research poll published in The Globe and Mail last weekend showed overwhelming support among Canadians for strong counter-measures if the Trump administration proceeds with its flagged tariffs. Nearly 90 per cent supported or somewhat supported removing US wine, beer and liquor from Canadian shelves, while 83 per cent backed dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs.

Three-quarters of Canadians also endorsed suspending oil, natural gas and electricity exports to the US, the poll found. Nanos pollster Nik Nanos says opinions had “changed drastically” since Trump’s tariff threats in his first term, with many more people backing retaliation over negotiation this time.

Just as the European Union is having to grapple with the Trump administration’s decisive realignment away from Europe, Canada must work out how to respond to the president’s petulance towards the US’s closest neighbour.

Professor Roland Paris, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa, says that, even if the trade war is abandoned entirely, “it will have lasting effects on the bilateral relationship”.

“Canada and the US have always had trade quarrels, traditionally over relatively mundane issues such as the method for pricing wood,” he wrote for Chatham House, where he is an associate fellow. “But Canadians have long assumed that the US would never deliberately seek to harm Canada. That assumption [has been] shattered.”

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