Protest Eating and Drinking

A recent trip to the States got me thinking

As anyone who follows me on Instagram knows, I am about as anti-Trump as people get. Like many, I loathe the American president and his entourage, and I don’t understand anyone who would vote for him. His first term was bad enough, but in the second, he has not only jabbed at Canada with talk of us becoming America’s 51st state, but since 2025 has hit us with tariffs that have placed several of our industries, especially steel, aluminum, auto and lumber, in peril.

Canadians’ anger stems mainly from those tariffs, which have hit household finances and businesses hard. With over 80% of Canadians believing the tariffs have significantly affected the economy, it comes as little surprise that polling shows 55% of Canadians feel angry, with U.S. favourability at a record low. Frankly, I’m surprised that number isn’t higher.

Most Americans, meanwhile, don’t actually support the tariffs, and many say they’re embarrassed by how Trump is treating their northern neighbour. Alas, he doesn’t appear to give a damn. When Canada turned elsewhere for business and signed a trade agreement with China, tensions escalated further, with threats of 100% tariffs.

The most recent major development came on July 1, when the deadline passed for the U.S., Canada and Mexico to decide whether to extend CUSMA, the trade deal that replaced NAFTA, for another 16 years. The Trump administration announced it would not renew the pact, saying it wanted to address the agreement’s shortcomings instead. We’re a long way from Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan exchanges loving glances over the Free Trade Agreement of 1988.

Any good news lately? Oh yes: this week came word that the Gordie Howe Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, finished seven weeks ago, will finally open. So hooray for that, I guess, despite the fact that the Americans will split revenues 50-50 with Canada, who paid for the bridge. Still, for Canadians, this treatment from one of the country’s closest and longest-standing allies feels like a betrayal, given the deep personal and economic ties between our two countries.

Speaking for myself, I have always loved the U.S.A. and count many Americans as friends. As a Canadian, I’ve been shaped by a country two hours from my front door. Just as Quebec fights to protect its language and culture surrounded by English speakers, Canada as a whole has struggled to differentiate itself from its neighbour to the south, whose culture is so pervasive that I can still recite the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, thanks to Schoolhouse Rock cartoons on Saturday mornings. For years I dreamed of living and working in the States, and I always loved travelling there, discovering not just the restaurants but the people, who might be annoying in Parisian restaurants but tend to be exceptionally friendly on their own turf.

But in Trump’s America, all of that has changed. Canadians are now more than a little pissed off at being treated as foes instead of friends by the country we long considered our compadre.

That anger has shown up everywhere, and not just the usual Canadians vs. Bruins hockey games, but primarily through the sale consumer goods. Boycotting American products has been widespread and organized with shoppers favouring Canadian-made goods, restaurant owners swapping U.S. suppliers for Canadian or other, and an even broader “Buy Canadian” movement taking hold nationwide.

Cutting off travel to the U.S. has been another form of payback. Canadian travel south of the border dropped sharply, around 40% in February 2025 alone compared to the year before, with widespread cancellations of shopping trips, concerts and vacations leaving a real economic bite on U.S. border towns and tourist destinations. Some Canadians have gone further: I know several Quebecers who sold their U.S. vacation properties outright, redirecting that travel spending to Mexico and the Caribbean instead, destinations now drawing the snowbirds and families who'd normally head to Florida.

(Ironically, the travel boycott is fairly one-directional so far as Americans have been heading north into Canada in bigger numbers, with U.S. visits to Canada up sharply, likely helped by a strong U.S. dollar.)

Governments pushed back too. Ottawa slapped retaliatory tariffs on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American goods, while various provinces quietly rewrote procurement policies to shut U.S. companies out where possible. Nova Scotia doubled tolls on the Cobequid Pass for U.S. commercial vehicles. Ontario cancelled a $100-million contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink, with Premier Doug Ford declaring it dead even if the tariffs were eventually lifted. Then there was electricity: Ontario supplies power to about 1.5 million U.S. homes, and Ford floated cutting off Michigan, New York and Wisconsin entirely if tariffs went ahead.

Friendly was not the name of the game.

For a country that has spent decades being almost pathologically polite to its neighbour, it’s a lot. We Canadians aren’t big on confrontation. But here we are, and for many of us, this defensive version of the relationship is feeling like the new normal.

Perhaps the most visible form of retaliation has been through alcohol. Save for Alberta and Saskatchewan, U.S. alcohol is still essentially absent from Canadian liquor store shelves. Given that the Ontario’s LCBO and Quebec’s SAQ are the two largest liquor boards in the world, that loss of business is significant: U.S. spirits sales in Canada dropped 66.3% between March and April 2025 alone, and the Wine Institute recorded a 78% drop in U.S. wine exports to Canada between 2024 and 2025, with Canada’s share of U.S. wine exports falling from 36% to just 12%, representing hundreds of millions in lost value and enough white Zinfandel to drown a herd of elephants.

Despite Trump saying the U.S. needs nothing from Canada, it’s clear they miss our love of a good Napa cab. Just this past week, California’s Democratic senator Adam Schiff pleaded with Canada to end the boycott of California wine, calling it devastating for winegrowers. In June he wrote to Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette, noting that Quebec consumers had long enjoyed access to American wine and that the ban cuts off a $434-million market, with damaging consequences for regional consumers, businesses and producers who have no say in national trade policy.

He wasn’t alone: a bipartisan group of 14 U.S. House members sent Fréchette a similar letter, and New York Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney announced she’d introduce the CANADA Act (Combating Attacks on our National Alcoholic Drinks by Allies), aimed at triggering a Section 301 trade investigation, arguing Canadian provinces cannot be allowed to hold American wineries, breweries and distilleries hostage. Nice try, Claudia, nice try. But even once American wine and spirits return, I’d guess it will take years — and a new President — for them to regain the market share they once enjoyed.

The boycott has clearly hurt U.S. sales, but the benefit to Canadian producers can’t be ignored. The LCBO saw Ontario wine sales jump 44%, one Ontario winery reported a 600% sales increase at the LCBO, and one distillery reported vodka sales up 100% and whisky up 300%. So if not “Bottoms Up,” it certainly has been “Elbows Up” on Canada’s side since the Trump administration began dismantling trade treaties and the back-and-forth began.

On a personal level, though, has the anger held, or has it started to fade?

It has been 16 months now since the Quebec liquor board pulled all U.S.-made alcohol from its shelves and website, and that’s still the case. American wines were never a big part of my household to begin with, so no great loss there, though I’ll admit to breaking down and buying a single bottle of bourbon at Duty Free on my way back from Mexico. My bad — though it was just one!

As for grocery shopping, many of us have been avoiding anything from south of the border. I’ve seen a few brands disappear from supermarket shelves, though fewer people seem to be scanning labels these days. As the anger ages, so does the fervour to “show ‘em,” and before you know it, you’re buying Driscoll’s raspberries because they’re $3 a carton. I tell myself it’s OK if I buy the ones from Mexico, but really… is it?

As for travel, I vowed to avoid the U.S. altogether, and for a long time I did. But sometimes life gets in the way. Last year I attended a Tourism Australia event in Malibu, California, and in May I went to New Orleans for the World’s 50 Best ceremony, which was a contractual obligation. And yesterday I returned from a trip to Vermont and New York State, prompted by a work situation but extended to make the trip worthwhile.

Sometimes, though, there’s no substitute for something you love, and for me that’s the New York City Ballet. I can find great restaurants in Montreal, but once a year in July, the best ballet in the world can be found at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in New York State, where the company has danced every summer since 1966. I started going with my mother in the late eighties and have made the pilgrimage most years since, including organizing a group trip in the summer of 2024.

Those trips came to a halt when Trump arrived, and I missed that annual pilgrimage more than I expected, which made me wonder: how effective are those personal protests? Would the awful orange tyrant really keep me from something I truly loved? Of course it’s the combined actions of many that make a difference. But could 48 hours in the U.S. be offset by my not drinking Tito’s vodka or eating Andy Boy romaine lettuce?

When I posted photos from the trip on Instagram, the messages poured in. Some said they too missed going to the States; some said they’d already started going back; others said they’d never set foot in the U.S. as long as Trump is in power, often punctuated with the “vomit” emoji.

In Vermont, probably the least Trumpian state of them all, the wonderful manager of the restaurant I visited told me they were feeling the lack of Canadian tourists sharply, and that business was way down. It was obvious everywhere I went. From Burlington to Stowe, shopping streets were empty and restaurants half full. At the U.S. border crossing there were only two cars ahead of us, and coming home, there was no line at all on the Canadian side. As a friend of mine put it recently: “I’m trying to feel sorry for them, but I have a hard time getting past the 77 million who voted for him.” So true.

For a long time, what kept Canadians from a U.S. holiday was probably the exchange rate more than politics. Now politics is the main reason, though the exchange rate doesn’t help either: restaurant bills and wine prices were noticeably higher everywhere I visited than back home in Montreal. Was the quality of the food worth the trip? Not really.

My main vacation plans this summer stay in Canada, not Europe or the U.S.: for those who have already “done” the beautiful regions of Quebec, Ontario towns like Stratford, St. Catharines and Toronto have plenty to offer culturally and culinarily, as do so many Canadian towns and cities.

If this Trump era has had one positive effect on Canadians, it's this: nothing has brought the country together quite like it since our last Olympic hockey gold, won by both the men's and women's teams in 2014. A country famously divided by region and language, French versus English, East versus West, suddenly found itself uniting against a common foe. The result has been a surge of national pride, and Canadians feeling more consciously Canadian than I've witnessed in my lifetime.

Is it time to soften our stance, to inch our way back toward buying American or visiting the U.S.? That's a very personal decision. For me, the ballet is too hard to give up. But aside from that and work commitments, it'll be Stratford over Broadway, and the Magdalen Islands over Cape Cod.

As for the bourbon, a Montreal bartender recently told me Canadian rye makes a pretty good replacement, suggesting one called King of the North.

I'll drink to that!

How do you feel about the American boycott?