As the US tariff threats to Canada escalate each week, I’ve spoken to a lot of Yukoners wondering how they can use their wallet to make a small but personal difference.
So here’s a how-to guide for running your own personal trade war.
As you’ll quickly see, the global economy is so complex and interconnected that it is not easy to go cold turkey on American products. And, like most strategic games, the most effective strategy may not be the most obvious.
The first place to start is goods. The trade department in Ottawa has one of the most sophisticated tariff retaliation algorithms, much admired by trade strategists around the world. If you look carefully at Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, you’ll see they are often micro-targeted at products from Republican districts that Canadian consumers have lots of alternatives for.
For example, in the 2018 trade war -- a minor skirmish by the standards of today’s US trade offensive -- Canada targeted bourbon. This just happens to be produced in the home state of Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader at the time. And Canadians can easily substitute rye or scotch.
The grocery store is probably the place to start since you spend big bucks there every week.
The Yukon News legal budget is smaller than that of US tech oligarchs or mega-corporations, so I won’t be naming any names. But you’ll know who I’m talking about.
Some things are easy. You can be pretty sure the eggs and milk are from Canada. After all, as you can tell from the lower prices when you visit other countries, those industries have been protected from foreign competition for years. The maple syrup is almost definitely Canadian.
But it quickly gets more complicated. I looked at a can of frozen orange juice. You can tell it was “manufactured by/for” the Canadian subsidiary of a big US company. But did Canadian workers package it? Did the oranges come from Florida or our friends in Brazil? You don’t know.
A competing Canadian brand has added a “Prepared in Canada” tag on its online grocery website, but you still don’t know where the oranges came from.
You can also just go by brand. We all know the big American brands. But even the ones you think of as “Canadian” may not be. For example, your favorite donut chain and its maple-leaf-themed marketing may be owned by foreign private equity firms. I even looked at a Canadian tinned sardine brand I remember from my childhood. It was sold to a British private equity company more than a decade ago, although most of the plants remain in Canada (as far as one can tell given Canada’s lax food labelling requirements).
You can also avoid US clothing brands. Unfortunately, this will also hurt their low-wage workers in Asian countries. On the other hand, your Canadian clothing brands plants are probably also in those countries.
It is the same for big ticket items. If you are buying a new car, you can check if that model’s final assembly plant is in Ontario or Quebec. But its 30,000 or more parts will have come from across the US plus Mexico and Asia.
Day-to-day shopping choices have an impact, but it can be smaller than you think. If you decide it is the kids’ patriotic duty to drink Yukon tap water at breakfast instead of thawed orange juice concentrate, that is $3.00 less for the big US brand you used to buy. But a fairly small portion of that $3.00 hits US shareholder profits. You might be having a bigger effect on the local grocery store, Canadian packaging workers or Brazilian orange pickers.
The lesson is not to limit yourself to the playing field chosen by the US government: goods.
Services are different and often pack a bigger economic punch.
Take travel, which economists consider an economic service. If you vacation in the US, you know for sure that 100 percent of your hotel, car rental, restaurant, casino, golf, ziplining, hot yoga and Kentucky bourbon museum spending is staying in America. Many of these things are much more profitable and involve many fewer third-country inputs such as those Brazilian oranges.
In fact, not going to Vegas for a long weekend is probably the equivalent of not buying thousands and thousands of cans of orange juice.
Digital services are also highly impactful. And they feel good because you’re fighting back against the big digital oligarchs who are so strongly backing the new US government.
Take social media. Each time you log on to check in on your high-school classmates or scroll silly videos, advertising profits roll into US oligarch and venture capital wallets. Which many of them then recycle into US political causes such as electing trade warriors.
Your recurring subscriptions to American streaming services are highly profitable for big US companies, some of whom also have close relationships with the new US government. Now that they keep raising prices to $20 a month or more, maybe it is time to watch less TV. And limit yourself to whatever is on CBC Gem or Crave (even though some of that money filters back to the producers of US shows).
Patriotic digital detox can be hard to do. The Yukon government, for example, spends big bucks on digital advertising on US platforms. Indeed, sometimes you need a social media account to get the latest Yukon government news on forest fires, highway closures or other important topics.
In any case, I’d encourage you to have a trade war planning meeting with the family. In addition to being an educational tour of the realities of the global economy, it can also be a good time to review your consumption in general. Maybe you should have been vacationing in Dawson City and bingeing fewer streaming series even before last November’s American election.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
