Sept. 3: Buy Canadian

September 3, 2026

How is the “Buy Canadian” movement going?

Nothing we can remember – perhaps other than Expo 67 – has united Canadians more than the U.S. president’s talk of making us the 51^st state, and the slapping of tariffs on a variety of Canadian-produced goods.

Save with SPP wondered how well the “buy Canadian” and travel elsewhere thing is going, more than a year after the problems first began.

Writing for The Financial Post, Pamela Heaven reports that a recent Bank of Canada study shows that the whole boycott thing is having an impact.

“Central bank researchers tapped three sets of data that confirm Canadians have indeed been shifting away from their neighbours to the south by increasing their spending on domestic travel and Canadian grocery products and reducing their spending on similar U.S. products and services,” she writes.

Fewer of us are going Stateside, her article continues.

“Canadians took almost 10 million or 25 per cent fewer trips to the United States last year. The biggest drop was in trips across the border by land which fell by 8.4 million or 30 per cent. Trips by air were down 1.2 million or 12 per cent,” she notes.

Instead, her report notes, many are travelling within Canada, or to other, non-U.S. destinations.

Another tactic employed here in light of the U.S. trade and annexation talk/measures was a decision by Canadian provinces to remove U.S.-produced alcohol from shelves.

Ariel Rabinovitch, reporting for Global News, notes that this ban resulted “in Canadian imports of U.S. alcoholic beverages decreas(ing) by approximately 81 per cent (from approximately US$718 million to approximately $137 million).”

While a couple of provinces have since put U.S. alcohol back on the shelves, the efforts so far have cost U.S. booze exporters upwards of a billion dollars in sales, the article adds.

The Americans are getting the message, former PM office official Diamond Isinger tells BNN Bloomberg.

“It’s clearly yielding results,” she tells the broadcaster. “It’s clearly being noticed by the president. It’s something very frustrating for him, and it’s having very real economic effects on American producers,” she adds.

J.R. Duren, writing for The Independent, reports that the Canadian travel boycott of the U.S. has cost America about $3 billion thus far.

“Canadians have a widespread distaste for Trump’s rhetoric and policies toward Canada over the past 19 months, a survey last month from polling firm Pew Research Center revealed,” the article notes.

“Overall, perceptions of the U.S.’s reliability have also plummeted since 2022. `In Canada, 83 per cent described the U.S. as a reliable partner in 2022, compared with 35 per cent today,’ the Pew survey found,” the article continues.

As we write this, negotiations in Washington between Canadian and U.S. trade officials have broken off, and a new wave of tariffs and counter-tariffs are expected. We’ll all be keeping our eyes on what develops.

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BNN Bloomberg, Global news, The Financial Post, The Independent

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