‘It’s trendy to be patriotic’: Trump’s tariffs have already backfired in Canada

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”, which launched earlier this month, has already notched up 25,000 downloads and reached No.3 on Apple’s top free apps chart in Canada.

“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 rated just 1.2, which generated a red warning message: “This product is not Canadian.” (It is an American brand.)

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 kid 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 only rates 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,” says Dip. “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.”

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

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.

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The state of Kentucky, currently ravaged by deadly floods, 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.

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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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