Scott Stinson: Of course we should not put U.S. alcohol back on our shelves
- Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe suggested some provinces might lift bans on American alcohol products due to Trump’s tariff threats, but Ontario Premier Doug Ford, BC Premier David Eby, and others refused, maintaining the bans firmly.
- The article argues that reversing alcohol bans would show weakness and encourage further unpredictable and punitive tariff actions from Trump, who has used tariffs for unrelated issues like migration and wildfire smoke.
- Ford’s emotional stance against Trump’s trade policies reflects broader Canadian frustration toward the U.S., highlighting a deep sense of betrayal and mistrust toward America’s current leadership.
- The alcohol bans are effective pushback, hurting Trump domestically as U.S. states pressured him about the issue, and with his low approval ratings and ongoing conflicts, it’s argued that now is not the time for Canada to make concessions.
Not long after Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe mused that several Canadian provinces that have blocked the sale of American alcohol products in their stores might want to reverse that policy in light of Donald Trump’s new tariff threats, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declined to take that advice.
David Eby in British Columbia didn’t take it either, nor did any of the provincial leaders who have banned everything from Kentucky bourbon to California wine. Eby was positively Fordian in his bluster this week, saying there was “no chance in hell” he would restore those products to B.C. shelves.
Which is good. I say this as someone who quite likes the odd bourbon, but: Long live the bourbon ban.
There is simply no reason to cave on the prohibition of U.S. alcohol in response to Trump’s latest intransigence. It would be a show of weakness, which would only encourage the U.S. president to apply even more random pressure tactics. Trump sometimes tries to justify his tariffs for economic reasons, but he’s also threatened them over illegal migration, fentanyl, and, most recently, smoke from fires. Will he wake up tomorrow and declare that beavers or moose or Canada geese are a scourge that must be dealt with by punitive tariffs? You cannot rule it out.
Trump is long past behaving like a rational actor on this file, among many. Extend the man an olive branch, and he’s likely to poke you in the eye with it.
Removing alcohol bans would also earn Canada exactly zero credit with Trump when it comes to ongoing negotiations on North American free trade. Any time Canada makes any sort of concession, the president just adds it to his side of the ledger and starts looking for the next thing he can latch on to. It happened with the digital services tax and it just happened again with the Gordie Howe International Bridge, revenues for which will be temporarily shared with the United States just because Trump decided that they ought to be. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, gave away the game on this recently when he said that anything the U.S. sees as “unfair” in practice has to be surrendered without anything given back in return.
That isn’t a negotiation. It’s a mugging.
Ford has a tendency to govern emotionally, and it sometimes gets him in trouble. He recently blew up, for example, at opposition politicians who questioned Ontario’s wildfire-management budget, accusing them of politicizing a natural disaster, when asking questions about budgets is exactly what opposition politicians are supposed to do.
But he is also plainly furious about Trump’s trade war, and the president’s treatment of Canada in general, in a way that only someone who feels betrayed can be. Whenever the subject of Trump and tariffs comes up in a press conference setting, Ford will reliably say how much he loves Americans personally, and how he’s like-minded with them about a lot of things, before he ends up spitting mad at the latest Trump-engineered injustice. He’ll end up muttering about that “one guy down there” that he has a problem with, so far managing to avoid making a sound bite that gets aired on Fox News and thus invites Trump’s wrath.
Ford’s emotional register on the subject is, I think, closer to how most Canadians feel about the United States right now than most of their elected representatives.
Canadians who are boycotting travel to the United States and diligently scanning the shelves at the grocery store for little maple leaf icons aren’t upset because we are unhappy with trade negotiations, but because our closest friend and ally can no longer be trusted to go a day without being, frankly, abusive.
Don’t give into bullies, they say. Push back. And that gets to something else worth noting here: it is working. The alcohol bans are a sore point for Trump precisely because there are multiple U.S. states whose leaders (and voters) have been in his ear about it. They know, even if the more MAGA-aligned among them won’t admit it, that the bans are Trump’s fault. We were all quite happy to import American alcohol before he started violating trade agreements that he signed.
The American public, polls repeatedly suggest, has come to realize that Trump’s tariff agenda has contributed to consumer inflation that he once promised to reverse, all while effectively turning the U.S. into a pariah state among its allies. His approval rating is deeply underwater, and with a war in the Middle East that he started and cannot seem to end, there’s every reason to suspect a Republican wipeout in the November mid-term elections.
This is not the time to offer concessions. Diplomacy has its virtues. But sometimes it’s OK to just be mad.