Canada Has Tools on the Table

Washington has tariffs. Canada has markets. And in trade negotiations, markets can bite.

I love my whisky. More accurately, I love my whiskies.

Once you know your supermarket, you stop thinking about it. You know the aisle. You know the shelf. You know the bottle. On a Friday, my hand used to move almost automatically — pick it up, drop it in the cart, move on. No ceremony. No speech. Just habit.

Not anymore.

These days, I stop. I turn the bottle around. I check the label. If it is made in the United States, it goes back on the shelf.

That is not outrage. That is pressure.

I am not going to sit, watch, and do nothing while a country that fed me, built me, taught me, and gave me part of my life is dragged toward the politics of autocrats and oligarchs. I do not look at one bottle and think, “What difference will this make?” I look at it and think: this is my fraction of one percent.

My fraction.

It is mine. It will hurt. It will help.

Because pressure adds up. Every bottle left on the shelf is a small refusal. Every substitution is a small market signal. Every percentage point taken out of U.S. exports makes it harder for the tariff country to bully smaller nations, punish allies, and then call the whole thing freedom.

That is what Canada understood earlier than most.

It has now been more than a year since Canadians began this boycott. At first, it looked symbolic. A gesture. A little consumer rebellion against a much larger machine.

Now the numbers are arriving. And they show something much more serious: the bottle did not just come off the shelf.

The habit began to break.

According to testimony from Chris Swonger, head of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, before a USTR Section 301 committee, Canada’s provincial bans on U.S. alcohol have now produced a 63% decline in U.S. spirits exports to Canada in 2025.

“America’s spirits industry is a powerful economic engine,” said Swonger, noting that the sector generates more than $250 billion in economic activity, supports approximately 1.7 million U.S. jobs and sources more than 2.7 billion pounds of grains from American farmers. “But the U.S. spirits and hospitality sectors are facing significant economic headwinds. A slowdown in the spirits market, combined with ongoing trade frictions, has started to result in year-over-year job losses at U.S. distilleries.”