Amid Donald Trump’s trade war, the Buy Canadian movement is here to stay

Every year, I take a trip to visit friends in Northern Canada, a journey so routine for me that I’ve almost forgotten to pack my passport. I’ve always perceived a trip across the US-Canada border to be not much more than a formality, a set of standard procedures mostly in place for optics. After all, in 2024, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the border every single day, some for reasons as minor as getting a cheaper tank of gas. In addition to civilian crossings, trucks carrying billions of dollars’ worth of goods also passed through the border last year.

Historically, the United States and Canada have had one of the most comprehensive trade relationships in the world. Each country is the other’s largest trade partner, and an estimated 3.7 million jobs rely on the networks created by this uniquely close relationship. Food makes up a large portion of the goods that cross the border each day. In 2024, over $45 billion worth of processed food and agricultural products were exported to Canada from the United States, from cereal and pancake mix to lettuce and green beans.

The close relationship between the two nations came to a screeching halt in early 2025 when the Trump administration imposed 25% trade tariffs on Mexico and Canada. As a response, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, ordered government-controlled liquor stores to halt the sale of American products. Later that same week, Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada as the 51st state. Our neighbors up north did not take kindly to the threat—and began to rethink their average household spend of $8,500 per year on American products. A grassroots movement to buy Canadian-made products and eschew American ones took root. By mid-March, 91% of Canadians surveyed by Lightspeed Commerce were prioritizing Canadian products while shopping, and 73% were boycotting American goods entirely.

The close relationship between the two nations came to a screeching halt in early 2025 when the Trump administration imposed 25% trade tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

When I visited Canada this July, the boycott was alive and well in my host Sophia’s home. Gone were staples like Diet Coke and Oreos; in their place were Canadian alternatives like Sobeys brand diet cola (a subpar replacement for a Diet Coke loyalist like myself). Red maple leaf stickers and “proudly Canadian-made” labels adorned everything from black cherry ice cream to ketchup. For Sophia and her family, the Buy Canadian movement was top of mind every time they went to the grocery store. They opted for Canadian products no matter the cost, and if no alternatives were available, they avoided the product altogether.

Adherence to the movement doesn’t come cheaply. Karuna Scheinfeld, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada who recently moved back to New York City from Toronto, says the boycott has resulted in markdowns on American goods in the Canadian market. This summer, she noticed American strawberries that were discounted by more than half were still not flying off the shelves, while more expensive Ontario strawberries were selling for three or four times the price.

For some Canadians, rising grocery costs mean they still care more about the price of goods than where they’re made. Elizabeth Asokanthan, a 25-year-old teacher living “paycheck to paycheck” in London, Ontario, says the Canadians who wholeheartedly participate in the Buy Canadian movement are not the kind of people who need to worry about grocery prices. “I’m trying to decide and sweating beads thinking, ‘Do I save a dollar and go to Giant Tiger, or do I just buy these really nice fruits at Farm Boy?’” She’s noticed that older adults in her Indian Canadian community have seemingly sidestepped the whole issue by shopping at grocery stores catering to Asian Canadians that are filled with imported products from India and China.

Sabine O’Donnell, a 28-year-old librarian living in Toronto, feels similarly. She shops at budget grocery stores like No Frills and mostly purchases the items that are cheapest or on sale. It’s not that Sabine doesn’t care about where her food comes from; she boycotted Canadian grocery giant Loblaws for over a year for alleged price gouging, and she “has never shopped at Amazon and hopefully never will,” she says. She just can’t afford to be constantly rigorous when shopping.

For a group of middle-aged Canadians living in the suburbs of Ontario who I spoke with, the biggest change seemed to be swapping California- and Oregon-grown wines for grapes grown in the Canadian provinces, like Cabernet Sauvignon from British Columbia and Blanc de Blancs from Nova Scotia. Over the last seven months, these folks said they have noticed slight changes in product offerings in their local grocery stores. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), Canadian imports from the United States have decreased by 2% since the second Trump administration began, while imports from its next-largest trading partners, China and Mexico, have increased by 9% and 7%, respectively. Imports have increased from other regions, including Central and South America as well as Africa.

Gone were staples like Diet Coke and Oreos; in their place were Canadian alternatives like Sobeys brand diet cola.

More produce is also being grown in local greenhouses. For Courtney Walker, a research administrator based in London, Ontario, the most difficult Canadian-produced items to find at the beginning of the boycott were leafy greens like spinach and lettuce, but slowly spinach arrived first, and it was all vertically grown, mainly from Quebec, and then many other vertically grown companies started cropping up. “By the end of March, there were multiple choices,” she says. “In the beginning, they were mostly at the higher-end grocery stores, and they were probably two to three times more expensive, but by late April or early May, they were comparable in price to American-grown products.”

Haven Greens, a greenhouse farm that produces leafy greens, is one of the brands that appeared on Courtney’s grocery store shelves in March. Founder Jay Willmot has been working on building the farm since 2022, and it was a coincidence that he launched the business in March 2025, when the Buy Canadian movement began picking up steam.

For many years, Willmot has thought that Canada’s supply chain for leafy greens was too long. According to him, 97% of Canada’s leafy greens are imported from the United States. Reliance breeds instability: a blight in Arizona could mean a significant price increase for people living in Toronto. While Willmot didn’t necessarily predict the trade war, it is an example of the type of supply chain issues he knew could impact Canadians in the near future. The March launch date was serendipitous, and according to the company, weekly sales volumes have grown by over 1,200% since March 2025.

Since January, Willmot has fielded countless calls from other Canadians starting greenhouse farms, and a second fully automated greenhouse company has begun operations in Quebec. When asked if he thinks Canadians will ever go back to buying American products, Willmot is pragmatic. “At the end of the day, in our category, people are going to gravitate toward the brands that offer the highest quality at the best price,” he says. “We don’t focus on whether it’s a Canadian or American product—we just want to ensure that we can get on the shelf at an attractive price point while also bringing the best-tasting, crunchiest greens to the market.”

The globalization of production chains can lead to confusing situations for packaged goods. If tomatoes are grown in the United States to make ketchup produced in Canada, is it an American or a Canadian product? “I’ll buy something that has been processed in Canada despite its ingredients originating in the United States,” says Marilyn Evans of Ontario. She won’t, however, buy a product that says it “may originate from the US or Mexico.”

All of the labeling can get convoluted. A recent CBC news investigation found that large grocery chains frequently mislabel items as being Canadian despite the impossibility of that fact (for instance, labeling almonds as Canadian-made, when almonds do not grow anywhere in Canada).

Despite the added effort, Marilyn says that the Buy Canadian movement is “making [her] feel prouder than ever to be a Canadian,” and she plans to continue buying Canadian products indefinitely. There is one American product, however, that she admits to purchasing. Her dog has been on the same diet—eating dog food from Kansas-based Hill’s Pet Nutrition—for 11 years, and she has no plans to change it. After all, pets have no say in international economic policy.