Canadian beer is sold in cans made with aluminum from the USA

Another good reason to drink bottled beer. And a look at how Canada is reacting to this madness.

Very local beer in 355 ml cans, maybe made in Canada, maybe with Canadian Aluminum, from sheet rolled in USA that maybe crossed the border twice.

I have complained forever that beer and soft drink cans are often lined with a Bisphenol A epoxy, or that the beer can is an unsustainable tale of convenience, corporate concentration and profit.

But now there is another reason for Canadians to buy beer and soft drinks in bottles: Canada is a huge aluminum producer, but all of the can sheet comes from the USA. While some of the smaller 355 ml cans are made in Canada, all of the popular 475 ml tall boy cans are made in the USA.

The Canadian Craft Brewers Association is asking the Canadian government for protection.

“To help mitigate these challenges, CCBA has joined industry partners in requesting that U.S. aluminum can sheet, cans, and lids be excluded from Canadian countermeasures. Given that there are no active rolling mills in Canada producing aluminum can sheet, and domestic manufacturers only produce certain can sizes, any surtaxes would increase costs for Canadian brewers without viable domestic alternatives.”

I suspect there are a lot of companies in the same boat; so many industries rely on components made in the USA, and under the free trade agreements it often made sense to consolidate production. Now it’s all unravelling.

In the case of beer, there is an alternative: the returnable, reusable and refillable glass bottle uses 93% less energy than making a new container and between "47 percent and 82 percent less water than is needed to manufacture new one-way bottles for the delivery of the same amount of beverage."

Since the pandemic, bottled beer has been much harder to find. Now that Doug Ford has allowed beer to be sold in corner stores, bottles are almost extinct in Ontario. But anyone who is serious about avoiding products made in the USA should demand them.

And Canadians are very serious; some are not buying products made in Canada for US companies, and are even trying to avoid Google; The Globe and Mail writes:

Dawn O’Leary misses Diet Coke the most. Her favourite pop is among the list of American goods and services she gave up even before U.S. President Donald Trump flip-flopped on his tariff threat last week. The 71-year-old has sold her U.S. stocks and dumped Netflix. She doesn’t only buy Canadian – she also refuses to purchase any product that’s made in Canada for a U.S. company. “Unfortunately, I have to do the research for that on Google,” says Ms. O’Leary, on feeling forced to use the American search engine. “I am not happy about that.”

Nobody is. I am looking at Rebel and Hushmail to replace Gmail, and Sync for cloud storage, but search alternatives are limited.

Some industries are getting a boost from all this; I have never seen so many full-page newspaper ads promoting Canadian products and services. Everyone is hopping into the buy Canadian canoe.

Many are quitting Amazon Prime, so it is hilarious how they are trying to jump on the Buy Canadian bandwagon.

They probably couldn’t do this campaign in the USA given that it is definitely DEI, but they are trying hard up here.

Since I started writing this post, beer got more expensive as the tariff on aluminum got doubled to 50%. [This morning it is back to 25%,]. And there is no 250% anti-American Farmer tariff, as Daniel Dale explains. Not a word of this thing is true.

Forgive me for writing about this so much, but we are all rather preoccupied. Readers in the USA continue to tell me that I am over-reacting, it is all just negotiation or the phantom fentanyl. But I do not think the new Liberal leader and next Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is the over-reacting type. I will let him have the last words, from his acceptance speech Sunday night:

“I know, I know that these are dark days, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust. We are getting over the shock, but let us never forget the lessons: we have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other. We need to pull together in the tough days ahead.”

It’s too early in the morning for a beer, but when it is time it will be local. The next time I shop, it will be in glass.

I have disabled comments.