Lessons from the past about how to deal with American tariffs

This would be a good time to buy Canadian, electrify everything, get off American gas and oil, and reduce our carbon emissions.

Buying Canadian will help keep Canadians beavering away.

I wrote this for Monday but I couldn’t wait to make it live.

So the President of the USA has ordered up a 25% tariff on most goods imported from Canada, suggesting that they don’t need anything that Canada makes. This will raise prices in the USA, hurting American citizens, and it will destroy demand for Canadian products, hurting Canadian citizens. It is likely that the Canadian Loonie will sink and unemployment will rise, causing economic hardship across the country.

However, it is also an opportunity to remake Canada with less reliance on American goods and services, to electrify everything, and to reduce our carbon emissions.

The British pitched in and bought Canadian.

Canadians have faced crises like these before, notably in the two World Wars, where citizens were exhorted to cut back on consumption to leave resources for the war effort. I have been collecting posters from the periods for years because they are all attributes of a low-carbon, 1.5-degree lifestyle; this post is illustrated with Canadian and British posters and one from the USA.

Kelly’s patriotic shopping this week

I have already written about how we should be eating a Patriotic Canadian Diet and avoiding any American food products, and I have asked my wife Kelly Rossiter, who used to write about food for the long-dead Discovery website Planet Green, to start up here again, showing people how to cook Canadian seasonal vegetables like celeriac, parsnips and beets. I may even have to develop a taste for cabbage rolls.

Reduce Waste and think about Sufficiency

Vegetables form 30% and fruits 15% of Canadian household food waste, and most of those come from the USA. According to Made in Ca, “Every day in Canada, about 1.3 million tomatoes, 1.3 million apples, 2.6 million potatoes, 650,000 loaves of bread, 640,000 bananas, one million cups of milk, 470,000 eggs, and 130,000 lettuce heads are wasted.” Wasting less means buying less and importing less.

Many of the posters promote sufficiency: reduce waste and don’t buy things you don’t need. Incomes may drop, and we have to be prepared for recession, so it is a good time to avoid that pet elephant.

Canadian food alternatives

Many Canadians have hopped on the Patriotic Canadian Diet, looking for brands of prepared foods that are made or primarily made in Canada, preferably by Canadian companies. My friend Lisa posted these alternatives.

It’s a long list! A lot of these alternatives are from President’s Choice or No-Name, which are Loblaw/Weston products that we have been boycotting since the pandemic when they were profiteering and exploiting their workers. But given the circumstances, they are probably now the lesser of two evils.

Kelly might say that half of these food products could be made at home (salad dressing? Eggos?) and others (soft drinks? Frozen prepared meals?) should be avoided altogether. It’s a good time to consider a healthier diet and making more food from scratch; then you are not giving your money to either American companies or Galen Weston Jr.

I also found this website, Made in CA, which has extensive lists of product alternatives. However, it appears to have been built during the last round of tariff threats in 2018, and I am not certain that it is up to date.

Is this trip really necessary?

It’s an American poster, but the sentiment is Canadian right now, with many people cancelling trips to the USA.

As Rob Carrick noted in the Globe and Mail,

Travelling in Canada instead of the U.S. right now saves you about 40 cents per dollar spent. That’s more or less the foreign exchange cost right now for Canadians paying for things priced in U.S. dollars, and it could get worse if tariffs have the expected impact on our economy.

We lack warm-weather destinations in winter, so how about Mexico, Costa Rica or Guatemala? The Canadian dollar has increased in value by about 12.5 per cent against the Mexican peso in the past 12 months. Against the euro, our dollar has declined only about 2 per cent in the past year.

Travelling in Canada saves you money on foreign exchange, and it helps support our economy in trying times. The thing about tariffs is that they have a way of tainting everything they touch in an economic sense.

Don’t fill your tank with American gas; walk or get a bike

Surprisingly, given that Canada is a net oil exporter, the country imports about 478,000 barrels per day of refined petroleum products from the USA. About half of it is condensates that go to Alberta to mix with the bitumen from the tar sands so that it will flow through pipes and then get shipped back to the USA. The other half goes to the eastern provinces of Canada because there is no pipeline from the west, so we fill our cars with American gasoline.

If “Captain Canada,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, really wanted to stand up to the USA, instead of banning bourbon, he would promote cycling and active transportation like they did in Denmark to fight the Arab oil embargo in the seventies. Instead, he is ripping up Toronto’s bike lanes. Perhaps, given the circumstances, he might reconsider.

Get off American methane, use clean, low-carbon Canadian electricity, and get a Patriotic Heat Pump.

76% of the “natural” gas burned in Ontario comes from the USA, primarily from Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, we are an electricity powerhouse, with a bigger powerhouse next door in Québec. Now, we have a heat pump revolution and don’t have to heat with gas; it’s time to ban new gas hookups and encourage removing existing ones. There has been much talk about how “heat pump” is a lousy name; perhaps in Canada, they should be rebranded as “Energy Independence Machines.”

Doug Ford should stop pandering to his Enbridge Gas buddies and move everyone to Ontario hydro and nuclear electricity. We have wind; we have water, we have CANDU nuclear technology, and we even have a pipe from Alberta that now delivers a quarter of our gas; after heatpumpification, that might be all we need.

Start planning for Spring

You can grow a lot of food in a small backyard. You can also do it in commercial spaces; I recently learned about an edible garden planted in front of the Dejardins office building near Yonge and St. Clair in Toronto. According to Shiri Rosenberg of Colliers Real Estate, quoted in the Toronto Star,

Photo: Colliers

“It’s about making thoughtful choices. Commercial spaces account for a meaningful amount of land in our city ... we have an opportunity to manage these spaces in ways that enhance the real estate, benefit our communities, and support the environment. We can make choices that do all three.”

Add a fourth reason: fighting the tariffs. More posters:

When the crop is done:

More Mass Timber

The poster shows Canadians attacking with rivet guns and trowels, but we’ve got lots of wood, probably more than we know what to do with, as Trump’s tariffs will kill our timber exports.

Let’s put our sawmill hands to work and make wood frame and Canadian mass timber our materials of choice. Let's take our troubled pulp plants and convert them to wood fibre insulation as TimberHP did in Maine. Let’s solve our housing crisis by building lots of affordable wooden multifamily housing in walkable communities.

Let’s build to the Canadian Harold Orr-inspired Passivhaus standard to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Dress Canadian

Forget fast fashion and go retro. Dig out the old Kenora Dinner Jacket and dress like a modest Canadian in Roots, Lululemon or Canada Goose.

Albert Einstein purportedly said, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” As Canadians, we can wean ourselves off American energy, food, goods and services. We can electrify everything with heat pumps, trains, electric cars and e-bikes. We can put our wood to work. We can adopt lifestyles that are more Scandinavian than American. Pour yourself a shot of good Canadian whiskey and think about it.