More than 90% of respondents said they are favouring Canadian products over American, while 73% were boycotting major U.S. retailers.rustamank/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Canadians have been doing a whole lot of patriotic squinting lately—scrutinizing country-of-origin labels in supermarket aisles or poring over cancellation terms on their U.S. travel reservations. Government procurement officials, in turn, are carefully surveying the nationalities of all manner of goods, from personal protective gear to fighter jets. Even some of Canada’s giant pension funds are reviewing their asset allocations, with the aim of de-risking exposure to U.S. holdings.
A March poll conducted by Montreal-based Lightspeed Commerce, which offers point-of-sale technology, found unsurprisingly that 91% of respondents were prioritizing Canadian-made goods while 73% were boycotting major U.S. retailers. “Even if U.S. tariffs are lifted,” the company said in a press release, “74% of Canadians say they’d keep supporting Canadian products, showing that the shift is more than just a temporary response to the trade war.”
Love that “elbows up” spirit, but the question is—and has long been—whether boycotts (and their twin sibling, buycotts) actually work and, if so, under what circumstances.
Generally, the academic consensus is, not really—or at least not for a sustained period. That’s mainly because people cling to brand loyalties (especially with food), lose their fervour or find they’re paying more than they wanted simply to make a point.
Still, there are lots of exceptions, as well as some quantifiable evidence of impact. In fact, boycott experts have estimated that about a third to a half of companies targeted by a boycott (or the threat of one) change their behaviour. Perhaps not coincidentally, the number of consumer boycotts has grown steadily in the past 30 years.
Scholars have sought to decode what, exactly, motivates consumers to participate in boycotts—political ideology, in-group affiliation, nationalism, even moral reasoning. There was a long period when progressive consumers and union members boycotted certain types of goods produced by firms locked in labour disputes, perhaps most famously in California in the mid- to late 1960s, in a highly publicized standoff between grape growers and a union representing migrant farm workers.
Geopolitical conflicts certainly add grit. In 2019, Korean tourists boycotted Japan in response to an escalating trade and legal conflict between the two countries. The result was substantial, with some regions seeing a 10% to 13% drop in accommodation revenues, according to a 2022 study by a Japanese-American-Korean research team.
Another bracing example: Consumers in several Muslim nations targeted Danish dairy giant Arla Foods in 2006 after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. The firm’s daily sales of US$1.5 million in those countries plunged to almost zero overnight.
Canadians, for the record, have been on both sides of the boycott narrative. In 2005, an online petition in the U.S. condemning the Newfoundland seal hunt triggered a boycott of East Coast seafood producers. The result: a $354-million drop in sales of snow crab, plus a further $270-million decline in exports of non-processed fish in the first two years of the boycott alone, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Business Research.
In 2014, Canadians switched to French's ketchup in protest after Kraft closed its Heinz ketchup plant in Leamington, Ont.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
On the flip side, there’s the story of Kraft, which faced backlash in 2014 after closing a Leamington, Ont., tomato processing plant that supplied the key ingredient in its iconic Heinz ketchup. Canadians quickly switched brands and started buying a French’s version. Kraft learned its lesson and eventually went back to making its ketchup with Canadian tomatoes at a plant in Montreal.
“That example is actually kind of interesting, because you have to search far and wide for boycotts that have worked,” says David Soberman, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “I think it’s quite instructive, given the current environment, that the one that comes to mind relates to Canadians being angry about something not being produced in Canada when it actually could have been.”
The main difference, of course, is the size of the target and the aim of the boycotters. Unlike Leamington and East Coast crab, the U.S. consumer goods space in Canada is gigantic, which means the impact of individual consumer choices—no to this cereal or those pants, and definitely taking a pass on that trip to Myrtle Beach—may be diffuse. There’s no doubt that some U.S. firms are hurting—barely a day goes by without a story about a stateside travel outfit whose Canadian customers vanished—but it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump’s bellicose administration will respond in the way Kraft did.
Rather, a more relevant question is whether Canadian boycotts of all things American generate unintended consequences, such as consumers turning away from products that are mainly or entirely made here but owned by U.S. firms. “We can think about Frito-Lay’s potato chips,” says economist Pascal Thériault, director of McGill University’s farm management and technology program. “By boycotting that American company that’s processing Canadian inputs in Canada, with Canadian workers, you end up hurting your own economy.”
He adds that food processing, which is a huge industry in Canada, functions a bit like the auto sector, with elements of the final product going back and forth across the border. Canadian beef is a good example: Alberta-born calves may cross the border for testing, then come back to Canada to be fattened, then shipped again to the U.S. for slaughter. The grain, in turn, comes from both sides of the 49th. “Is it American or Canadian beef in the end?” Thériault asks. “It’s extremely complicated to decide.”
Soberman also points to the balancing act that comes with choosing to buy Canadian. On one hand, that decision supports domestic jobs. But consumers shouldn’t get carried away and boycott all foreign products, he argues. “I don’t understand why we should be boycotting or moving away from Mexican, Japanese, French, British or Italian goods because Donald Trump puts tariffs on our products,” Soberman says. “The best way you help Canada is not just by buying Canadian, but by diversifying our economy such that we have strong trading relationships with others. If the U.S. becomes undependable, we basically have friends to fall back on.”
The calculus only becomes more complicated the deeper you dig. For example, if you shift from a cheaper U.S. brand to a pricier Canadian one in response to Trump’s infuriating “51st state” rhetoric, you may also be insulating yourself from additional costs when Canada responds with reciprocal tariffs on those once inexpensive U.S. products.
A further wrinkle has to do with high-profile signalling by political figures—premiers yanking Yankee booze off liquor-store shelves or mayors barring municipal employees from using Uber or Lyft for work journeys, as Toronto’s Olivia Chow announced in mid-March, furthering a new City of Toronto tariff policy that will prevent U.S. firms from bidding on contracts under $353,300 for goods and services, and $8.8 million for construction.
Such moves seem, well, boycott-adjacent, and they do make headlines. But Soberman notes that governments, here and abroad, have long relied on purchasing rules that seek to ensure that foreign bidders hire domestic partners or employ Canadians as a qualifying condition. Lockheed Martin, the U.S. defence giant that is supposed to deliver 88 F-35 jets to the Canadian Forces, acknowledged as much when it hastily offered to sweeten the pot with more local jobs to forestall the loss of the latter phases of its $19-billion deal with Ottawa.
For the moment, none of this seems to be abating; if anything, the Canadian boycott of U.S. goods may be consolidating. Thériault points to announcements by all three Canadian supermarket chains that they’ll put out signs indicating Canadian products. “Sometimes having an oligopoly in the food retail sector has its benefits,” he muses. “None of the three wants to be the one that will not identify its Canadian products, right? So that becomes a movement that touches everyone and all the food retailers.”
Ultimately, those retailers will still sell imported products. But instead of going the boycott route, it’s about promoting Canadian products. “That is a much more positive approach that consumers will buy into,” Thériault adds, “as long as they understand what they’re buying into.”
Ed White/Reuters