Sand Northrup was huddled up at a friend’s home in snowy Gibsons, B.C., on Saturday night when they got word the U.S. would follow through with crushing tariffs on Canadian goods. Over a game of cribbage, they hatched plans to personally respond however they could — already sipping beer from a local Sunshine Coast brewery instead of a bottle of California red.
“It was very much like, ‘There we go. There it is. Now we’ve got to engage. What are we going to do?” said Northrup, 67, in a call from East Vancouver on Monday.
“And until this stuff changes, we’ve got to put our money where our mouths are.”
A number of Canadians who spoke to CBC News said they felt disrespected and betrayed by the threat to their economy, especially since it came from a longtime ally on trade. They are resolutely pushing back by keeping whatever personal cash they can spare away from the U.S. — from making little adjustments to grocery bills and subscriptions to cancelling travel plans and reconsidering where to apply for grad school.
They said a last-minute deal to temporarily postpone the tariffs didn’t change their minds because their sentiment is the same: Interfere with the economy after years of free trade and we’ll be taking our business elsewhere.
‘Hostile message’
Canadians have known for weeks that tariffs were on the horizon. U.S. President Donald Trump had said he would impose tariffs of 25 per cent against Canada and Mexico on his first day in office over what he described as inaction on illegal drugs and migrants entering the U.S.
He delivered instead with executive orders on Saturday, setting the stage for tariffs to come into effect just after midnight on Tuesday.
The tariffs and a likely trade war were averted, at least temporarily, after Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck a last-minute deal to postpone the tariffs until March. It was welcome news for the anxious global economy but, for many, trust in the U.S. had already been lost.
Emboldened Canadians have been swapping shopping tips on Reddit, cheering those who said they’d cancelled Netflix subscriptions or vacations to Disney World in Florida. A number said they were, if nothing else, glad to see the country seemingly united for a common cause across party lines.
Daniel Miksha, 22, was following the news closely over the weekend. Ever since the presidential election in November, he’d been reconsidering whether to apply to master’s programs at his three top schools: Harvard, Yale and Boston University.
He decided against all three — and against any other school in the United States.
“Seeing that kind of hostile message toward Canada and just the general souring of the political environment [in the U.S.] makes me think that that’s not a place I want to settle down and try to raise a family,” said Miksha, who is from Calgary and finishing his undergraduate degree at McGill University.
We asked Canadians: How concerned are you about Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods?
He applied instead to the University of British Columbia and KU Leuven in Belgium. The tariff threat solidified his choice.
“Regardless of whether these tariffs hit, this use of economic threats to scare Canadians is aggressive and unacceptable,” he said.
The alarm also ran deep for Maureen Manning, 56, as she listened to Saturday’s news with her neighbours in Nanaimo, B.C. Manning, a mother of three who had her wedding in Nevada, said her family had already been making changes even before tariffs materialized as a certainty.
They buy their produce now from a local farmer’s market on Vancouver Island and swapped their coffee for a blend from Fernwood, a roastery in Victoria. She said they’ll also be skipping their regular trip to Palm Springs, Calif., and revisiting one of her daughter’s plans to shop for a wedding dress in Seattle.
From booing the U.S. national anthem to skipping American items at the grocery store, a simmering trade war has some Canadians feeling more patriotic and less polite with their southern neighbours.
Manning says the threat of tariffs alone was a show of “flagrant disrespect” toward an ally.
“I think right down to the last minute, we were hoping for otherwise, right? That things might shift, that there might be a possibility of the United States president remembering who his country is, what his country is to Canada, and also recognizing who and what we’ve been to them. That didn’t happen,” said Manning, whose maternal grandparents were from Michigan.
“So we have no desire to go to the States right now.”
From East Vancouver, Northrup says the new grocery list runs long: Italian wine. Finnish crackers. Mexican avocados. Canadian dairy, even if it means switching from oat milk. Their vegetable club, made up of about a dozen people who buy their produce from a wholesaler, has already agreed to stop shopping in the U.S.
A spring trip to Portland was cancelled.
Something needs to be done, Northrup said, even if Canadians wish it wasn’t the case.
“To feel like you want to get back at the bully? It’s not a good feeling.”
