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“Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies, they are our allies.”
— former U.S. president Ronald Reagan
Trade wars are not solely fought between nations. Sometimes, they can arise within a nation, demonstrating that no single country on earth has a monopoly on stupidity.
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The Macro
The Liquor Control Board of Ontario store in Picton — my new home in southeastern Ontario — is, by any reasonable measurement, oversized.
Picton has but 5,000 permanent residents. However, in the summer months, the community swells with affluent cottagers from southern Ontario who flock to Prince Edward County for the food, the wine, the craft beer and the epic waterfront vistas.
So why is it, now that I live in a wine-producing region in the most populous province in the country, I have such a pathetic selection of wines to choose from?
Although there are rows upon rows of Ontario wines in clear view, on a recent visit to my local LCBO I was unable to find a single bottle of B.C. wine. I went to the LCBO in nearby Wellington and was told there was only one bottle in the entire store. Even in larger centres like Belleville, there is a nearly endless supply of Ontario wine but little from the rest of Canada.
I thought this might have to do more with the fact that we’re located very close to a wine-producing region. A fairly thorough check of the LCBO website revealed there were only 21 bottles of B.C. wine available through its outlets. OK, the number is really only 20 because I refuse to count the Maan Farms Mad Pumpkin Spice Flavoured Fruit Wine as real wine.
Ontario’s strategy is not just depressing for B.C. wine snobs, it also provides an interesting insight into the psychology of trade wars and why nobody wins when tariffs and other restrictions are put in place to punish a trading partner.
No one should fault Ontario or its bombastic Premier Doug Ford for looking at the raging trade war with the United States as an opportunity to promote Ontario wine. Just as Manitoba did, Ontario pulled all U.S. alcohol off its shelves after U.S. President Donald Trump began hammering Canada with punitive tariffs. Although smaller provinces may not provide much in the way of bother for the Trump administration, the LCBO’s decision to drop American products has had a huge impact.
A sign posted on a wine shelves at an LCBO in Toronto in March. (Jill Colvin / The Associated Press files)
As many of you may have heard, the LCBO is the single largest purchaser of alcohol in the world — and when it decides to stop buying American, producers can feel the pinch. According to recent industry reports, American distillers and vintners are expected to lose billions of dollars this year in lost sales to Canada and to other nations similarly hammered by Trump tariffs.
OK, but wouldn’t Ontario show a little “Elbows Up” love and provide a little extra shelf space to B.C. vintners? It appears that old, protectionist habits die hard.
A wine writer and connoisseur named Rick VanSickle, who operates a website devoted to Niagara wines, recently lamented, the internal trade barriers that continue to exist in Canada. Following a recent wine-tasting trip to B.C., VanSickle noted that he could find nary a bottle of Ontario wine on the shelves of B.C. wine stores. He also noted that the very same situation exists in Ontario, where B.C. wine is hard to come by. “It’s striking to me, that even with the Elbows Up movement for all things Canadian over everything else, that provincial biases still exist,” VanSickle wrote.
Those provincial biases are playing out on a number of different fronts as the provinces wage war with each other to convince Ottawa to drop or apply tariffs to aid the industries in their provinces most damaged by the Trump tariffs.
Western provinces, including Manitoba, want Prime Minister Mark Carney to drop the 100 per cent tariff on Chinese-made EVs in order to get China to remove a punishing tariff on Canadian canola. Ford has said lifting the EV tariff would crater Ontario’s besieged auto industry.
And let’s not forget Ford’s battle with global alcohol giant Diageo, which has threatened to close a Royal Crown rye whisky bottling facility in Amherstburg, Ont., and move it south of the border. In September, Ford infamously dumped an entire bottle of Crown Royal in front of a podium to demonstrate his displeasure and has more recently threatened to pull the iconic Canadian rye off LCBO shelves should Diageo follow through with its plans to close the bottling facility.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford empties a bottle of Crown Royal at a news conference in September. (Sammy Kogan / The Canadian Press files)
Forget that, as the company noted, Crown Royal will continue to be mashed, distilled and aged in Canada in a number of facilities including its flagship operation in Gimli, Manitoba. Ford will get his elbows up, but not to protect Canada. Only Ontario.
And isn’t that the worst part of trade wars? The fact that blatant, unbridled self-interest will always trump (pun intended) the collective good.
We wish Carney the best of luck with this one.
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