craigmcn

Survey after survey has Canadians naming the cost of food, gas and cell phone bills as their biggest financial frustration, and yet this week a lot of us cheered on a policy explicitly built to push some of those same costs upward. That’s not hypocrisy exactly, it’s more that two feelings, patriotism and household math, got bundled together in the public mood and nobody bothered to check whether they actually belonged in the same basket.

The bundling happens because buy Canadian sentiment and tariff policy feel like they’re pulling in the same direction, but they’re different levers doing different jobs. A tariff on American goods raises the price of the American thing. It does not, on its own, cause a Canadian alternative to appear on the shelf next to it. If no domestic equivalent exists, and for a lot of specialty goods and components none does, the tariff just makes the only option more expensive with nothing to switch to.

This is where the warm feeling runs out of road, at the actual shelf, in front of the actual price tag, where the flag on the packaging doesn’t change what’s available. A contractor buying American-sourced hardware, a grocer stocking a product with no Canadian-grown substitute, a household replacing an appliance part, none of them get the satisfaction of a patriotic swap. They get a bigger bill and the same options they had before the tariff took effect.

I’m not arguing against the tariffs, and I’m not arguing against buying Canadian when a real alternative exists, both can be reasonable choices on their own terms. I’m arguing against letting the good feeling of one stand in for the economics of the other, because only one of them shows up on the receipt, and pretending otherwise is how we end up surprised by our own policy.