Avoiding US goods and services – from tech to whisky to air travel – has forced many to find a new way of living
This week the US imposed 50% tariffs on US$20bn (£15bn) of Canadian goods, and Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, has vowed to match them “dollar for dollar” after the collapse of trade talks between the two countries last weekend. Donald Trump retaliated on Thursday by ordering the federal government to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.
Such actions have added fuel to a widespread boycott of US products and services by Canadians that began early last year in response to the president’s trade war and threats to annex his northern neighbour.
More than 3,500 people from across Canada shared with the Guardian via an online callout how they have made changes to their lives in response to the US administration’s political and economic stance. Many expressed deep anger and sadness, but remained resolute that this was now a new way of living.
Nobody really cares about 10,000 people boycotting anything… 😆
“I think you need to be in Canada to understand how deep the animosity to the US is”
I too have deep animosity for the US, and I live here
You are free to leave.
If there is one thing US citizens and non-US citizens can agree upon, it’s that the US can fuck right off.
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For anyone interested about companies that have made massive strides since the tariffs:
alt for google : proton (switzerland)
alt browser: vivaldi (norway/germany)
alt search engine : qwant (france) ecosia (germany)
alt for note taking : joplin(england)
alt for win : lunix. (global) -free
alt for mfp: kazio (new zealand)
alt for fitbit : polar (finland)
alt for phones : fairphone (netherlands /china)
alt for github : codeberg (germany)
alt for amazon : shop app (shopify canada)
alt for music : deezer (france)
for books : kobo (canada)
alt for ms office : libreoffice (germany) free
alt card wallet : catima
alt for cloud: nord(lithuania)
alt for streaming : make a jellyfin server - free (throw it on ubuntu (england) start hosting your own stuff local). i suppose also plex but that is a californian company.
alt to paypal : klarna (europe) - that said we still do need more ecommerce to be supportive of alternatives for this and card wallets other than google pay. this is really lagging behind.
Man, fuck Shopify. Tobin is a shitsmear of a human.
If you look at all the current e-commerce alternatives : they are all dirt to dirt. shop just doesnt happen to be american dirt if you’re attempting the route of voting with the wallet.
unless you have a good alternative. i’ll wait for you to post it to help others find better options.
No you’re right. I’m being totally serious when I say we can’t swap platforms each time a CEO comes out as a fascist. It’s just too troublesome because we could be doing actual good instead of looking for another obscure platform that doesn’t quite meet our needs.
I’m just lucky because I’m in Japan and I have some more alternatives, but even something like Rakuten is probably not 100% fascism-free (iirc, their mobile segment has a contract with Starlink).
yeah it seems no matter what they are all in bed with eachother. it’s a real thin plank we walk here. i am just hopeful we see more alternatives spring up that throw this power ball off it’s tracks or another election settles it a bit easier for more alternatives.
hopefully Canada can get closer ties to europe (who i understand are not perfect either) but as far as sustainable survival would likely be a more comfortable fit.
Another one? Do we mass produce these assholes for some reason? Because I feel that somewhere along the production line there is fat to trim.
I think it’s just really hard to be a big tech CEO unless you’re willing to shit down many people’s throats.
I hope the boycott doesn’t stop even after if ever the regime changes. US will stay the same, what happened today can happen tomorrow.
If it’s american I dick it lick it ship it.
I’m guessing a large percentage of the upvotes are from Americans.
That is what I am doing for the past 2 years. Managed to completly remove Apple, all my media content is torrented, free. Just can’t remove Google and Microsoft (at work).
As an American, I’m right there with you Canada. I’ve been giving your country all my tourism money for the past 2 years since the orange dipshit became president again. You deserve it more than this shitty country does.
MS Windows and MS Office is also “made in USA”.
Boycotting things you’ve already purchased like alcohol and software doesn’t do anything
Alcoholics love this one simple trick.
So are iPhones, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
Canadians only seem willing to boycott farmers not the powerful men that have Trumps ear and put him in power to enact their will.
America has already completed a near 100% digital conquest of Canada with near zero resistance. No wonder they are surprised that there is pushback about “51st state”
Aren’t most farmers voting for team red? It’s easier to change whose produce I buy this weekend than it is to change my phone’s OS.
I have quit reddit, Instagram, Dropbox, and dropped down to a free tier of Google since the boycotts began though. It’s a work in progress to be rid of all commercial us tech.
iPhones are only designed in USA, 0 actual production.
Software (app store), significant portion made in usa.
Also more important: significant portion of the money goes to USA excelutives.
I types this on a google phone, I’m in the same boat.
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For me a major concern was American surveillance and law enforcement backdoors. A country with no concern for international law or human rights should not have that kind of supranational power. I’d feel safer with Chinese electronics in all honesty.
Here’s some alternatives I’ve been using:
-Routers: Mikrotik, Latvian company, mostly made in Eastern Europe
-Cloud Storage: Tresorit, owned by Swiss Post
-VPS: Ovhcloud, French company with its North American Datacenter in Canada
-Linux: Anything but Fedora which is owned by IBM. Using it contributes to their RnD for their Redhat corporate services and distros.
-DNS: Quad9. Switzerland based non profit. Don’t give Cloudflare your precious traffic data.
-Dropped every single US owned social media and subscription service.
Still working on migrating my email and search off Microsoft and Google. Going to drop Android and Steam at the first viable opportunity.
Credit Cards and Youtube are literally the only two that are unviable to switch from… for now.
A country with no concern for international law or human rights should not have that kind of supranational power. I’d feel safer with Chinese electronics in all honesty.
This describes both the Americans and the Chinese. But I guess you can pick the lesser threat based on your circumstances. The Chinese have been far more aggressive in my region so if I’m forces to choose, well the choice is clear.
As a rule of thumb, you want to give the least of your personal information to the country that will violate your country’s independence. Its a rational choice.
European here. Avoiding American stuff wherever possible since a while.
Sneakers, clothing, Linux rather than Windows, tech, ketchup and so forth.
Not sure what the impact will be, if any, but hopefully it will help a bit somehow.
It’s more than that for me. Many products I bring into Canada from Europe come into the country via a warehouse or subsidiary in the US before landing in Canada.
I’ve stopped importing their products even though they’re not American.
I want to source their products direct or work with them to build out distribution here in Canada.
We need to change the worldview that America is the centre piece. Their fascists and what we’re seeing is a symptom of what America really is. Boycott them.
I hope very much that the world can take this orange opportunity to really destroy the notion of American exceptionalism through independence and cooperation. I truly believe having it as a founding cornerstone of our national identity is at the heart of most of our problems.
Yeah, I’m annoyed at a lot of transformed food products saying “made in Canada from imported produce”. Basically American diarrhea spreaders. Ain’t buying food that will kill us.
I’ve successfully cut the use of nearly every American product or service since last year. Genuinely worth it and enriches your life. You just realize how enshitified everything is.
I don’t think the American public has understood how these are permanent lifestyle changes. Any trade agreement, getting alcohol back on the shelves, will make these people change that. Tourists are gone. People will not cross the border with the risk of being sent to concentration camps in chains over minor bullshit.
Yup. I want a Canadian branded phone. I’m looking at a Motorola phone. I’ve heard they have a version coming out with grapheneOS that’s open sourced and was started by a Canadian.
Right now, I’m still stuck with a lot of US tech that I’m chained to. I’m looking to unchain that tech, but those are harder to come by.
I do have a smart watch though. It’s called UNA Watch. It’s the first user repairable / replaceable modular watch and it’s designed and produced (I believe) in house in Scotland. It’s still early development, but I’m hopeful it’ll help unshackle more US tech off my body.
i have a polar watch (finland) i notice that any of these alternatives are taking a lot of strides the moment they get support.
will check out this UNA too!
Motorola/Lenovo gets a close to pass for me for being a Chinese/American conglomerate. Lenovo is preferable to HP or Dell in my eyes. Especially because of BDS.
For phones I buy from Nothing/CMF. British company, made mostly in China and India I believe. I suspect they might drop a Graphene compatible device sometime. It seems to fit their brand.
Thanks for the watch recommendation. Ill look that up!
There’s also Fairphone, which I think is Dutch
Tourists are gone. People will not cross the border with the risk of being sent to concentration camps in chains over minor bullshit.
Conceptually and culturally I agree that this should be happening, but for reasons I can’t understand, the numbers and data hardly show a drop.
Are you sure about that? Every metric I’ve seen show considerable reductions and returning growth is relatively minuscule.
A 25% drop is quite catastrophic for an entire sector like tourism.
https://fortune.com/article/how-are-canadians-snubbing-us-travel-tariffs-tourism/
There are select articles you can find like this, especially about Las Vegas specifically, but I find them to be unconvincing clickbait. The FIFA World Cup and the upcoming Olympics were and are projected to still be packed full of visitors. It’s very disheartening. It seems to me like most people still take the “yeah but it won’t happen to me” attitude toward the stupid fascist thugs.
I think you’re both correct - Canadian tourism is down dramatically, but overall tourism is, inexplicably, holding or recovering. All the figures I can find for tourism show that thus far 2026 is on track to meet the projected ~6% recovery vs 2025. It makes sense I guess - for example, fucking Dubai is still a major tourist destination.
Would make sense, if there’s a decline, prices will drop and attract new people from elsewhere.
Data shows something like a 30% drop in Canadian visits to the US, which is wild when you consider that ‘visits’ number includes things like work crossings for those who work across the border.
CBC has done a whole bunch of articles looking at CBSA stats.
Yeeep. Unfortunately, Lemmy is tiny and really doesn’t have a diverse collection of viewpoints - what we do here just can’t be taken as an indication of broad cultural trends. Everyone talking about permanent lifestyle changes and similar in response to this are totally correct about themselves, but if history has shown us anything it’s that People will stop caring as soon as it’s out of the news cycle. There hasn’t been any big news about deportations or similar, and as a result tourism is slowly climbing back up. Hell, the World Cup in the US was the most attended world cup in history - iirc by almost +50%
I find it very weird that trade between Canada and Europe is going through USA.
Isn’t it possible to have more efficient shipping route to Canada than USA?It’s really not weird at all. It’s the same in EU. If I order something from another continent. Chances are pretty high it’s going to go through Germany before making its way up here to Sweden.
Canada is 40 million to the US 350. So it makes more sense to have things go through the country where your biggest market is, and have it distributed out from there.
Ofc I’m just speaking very broadly. There’s a difference if you import directly yourself, or if they’re going through a Canadian vendor
youre channelling through a large country who are shackled to their own country’s stuff. it isnt going to get the acknowledgement you think it will get there. US are simply benefitting from being invoved in the supply chain without having to be a trade partner.
youre channelling through a large country who are shackled to their own country’s stuff. it isnt going to get the acknowledgement you think it will get there.
I have genuinly no idea what you’re trying to say.
Canadian companies are more than welcome to set up their own distribution channels and not route it through the US. Nothing is stopping them.
No in Europe most goes through Netherlands because it’s the best geographical placement. Especially for Germany that is the biggest market of a single country.
It doesn’t go to Norway which is further away, or Spain which is also further away. It is going the most practical route which is often through the Netherlands.Seem to me that goods going between Canada and Europe going over USA is sending it on a detour, that makes the shipping route longer. Having it go over USA first is like having it go over Mexico, except less extreme.
It depends on what it is you’re buying and how it’s getting there. If I’m ordering something from China. I’m not gonna get it shipped. Because that will take ages. It’ll go on a transport plane. And every single time I’ve ordered things, they’ve been flown to Germany first.
Items being shipped between Europe and NA is not going on a detour to land in the US. Especially not if it’s imported by a vendor. The vendor will pick the cheapest option. And trucking through Canadian wilderness isn’t it.
It depends on how exactly they’re doing it.
If the shipments are treated as “bonded shipments” in the US (meaning that they’re in the US only in transit to a final destination outside the US - which in this case is Canada), then they’re not considered as imported into the US and are instead treated as as imported directly into Canada, even though they travel to the US on their way to Canada. In this case it can make sense to import large consignments to, for example, a single port in the US by ship as one or more full shipping container loads and un-bundle it there into two parts, one that’s officially imported into the US and another which is a bonded shipment which travels by road to Canada and which is officially imported into Canada (so, for example, US-Canada tariffs have no bearing in that)
On the other hand, officially importing something into the US to then afterwards officially export from the US and importing into Canada wouldn’t really make sense IMHO because it would possibly pay Duty on entering the US and then again on entering Canada. I mean, maybe they did it like this because NAFTA meant there was no Duty from the US to Canada for such products, but as things stand now it’s a risky setup if not already a problem.
The vast majority of canada’s population lives within 100km of the border, so if you already have logistics centres close-ish to the border, it may be cheaper to do so through your existing infra
But if the shipping is more efficient to Canada, shouldn’t it go to USA over Canada instead, using the same infrastructure to distribute it further?
On eBay I bought my son a Pokemon game that was in HK. Consider me surprised when I had to pay duties for it to come from America to Canada. Paid an additional 15$. Why could it not ship direct to Canada? Lord knows.
It has to do with rail connections and port capacities. If stuff comes in by ports, even air freight, rail hubs in the Eastern US are more central.
Otherwise it has to come into the port of Montreal, inland ports beyond the Seaway don’t accommodate every ship size and are lower volume.
In Ontario, I believe it’ll be more likely for products to come into Canada through both Montreal and Eastern US ports. Whereas in Quebec it’s usually not the case. New York and Montreal are similar distances to Toronto by rail.
It’s probably something you have to consider via carriers.
I thought this was already being done almost from the onset of the current U.S. regime?
People aren’t going back and forth on this decision. It’s definitely something that needs to be done and they need to stick to it. Build up your own infrastructure before it’s too late.
AFAIK they been doing it for a better part of two years ever since Trump proposed the annexation of Canada.
The article is new, the behavior isn’t.
I am hoping to hear from a real Canadian if this a common thing among Canadians or is it just a handful of people?
Canadian from Quebec here - everyone in my family and friends and every co-workers i have is trying to avoid Americans products, vacations, cars, etc as much as possible, every day.
It’s not even a spite thing, not anymore at least - it’s just a new habit we’re collectively developing.
Tod Maffin has been an amazing and hilarious voice for months through all this…
I’ve been happy to see so many “aliment Quebec” lables.
Canadian here. Everyone I know is trying to avoid American products when we can. My parents switched from orange juice to apple juice for breakfast. People buy produce from Mexico to avoid American, enough that supermarkets try harder at sourcing outside the US wherever possible.
Dude, the American imported oranges have been going moldy on the grocery store shelves since Biden left office.
People will go hungry before they buy fascist.
Adding my Canadian voice to the pile: it’s very real and common. It’s common enough that our biggest grocery chain has updated their labelling to be much clearer on the source of products
Québécois who did his groceries earlier today, here - 100% agree. Without going back to check I can tell you I intentionally didn’t buy grapes (“product of the United States”) but i did buy iceberg lettuce (from Quebec, incidentally for 1$) and red bell peppers (product of Canada). I bought onions (from Canada) but no berries (they were all from the US). Bought some “CARBS” sourdough crackers, too, Companys right here in Quebec!!
The grocery stores near me have big signs with Canadian flags on, marking some shelves as all Canadian. They wouldn’t bother if they didn’t think it would help sales.
The big grocery store chains have also been caught profusely maple-washing. Best to avoid Loblaws/Sobeys/etc even if they are big Canadian companies. Try to go to independent markets if possible.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/sobeys-loblaw-maple-washing-9.7196767
It’s a common topic of conversation in the grocery store aisles and in the coffee shops.
Nobody is happy about how Trump’s America is trying to fuck over our country.
I don’t think the USA would be bitching and moaning about Canadian tourists no longer visiting their shithole or Canadians not buying their alcohol if it were just a handful of people taking part in the boycott.
Crown Royal seems to have recently been doing a big advert push in the US. Bold choice, especially assuming no exception to the tariffs. But ya know, they might be “unenforceable” retroactively and give businesses another huge refund.
I don’t blame anyone for avoiding this place. It blows my mind how comfortable people from the US are leaving for vacation and having to deal with coming back in. It’s been proven it doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or not.
Pretty much everyone I know avoids any American products at the grocery store, and I know a few people that have switched off products they like to Canadian alternatives (like ketchup, cheese, etc). My family bought Heinz our whole lives and now we’ve swapped to French’s, which we’ve found we like better so we won’t be switching back anyways. I think one of the biggest things is losing a lot of long time customers and brand loyalty.
Only reason I didn’t start boycotting Heinz ketchup was because I already was after they closed that Canadian plant some years ago. And you’re right, French’s isn’t even a step down and I’m disappointed at businesses/events that have Heinz condiments.
Hell, I’ve been getting a budget brand ketchup since I can’t find French’s with the older style nozzle (and hate the newer ones that need enough force that it’s too easy to squirt way too much) and even that isn’t bad.
And I think that’s going to be a huge lasting impact. All the marketing time and dollars spent building underserved reputations for mediocre brands is going down the drain as Canadians realize they lose nothing by ignoring US brands. And sometimes the lesser known ones are better because the big brands were enshitified and bet it all on name recognition.
It’s not just the tariffs and other bullshit.
I can’t trust American products to be safe.
This is starting to become pretty widespread. My local grocery and liquor stores don’t carry any US products, and i don’t miss them at all.
There’s gotta be some people who don’t give a shit but I haven’t really met any. I don’t know anyone who’s taken a trip to the US during this admin and many who’ve cancelled trips. Even my elderly mom is using apps to avoid American products. It’s definitely not just the typical folks you’d expect to be calling for boycotts.
Thanks a lot everyone for your answers, you give me hope that this orange guy is not going to get away with everything he does
You should believe it because politicians in the affected states are whining about it.
They’re whining to us instead of to the orange shit king. But that’s a different problem.
Canadian in Ontario, only if there is no alternative will I buy American.
and only if I actually need whatever it is
otherwise I’ll just do without
If it something i really cant do without, I at least to try to find it from a blue state
it’s common enough among everyone I know. probably at least 15% that actively avoid US products and another 15% that passively avoid them.
edit: I do know a good number of people who just shake their head at the US and haven’t made their actual behaviours known. but I also know a few people who have cut out american products as much as possible, including altering their diets and what services they use. it’s not just “oh I’ll buy the Canadian version” — it’s “oh, it’s american, nevermind I’ll just find/do something else”
This in is the dictionary under unforced error.
