Scott Stinson: Of course we should not put U.S. alcohol back on our shelves

A worker removes bottles of American-made Jack Daniel's whiskey from a shelf at a liquor store in Toronto after the Ontario government ordered a ban on sales of U.S. booze in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs. Photo by Christopher Katsarov Luna /Bloomberg

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Not long after Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe mused that several Canadian provinces that have blocked the sale of American alcohol products in their stores might want to reverse that policy in light of Donald Trump’s new tariff threats, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declined to take that advice.

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David Eby in British Columbia didn’t take it either, nor did any of the provincial leaders who have banned everything from Kentucky bourbon to California wine. Eby was positively Fordian in his bluster this week, saying there was “no chance in hell” he would restore those products to B.C. shelves.

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Which is good. I say this as someone who quite likes the odd bourbon, but: Long live the bourbon ban.

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There is simply no reason to cave on the prohibition of U.S. alcohol in response to Trump’s latest intransigence. It would be a show of weakness, which would only encourage the U.S. president to apply even more random pressure tactics. Trump sometimes tries to justify his tariffs for economic reasons, but he’s also threatened them over illegal migration, fentanyl, and, most recently, smoke from fires. Will he wake up tomorrow and declare that beavers or moose or Canada geese are a scourge that must be dealt with by punitive tariffs? You cannot rule it out.

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Trump is long past behaving like a rational actor on this file, among many. Extend the man an olive branch, and he’s likely to poke you in the eye with it.

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Removing alcohol bans would also earn Canada exactly zero credit with Trump when it comes to ongoing negotiations on North American free trade. Any time Canada makes any sort of concession, the president just adds it to his side of the ledger and starts looking for the next thing he can latch on to. It happened with the digital services tax and it just happened again with the Gordie Howe International Bridge, revenues for which will be temporarily shared with the United States just because Trump decided that they ought to be. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, gave away the game on this recently when he said that anything the U.S. sees as “unfair” in practice has to be surrendered without anything given back in return.

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That isn’t a negotiation. It’s a mugging.

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Ford has a tendency to govern emotionally, and it sometimes gets him in trouble. He recently blew up, for example, at opposition politicians who questioned Ontario’s wildfire-management budget, accusing them of politicizing a natural disaster, when asking questions about budgets is exactly what opposition politicians are supposed to do.

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But he is also plainly furious about Trump’s trade war, and the president’s treatment of Canada in general, in a way that only someone who feels betrayed can be. Whenever the subject of Trump and tariffs comes up in a press conference setting, Ford will reliably say how much he loves Americans personally, and how he’s like-minded with them about a lot of things, before he ends up spitting mad at the latest Trump-engineered injustice. He’ll end up muttering about that “one guy down there” that he has a problem with, so far managing to avoid making a sound bite that gets aired on Fox News and thus invites Trump’s wrath.

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Ford’s emotional register on the subject is, I think, closer to how most Canadians feel about the United States right now than most of their elected representatives.