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.
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.
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
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%