From ketchup to shoes, buying Canadian is harder than it sounds

A boycott is an effective way of targeting an individual business about a specific practice that you want it to stop.

But the bigger and less defined the action becomes — like the recent call to “buy Canadian” as a retaliation for Donald Trump’s tariffs on our aluminum and steel — the harder it is to make it work.

Let’s talk shoes.

“What is Canadian made? I don’t know any more,” said Ben Nightingale, owner of Shoes 22 in Kitchener’s Stanley Park Mall.

This area, particularly Cambridge, “was the shoe capital of Canada” at one time, he said as he rattled off local makers from the past: Savage, Kaufman, Hush Puppies, Kodiak.

Decades ago, “I used to go to Cambridge to get Florsheims from the factory,” he said.

“Back then I paid $90 for them. Today, made in India, it’s the same price.”

And that’s part of the reason that today there is almost no Canadian shoe industry.

Thanks to global trade, shoes are like almost everything else you can buy — unlikely to have been made in Canada.

Manufactured goods often present a mishmash of origins. Nightingale showed me a sandal made in Israel. But the leather upper part came from Italy, the orthopedic inserts were from Austria, and the sole was made in Spain.

For many manufactured goods, wages are lower in other parts of the world, like China, Southeast Asia and Mexico, so they’re made overseas and we get them cheap.

Nightingale wonders why some of us are even boycotting the United States anyway.

His smartphone was made in China.

“China has a terrible human rights record,” he said. “Why are we not boycotting that?”

It’s a good question. Why does some bad behaviour galvanize us to act and others leaves us immobile?

We can choose to travel in Canada for vacation instead of the U.S., if it makes us feel better.

But we’re too small a market to make a serious difference. Our economies are so intertwined that anything that hurts one country, hurts the other.

Food is not much simpler. At a nearby grocery store, it’s easy to tell which fruits and vegetables are from Canada and the States, because they’re labelled by country of origin.

But the other groceries — packaged foods, dairy and meat — are a mystery.

And a quick and unscientific survey of shoppers in a grocery store shows they either haven’t heard of the boycott or they can’t wrap their heads around what to do about it.

Food packaging is complicated.

Remember the ketchup wars? When Heinz moved its operations out of Leamington in 2016, people were angry.

French’s ketchup had a little over three per cent of market share. It more than doubled that share by telling Canadian consumers it would use Leamington tomatoes, processed by the company that took over the Leamington plant.

But now French’s is owned by an American company.

What’s a politically-minded consumer to do?