I think he’s trying to encourage the premiers to allow US brands back onto the store shelves.
If that were enough to make a deal, it wouldn’t be awful. I think a lot of Canadians wouldn’t buy the liquor if it was back on store shelves, so it might not change much.
It could be a good negotiating tactic, because the Americans might think that it meant that the revenue for US alcohol companies might start flowing again, when in reality it just puts it directly in the hands of Canadian buyers, rather than in the hands of the Premiers.
What’s more annoying to me is that Carney is going to go with counter-tariffs. That just means that if Canadians choose to buy American products they have to pay more. And, since the US is so monstrously huge, in many cases there aren’t alternatives to American products.
What I think they should be doing instead is investigating American companies for antitrust, allowing Canadians to circumvent DRM to do things like install alternative app stores to deprive Apple / Google of revenue, allow Canadians to work around printer ink restrictions to use any ink they want, allow Canadian farmers to repair their own tractors without John Deere’s approval, etc.
Instead of raising Canadians’ costs, deprive American companies of the unfair IP rules that they use to make massive profits. Those rules were forced on Canada in exchange for the US agreeing to barrier-free access to the American market for Canada. If the US is withdrawing from their own trade deals, then Canada shouldn’t feel obliged to uphold its obligations under those deals either.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
That was always a bargaining chip. It wasn’t super significant from an economic standpoint, but it’s an easy thing to remove liquor from the shelves, just a decision by Premiers. Liquor producers have way more influence in the US relative to the actual economic impact. That makes a very good bargaining chip. Don’t know why you’d be upset over Carney wanting to use that bargaining chip.
It’s a moot point now, pretty sure US booze isn’t going back on the shelves anytime soon after the collapse of trade talks.