February 28 was, in case you missed it, buy Canadian day.
The event was held in tandem with an economic boycott down in the states, where multinational businesses headquarered in America like WalMart and McDonalds were boycotted.
For one day.
But with tariffs coming into force today (as I write this) there’s going to be more demand to buy Canadian.
But what qualifies as buying Canadian, anyway? Take, for instance, the case of Heinz ketchup.
A few years ago, you may remember, Heinz shut down its Canadian ketchup manufacturing plant, leading to a call for Canadians to support French’s Ketchup.
The pressure seems to have worked, and Heinz is once again manufacturing ketchup in Canada, though some have not seem to have got the news, leading to Heinz having to put out a press release saying they were indeed making Canadian ketchup.
Never mind that Heinz is co-owned by American mega-corporation Berkshire Hathaway and a Brazilian company, 3G Capital; its ketchup, at least, is Canadian.
Of course, arguments that French ketchup is more Canadian are hard to make, as French itself is owned by McCormick and Company, headquartered in Maryland, USA.
Meanwhile Primo Ketchup, which is not just made in Canada but owned by a Canadian Company is barely discussed.
(Indeed, the company is not just Canadian owned but is also co-owned by the workers who make the product.)
There’s a fourth brand of ketchup in the running, which is also manufactured by a Canadian Company. That’s President’s Choice ketchup.
It’s a Canadian made, Canadian owned ketchup: President’s Choice Ketchup. But here’s the deal. It’s owned by Loblaws.
Remember Loblaws? It was not even a year ago that many Canadian were boycotting Loblaws and its subsidiary companies (Superstore, Extra Foods, SuperValu, No Frills, T&T, Real Canadian Wholesale Club and Sobeys, just to name a few) because they were running up the prices and gouging the average Canadian?
But with an American billionaire threatening to impose penalties on Americans to punish them for buying Canadian goods (seriously, that’s how tariffs work), suddenly our Canadian-made billionaire Galen Westen, (net worth, $8.7 billion (estimated)) doesn’t seem so bad.
He didn’t have a change of heart or anything. He’s not a better person, or any less a price gouging capitalist, it’s just that, well, he’s our price gouging capitalist. As if that’s somehow better.
And here’s the tension to the whole thing. We should support local businesses. We want to support local businesses. But when the local grocery store sells bananas at $0.20 more a pound than a store in Dawson Creek? Our good intentions go out the window.
And it’s not because we’re being jerks about it. It’s just that, for a lot of us, that $0.20 cents on bananas here, and the $0.90 cents on milk there adds up to more than we can really afford.
And I’m not blaming our small businesses. Heck, I run a small business myself.
The trouble is that when you buy or create things in bulk, you really do get savings, but its hard for a small business.
Let’s take the cost of printing this paper, for example.
In order to get the paper printed, I need to pay a set-up fee. You see, unlike a laser printer, a newspaper uses what’s called an offset web press. Four metal sheets—one for each colour—are created and put on rollers. As the newspaper is run over the rollers, ink is transferred to the roller which is then transferred to the newspaper.
The cost of this is…let’s call it $500 per issue. The cost for the newspaper and ink is less than two cents per paper.
If I were to take and print one copy of the paper, the cost of it would be $500.02. If I print two copies, the cost per paper is $250.02, and so on.
If I were to print 10,000 copies, the cost per paper would effectively fall to seven cents. But there aren’t 10,000 people in town. Instead, I currently print about 750 papers at a cost of $700, which means each paper costs about $1. Add in the cost of writing and producing the paper, and it comes out to about $3.25 per paper.
Meanwhile, if you lived in Edmonton and wanted to subscribe to the Journal, it would cost $45.50 a month, or about $2.27 per issue. You would get five issues a week and they’d be much bigger than this one.
That’s the power of buying bulk. Things are cheaper in Dawson Creek because they have more people and can buy more stuff to sell to more people. Similarly, things are cheaper in Edmonton than in Dawson, in Toronto vs Edmonton.
In the same way, a small chain of grocery stores can offer lower prices than a mom and pop shop. Save-On-Foods (owned by Pattison Food Groups) can offer lower prices than the small chain. Superstore can offer even lower prices than Save-On. WalMart can offer lower prices than Superstore. And Amazon can offer lower prices than Superstore.
And the cost savings of buying bulk is just one of the hundreds of forces at work in the market that makes it cheaper and easier to buy a product produced by an American Megacorp than a locally made item.
Do we buy Coca-cola products because they’re bottled in Richmond, BC? Or do we boycott it because it’s owned by American Megacorp Berkshire Hathaway? And what do I do if I want to eat an orange? There aren’t a lot of Canadian citrus groves. And good luck buying Canadian if you need a new dishwasher.
It’s hard, and it looks like it will get harder before it gets easier, assuming you’re not a billionaire. Over the last 150 years, we’ve built a system that prioritizes price over quality, and now that system has come to bite us in the butt. Figuring out a solution will go far beyond just buying Canadian and involve a fundamental shift in how we as a country operate. Meanwhile the super rich keep getting super richer while the rest of us struggle to get by.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
