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Chris Selley: On Canada-U.S. trade negotiations, what are we even doing?

What if we had let consumers boycott American booze, like they have travel, instead of doing it by government decree?

Here’s something we haven’t heard much about in Central Canada: Sales and therefore imports of American alcoholic beverages in Alberta and especially Saskatchewan, the heretic provinces that don’t maintain outright bans on Yankee liquor, have declined considerably.

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Government data on liquor imports compiled by Carleton University political management professor Jennifer Robson, published this week, suggest sales in Saskatchewan might be down by two-thirds, and by roughly one-quarter in Alberta. In Alberta, according to reported figures from Alberta Liquor, Gaming & Cannabis (which owns the province’s monopoly liquor wholesaler), the biggest drops in U.S. imports from 2023 to 2025 were in wine (down 42 per cent) and beer (down 92 per cent).

Chris Selley: On Canada-U.S. trade negotiations, what are we even doing? Back to video

This is relevant, surely, when you consider the downsides of the outright bans in the other provinces — which is something many of the bans’ most passionate proponents never really did.

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