The next time you find yourself despairing over the dystopian hellscape that is life in the Trump 2.0 era, cling to this: Donald Trump may have given Canada’s sustainability movement a major shot in the arm. 

With his odious domestic policies, his support of genocidal leaders around the world, his threats to turn Canada into his country’s 51st state, and the ongoing session of four-dimensional surfboard Whac-A-Mole that he calls tariff negotiations, Trump has infuriated many Canadian consumers into a large-scale spurning of American goods. 

In many cases, they have shifted their purchasing habits in ways that mirror—and may end up turning into—those of a sustainable-consumption mindset. Label-checking and mindful buying have gone from niche practices to a national pastime, and buying non-US often means buying locally or regionally.

“It’s a moment to think about where something comes from, who made it, and what it means to bring it into your home,” wrote Toronto-based sustainability educator and writer Sarah Robertson-Barnes in an email to Asparagus. “The momentum makes it easier for everyone to choose local and sustainable, which is exactly what we want.”

Even when Canada’s vastness means that some homegrown products travel longer distances, with higher transportation emissions—for instance, an apple going to Vancouver from Ontario’s main apple-growing region will travel more than 4,000 km, while one from Washington State needs to go only about 400—there are other aspects of sustainability to consider. For example, although both Canada and the US allow farmers to pay fruit-pickers a piece rate instead of an hourly wage, in both countries that rate is based on the state or provincial minimum wage, which in states such as Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is an impoverishing US$7.25/hour, while in BC and Ontario it is over C$17/hour (just under US$13). 

Matthew Shane, a professor of psychology at Oshawa’s Ontario Tech University, created the website The Canada List after Trump’s annexation threats opened his eyes to Canada’s economic vulnerability. He thinks the distance issue may be taking care of itself, noting that many of the approximately 15,000 monthly visitors who search the site’s 6,500-plus entries of Canadian businesses are already narrowing their scope from Canada-wide to regional and local. “Probably our biggest request at this point is to start putting in some provincial and city filters so that people can start to shop for the goods that are in their own neighbourhood,” he said in a phone interview.

Shopping sea-change

So how big is the shift? Well, in late April, the global market-research company NielsenIQ surveyed more than 5,600 Canadians about their attitudes toward purchasing vis-à-vis the United States. The result: a full 96% of respondents said they were changing their buying habits. Only 4% fell into the category of “Unchanged Shoppers,” with the rest falling into three other categories: 

• “Canadian Loyalists” (13% of respondents), who will go without if no Canadian product is available 
• “American Goods Avoiders” (32%), who are boycotting US products and buying from Canadian or non-US countries 
• “Pragmatic Canadian Supporters” (51%), who prioritize Canadian products but still buy US if it’s the “best” option

Vancouver resident Heather Armstrong exemplifies the second of these categories—and the changed shopping practices that go along with it. Although the retired HR specialist has always preferred to buy local food when it was convenient, she now considers herself a “very strict” American Goods Avoider and carefully checks the origin of everything she buys. 

“Trump is ruining the country. He’s ruining the world,” she says. “So why would we support the US? If we can get the product here, why not do it here?” A daily coffee drinker, Armstrong says she hasn’t gone to her local Starbucks in months.

It’s a moment to think about where something comes from, who made it, and what it means to bring it into your home.

The products to which the Nielsen survey refers are known in marketing-speak as “fast-moving consumer goods,” or FMCGs. They include food, clothes, diapers, household items, and—warranting specific mention on Nielsen’s list—oral backache remedies and processed cheese spreads, both of which are Top 10 items for American Goods Avoiders, the most affluent group.

There’s a reason that Nielsen frames its report as a warning to American businesses: FMCGs make up a good chunk of Canada’s main US imports. According to data-compiling site Trading Economics, consumer items abound on the list of top US imports to Canada, with categories involving food, clothing, and household items each accounting for US$2–6.1 billion of imports.

Even the top item on the Trading Economics list, while not exactly an FMCG, still falls under an individual’s discretionary spending power. Cars and trucks—referred to on the list as “vehicles other than railway, tramway”—are our number-one import product from the States, accounting for over US$50 billion in imports. Consumers can find Canadian-made vehicles by consulting the website Driving.ca, which lists the 10 models assembled in Canada in 2025, including the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 hybrids. (Those in the market for a tramway may need to cast a wider net.) 

Tips to buy local and sustainable products

Whether you’re a sustainable shopper adding a patriotic element to your choices or a patriotic shopper wanting to make more sustainable choices, buying both non-US and sustainable products simply means adding some new criteria to  your purchasing process and taking an extra step or two. Here are some tips:

1. Start local and expand your hunt as needed. 

Sustainability educator Robertson-Barnes points out that starting with shops and makers in your immediate area hits both the Buy Canada and sustainability targets: it keeps money in your community while also reducing your carbon footprint. As you widen your search, she suggests looking first for the label “Product of Canada,” which means that at least 98% of the product must be Canadian, and secondly for “Made in Canada,” as this requires only 51% of the product to be Canadian. 

2. Find Canadian products first; then check their sustainability creds. 

Canada is big, but the world is bigger, so you’ll generally do the least floundering if you start by making sure an item is Canadian and check it for sustainability afterwards. Some useful Canadian-product websites are Made in CA—started in 2018 by Torontonian Dylan Lobo in response to Trump 1.0’s tariffs—and Matthew Shane’s Canada List. The latter allows you to filter by Canadian ownership or manufacturing, or—in a new feature that will please the American Goods Avoiders among us—to “Exclude all USA products.” Shane hopes to add filters for provinces and cities this month, allowing you to go fully local if you want to.

Once you have a Canadian item in mind, you can check certification sites for the sustainability quotient of the company that makes it. Some of the big names in certification are B Corp and Ecologo. You can also check the website of your regional sustainability-in-business organization, such as BC Green Business or Green Economy Calgary. Their directories of member businesses are great sources of companies that are both local/regional and sustainable. 

3. Join Facebook groups, if the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make your head blow up. 

Yes, Facebook owner Meta is a huge part of almost every problem, and yes, with its ban on posting news links in Canada, it is actively working to kill off Canadian journalism like that found in Asparagus. If you can get past this, you’ll find a wealth of groups, most of them with names that are bewilderingly similar permutations of “Made in Canada.” Among the largest of these are Made in Canada – Buy Canadian Products, with 1.4 million members, and straight-up Made in Canada, with 114,000 members. 

Along with an abundance of posts from small businesses and artisans touting their wares, these groups feature thousands of members who take their patriotic sleuthing seriously, triumphantly posting where you can find Canadian-made sugar, baked beans, mustard, diapers, bedsheets, body wash, and all those other FMCGs. When there is no fully Canadian source, they post non-US brands—for example, Oasis orange juice, which is made in Québec with oranges from Brazil. If you post an ISO (“in search of”) for any given product, you are likely to get plenty of recommendations. 

When those recommendations are for small and/or home-based businesses, give priority to the ones closest to you, and consider sending the owner an email asking about their sustainability practices. When you’re following up on finds from large companies, do your sustainability research by checking them on certification sites such as the ones listed above. 

4. Check out BuyCanadian on Reddit.

If Facebook is “just…can’t…do it” territory for you, this subreddit has some of the same content, even though the Reddit format makes the information harder to find. For instance, one member posted “ISO: the highest protein yogurt available in BC by Canadian owned co” and got recommendations of Québec-based Liberté; Delta, BC-based Olympic; and Québec-based, French-owned Oikos, among others. 

A bonus of Reddit is that members can post news stories, so you’ll find relevant articles there that you can’t on Facebook.

5. Bookmark sites that marry Canadian products with sustainability. 

With the Buy Canada movement in its early phases, there aren’t many of these, but some do exist. One is Sarah Robertson-Barnes’ blog Sustainable in the Suburbs. You can get tips and shopping guides from various blogs that focus specifically on sustainable living within Canada: try those listed on FeedSpot’s list of the Top 25 Canadian Sustainable Living Blogs. For instance, Erin Polowy’s site My Green Closet currently features sustainable made-in-Canada swimwear. 

Going to ecohubmap and entering “Canada” in the “Countries” field will yield a wide variety of sustainability-focused Canadian businesses, from children’s wear to makers of solar panels. The site doesn’t assess the sustainability of businesses that submit listings, so use it as a starting place and follow up by checking for certifications or asking businesses about their sustainability efforts. 

Finally, observe the golden rule of sustainable shopping: ask yourself, “Do I really need this?”

Is the sustainability boost sustainable? 

Can the Trump-fuelled boost to sustainability last in the longer term? Recent surveys suggest that the Buy Canada movement has more staying power than the average consumer boycott—and the longer people are checking labels and prioritizing local, the more likely it is that sustainable-shopping habits will take root, even if they’re byproducts of quite a different motivation.

Canada List creator Shane, for one, sees himself as maintaining his Buy Canada habits even after Trump is out of office—and the feedback he gets from his site’s users indicates that they feel the same. “Many of the users of The Canada List are suggesting that it will be a permanent shift,” he says. 

Heather Armstrong of Vancouver echoes the sentiment. She says she might soften her stance slightly if, for instance, California Governor Gavin Newsom is the next president, but she’ll only buy non-Canadian if she has to. “I think that I and a lot of Canadians now are conditioned to buy Canadian,” she says. “Because now we realize we can.”

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