Apparently its California wine and Bourbon (from Kentucky) were the big ones we put on our shelves.
American beer was never really a big seller up here.
The big one to watch out for here is Canadian hard liquors (Such as Forty Creek Rye and Canadian Club Whiskey), are 70% export product, the majority of it going to the USA.
All fine, to be "elbows up" and stand by your principles, but principles won't feed your family, pay your ever rising electrical bills, pay your mortgage or rent, etc.
Now, this will piss some of you off. Why does PM MC have roughly 90% of personal assets invested in American companies? It has been asked again and again. How "elbows up" is he really?
I spoke to my friend Dan, who is a third generation dairy farmer here in Ontario (he is 41 and considered a baby in the dairy farming circles). There are many in dairy who do want to see a gradual phase out of dairy quota system. It has not over the long term saved dairy farms. In Ontario, we have lost the vast majority of them in the last 50 years. My uncle gave up his quota in 2005 and refused to let his sons take it over. My grandfather (as I stated previously) was one of the lobbyist to help implement the system and before he died in 2012 (at the ripe young age at 99), he stated he was very disappointed by what the dad system had become.
Australia and New Zealand phased out their supply management systems for dairy. Older farmers got out and retired with their skin in tact. Younger more ambitious dairy farmers who put in the work and sought out new markets, grew their farms.
WTF are we holding onto with supply management?
As farm kid from SW MB, I witnessed first hand the exodus from the farms of Canada. When I started kindergarten in 1966, I had just missed going to the one room school house that was a mile up the road. The schools were being consolidated into the larger towns so I climbed into a big long bus packed with kids from 5 years old to 18. I recall one school district building a more modern school for it area, my dad was dead set against it because he could see it wasn't sustainable.
Back then you could raise a family on a 160 acres, but just barely and the writing was on the wall regarding the future of that quarter section. My dad was considered a large farmer at the time as had a section and a half of land plus about 100 head of cattle but he could see that shortly he and my brother were going to have to purchase more land to survive. Also many of our neighbours were making the same choice, get bigger or get out. Most of them decided to get out and by the time I graduated from high school that bus was a lot smaller and it was carrying only 6 or 7 kids.
Another thing, before the Marketing Boards came in, we had 4 milk cows, raised some pigs for slaughter, and had laying hens. There was creamery in town and the co-op took all of the extra eggs that mom had. Everything was homemade.
With the establishment of the marketing boards in 1971, the creamery was soon gone and we got rid of the milk cows and hens.
The boards were designed to save the small milk farms, same as the Wheat Board was designed for the quarter section farm. But times changed and the Wheat Board went away and I believe that likely the Marketing Board should as well. Dairy farms will get bigger as scale seems to be the only thing that matters now.
But I'm not confident that ridding us of the Marketing Boards will make milk, cheese and butter any cheaper. I have yet to see ANYTHING get cheaper.
Oh and the US Secretary of Agriculture saying that the decline of Wisconsin Dairy farms are due to Canada? She can go fuck herself , because as I described above, modern agriculture caused the exodus from rural North America, it damn sure wasn't the Canadian Milk Marketing Board!