Republicans Discover Canada Has Provinces, Immediately Try to Deregulate Them
In a legislative manoeuvre that suggests at least one congressional staffer has recently glanced at a map, House Republicans have introduced a bill targeting Canadian provincial booze bans, apparently under the impression that Kentucky bourbon distributors have standing in the Ontario liquor aisle.
The bill takes aim at interprovincial trade barriers that have frustrated Canadian premiers for roughly 158 years without any of them managing to fix it. Washington, sensing an opening, has volunteered.
"We're deeply concerned about the free movement of American whiskey across the 49th parallel," said no one who has ever set foot in a Saskatchewan liquor board outlet. The LCBO, for its part, responded with the polite bewilderment of a monopoly that clears roughly $2.5 billion a year and does not take constructive feedback from foreign legislatures.
The irony was not lost on Ottawa. Canadian premiers, who spent the spring congratulating themselves for tentatively agreeing that a bottle of Nova Scotia wine might, under certain conditions, be permitted to enter New Brunswick, now find their signature failure being weaponised by the same country currently tariffing their aluminium.
One trade lawyer noted the bill has almost no chance of passing, and even less chance of being enforceable against a sovereign province. "It's the legislative equivalent of yelling at a moose," she said. "Cathartic, but the moose continues doing whatever it wants."
The moose, coincidentally, was last spotted in a backyard pool in British Columbia, exercising more interprovincial mobility than most Canadian wine.