Premiers Draft Retaliation Menu Ranging From Withheld Wine To Withheld Electricity, In That Order Of Seriousness
The premiers gathered this week to workshop what a person from Saskatchewan might call 'getting our backs up' and what a person from Washington might call 'a strongly worded fridge magnet.'
On offer: a renewed booze boycott, potential energy withholding, and, in a move that reads like a threat only if you squint, the cancellation of the cross-border ceremony for the Gordie Howe bridge. The bridge itself, being made of steel and indifferent to feelings, will still open.
The escalation ladder, as drafted, appears to start with removing Kentucky bourbon from provincial shelves and end, several rungs later, with turning off the lights in Minnesota. Somewhere in the middle sits a proposal to allow the nine cooperating provinces' wineries, distilleries and breweries to ship directly to consumers across provincial lines, a reform Canadians have requested since roughly 1867 and which apparently required a trade war to unlock.
'We considered doing this for our own citizens years ago,' one premier did not quite say out loud, 'but it turns out we needed Donald Trump to threaten us first.'
The boycott of American liquor continues to hold, with LCBO shelves featuring a growing selection of Ontario ciders and the quiet dignity of an empty Jim Beam slot. Officials stress the measures are proportionate, calibrated, and, above all, deeply Canadian, which is to say they will be announced firmly and then reviewed at the next meeting.
The Gordie Howe bridge, for its part, will be inaugurated in what the minister described as a ceremony 'without American participation,' also known as a ribbon cutting where somebody's cousin plays the fiddle.