Trump Bans Canadian Booze And Motorcycles, Two Things Americans Were Already Getting Elsewhere
The White House has announced a ban on importing Canadian alcohol and motorcycles into the United States, a category pairing that reads less like trade policy and more like the contents of a divorced uncle's garage.
The logic is hard to reconstruct. Canada is not a motorcycle superpower. The country's chief two-wheeled export is a Bombardier snowmobile with the tracks taken off in June. As for booze, the primary Canadian product at risk is rye whisky, most of which is consumed in the United States by people mixing it with ginger ale and then complaining it tastes like ginger ale.
What the ban accomplishes is symbolic, which is to say expensive. American bartenders now face a supply problem. Michigan liquor distributors, who spent 2025 explaining that Crown Royal is not a threat to national security, are back at the microphone explaining it again, slower.
Ottawa's response has been dignified restraint punctuated by a small amount of gloating. Provincial liquor boards, which last year yanked American bourbon off the shelves to great applause, now find themselves in the odd position of having pre-emptively won a fight nobody had started.
The deepest cut is structural. A ban only works if the other side wants the thing. Canada sells roughly $1.5 billion in spirits south annually, and Mexico, the U.K. and Japan all still take calls.
The purple bags, at least, will survive. Canadians have been using them to store dice, screws, and loose change for six decades. The whisky was always the packaging.