Boycotts and campaigns can fail in part because we think they won’t work. 

We all know we should not buy so much stuff on Amazon — or any stuff, really — but it feels so invincible, we don’t even bother to try to resist. The global instant delivery machine declared net revenue of $638 billion in 2024, an 11 percent increase over 2023. Its fortunes have climbed like that every year for the past twenty years. 

It feels like the force is stacked against us. Boycott? Right. Go ahead. Stop your Amazon Prime. Never mind Meta. Try it. Get off Facebook and Instagram. So effective. Now you just know less and miss your friends.

And yet. Canada’s sudden, fierce, and united boycott of all things American seems to have shifted something. 

Take orange juice, just for example. The Florida Growers Association trained Canadians to associate oranges and orange juice with Florida, and Florida alone.

Looks like that up-to-now extraordinarily successful strategy might have just backfired.

In September 2024, the price of orange juice concentrate commodity contracts reached an all-time high of $589 U.S.

But Canadians are now buying oranges and orange juice from Brazil.

OJ has fallen $238 U.S. since the beginning of the year. Half of its value, gone in about two months.

That is is just one example of how effective the Canadian boycott has been.

That boycott is also spreading around the world. We are not the only country appalled at the series of nauseating policy decisions to have crawled out of the darkness that has descended on Washington in the weeks since the inauguration.

Last week, when it was announced the U.S. had fallen to its worst ranking ever in the Global Happiness Report, for example, it was also ranked deeply unpopular with the people of 39 countries. Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Korea, France, Japan, Norway, Austria, and Switzerland registered the steepest drops since January, with a third to a half of residents actively opposed. 

In fact, Russia, China, and Israel were the only countries with a net favourable rating toward the U.S. 

Citizens everywhere are watching America’s ICE agents not just detain but imprison foreign nationals, whether they are Green card or visa holders or not; turn back scientists attempting to attend conferences; and expel students trying to return to their universities. As of this writing, the U.K. and Germany have issued advisories warning travellers they could be detained or denied entry at the border. Denmark and Finland have advised transgender citizens not to travel to the U.S. 

At home, outspoken MP Charlie Angus has issued a fierce warning to Canadians not to go there.

Travel advisories, detentions, searches and harassment at the border are not really good for tourism. Few among us are making plans to travel to the U.S. these days. Some of those who already booked travel are still going. But I don’t know anyone actively making plans for a holiday in the land of ICE.

The United States’s tourist economy, the largest in the world, contributed $2.5 trillion to the nation’s GDP last year, and supported 18 million jobs. Canada is the single largest source of visitors to the U.S.; Canadian travel alone generated $20 billion for the U.S. economy last year.

But who cares? Certainly not the crazed ideologues of the Trump administration. At the start of the tariff threats a few short weeks ago, the U.S. travel industry prepared itself for a 5, 10 or even 20 percent drop in tourist traffic and revenues from Canada. The industry had rosily projected an increase this year of 5%. But those hopes were long gone. Reconciling to realities, first it foresaw a decline of about $2 billion.

Then $4 billion.

But travel from Canada to the US is not down 5, 10 or 20 percent. It is down 50 percent. And it may well decline further in the face of the growing and flagrant disrespect for the law in that country.

A recent poll by Abacus found that 56 percent of surveyed Canadians who had planned to travel to the U.S. this year had since scaled back or cancelled those plans. 39 percent planned to travel to a different country. 19 percent were planning trips within Canada. I am sure those numbers are now only higher. The poll was taken before all the reports of innocent travellers being thrown in jail.

Among Canadians over 55, the numbers are far higher. Cancellations and failures to book at all are wiping out whole tour companies. Operators from New York City to Arkansas report zero bookings for March, April, and May. 

And Canadians are not the only travellers watching what is happening inside the U.S. with mounting horror.

Consider Tesla. Its stock ticker has become a barometer of the times.

The shares are in free fall — down 42 percent since the beginning of the year — as unit sales plunge around the world. That sudden steep decline represents solidarity. Sweden, France, Germany, Denmark, Australia — all stand with Ukraine, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Greenland.

It was especially satisfying that in response to Trump turning the White House lawn into a car sales lot earlier this month, to hawk hatchet man Elon Musk’s EVs just a few weeks after Trump cancelled all outstanding electric charging station contracts — they are too woke for him — Tesla shares fell even further.

Democrats buy Teslas. Or did. But even as sales slide —  94 percent of Germans say they will never, ever, ever, ever buy a Tesla, while in France, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and Norway, sales are down about 50% since the beginning of the year — EV sales around the world are picking up steam. That’s a double loss: of existing market share, and all that expansion. In Germany, the largest EV market in the EU, there was a 30 percent rise in sales in February, the same month Tesla sales plummeted 76 percent. Even in China, Tesla’s second largest market, sales declined 11 percent at the same time the EV market as a whole was up 40 percent.

Then there’s a new, unprecedented boycott. That of right wing populism itself. Its fortunes seem to be waning suddenly. It’s too early to tell if the appeal is paling all around the world, but certainly in Canada, Pierre Polievre’s clear association with Trump, Musk, and all their horrible friends has tanked his ratings. The Liberals are now leading in the polls for the first time in three years.

I call it the Trump effect. It’s very satisfying.

And finally, as Jason Parks affirms in his roundup of local grocery stores in this week’s issue, On the Front Line, along with oranges, sales of groceries and produce imported from south of the border are dropping rapidly. Two forces are at work: shoppers are refusing to purchase them, and grocers are seeking out alternatives.

An overwhelming majority of Canadians, 85 percent, say they either already do or plan to replace American products when shopping, according to a February poll from the Angus Reid Institute. Canada is at the center of an international resistance. Few things in our lifetimes have been so consequential. 

We are not alone. 

We will prevail.