As trade war escalates, are B.C. grocery shoppers heeding call to 'buy local'?

Britt Kirkpatrick came out of the Safeway on Vancouver’s Davie Street on a sunny Monday morning with three bags of groceries and a small act of defiance inside them — B.C. produce she had chosen over the cheaper American stuff on the same shelf.

“I’m willing to pay a little bit more if it’s from Canada, and kind of, in our own way, fight back,” said the West End nurse. “I think the consumer can fight better than our government.”

She is exactly the shopper the “Buy B.C.” campaign is counting on. Whether most British Columbians will follow her — and whether they even can, aisle by aisle — is an open question.

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The trade war turned sharply over the weekend. After negotiations collapsed late Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 50 per cent tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, and Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match them dollar for dollar starting Sept. 8.

A new Angus Reid Institute poll released Saturday found 77 per cent of B.C. residents think Ottawa was right to walk away rather than accept a bad deal, and 65 per cent called the coming counter-tariffs “about right under the circumstances.” But the resolve comes with a flinch — nationally, nearly nine in 10 worried the dispute will drive up the costs of goods and services.

Six shoppers Postmedia spoke with at two West End stores on Monday told a more complicated story than the poll numbers alone.

Nearly all said they try to buy Canadian, and everyone backed Carney’s decision to walk away from the negotiations. But the resolve frayed at the price tag and the produce bin. Some pay the premium without blinking, some weigh every dollar, and some can’t always find a local option to buy even when they want one.

The produce aisle is where much of it plays out. On a walk through the Davie Street Safeway, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage and broccoli were mostly or entirely Canadian, all flagged with a Maple Leaf or “Buy B.C.” tags.