There's a pallet of American product in your DC right now that you bought back in February. You need to move it. That inventory is cash and you're short on cash, and nobody's posting about that this week.

The 50 per cent tariffs hit August 22. Canada came back on the 25th with counter-tariffs on about 700 products effective September 8, steel and aluminum and appliances and ag equipment and electronics. And on that same September 8 the federal fuel excise tax comes back after being off since April. Ten cents a litre on gas, four on diesel.

Same morning. Your landed cost goes up and your customer's tank gets more expensive, and neither one was in the plan you wrote in February.

So I'm guessing your week looks like this. A flyer you locked nine months ago full of items you wouldn't pick today. A margin plan that was supposed to finish positive and now might not finish the month. A team that's been running hot since spring. And a call with a supplier rep in Ohio you've worked with for a decade, and you're not sure how to open it.

How are you feeling about that call? I've been thinking about it all week.

I was at Walmart from 2002 to 2012. We did Made in Canada work in that stretch. We also did Made in Quebec work. No tariffs, no trade war, nobody in Washington saying anything about anybody. Canadian retail reaches for this every few years entirely on its own, and then quietly puts it back down.

But those two things weren't the same, and it took me a long time to figure out why one of them actually mattered.

Made in Canada was a program. Signage, flyer pages, an endcap, a moment on the calendar. It ran fine. When the moment passed, nobody owned it.

Made in Quebec was a buying trip. Our buyers went into the market, sat down with local suppliers, and sourced product. Nobody was thinking about a campaign. They were building an assortment, because a national planogram was never going to give those stores what that customer actually wanted.

One changed what was in the store. The other changed what was on the sign. You already know which one was still around two years later.

I'd bet most of you have your own version of this. What happened to yours?

I do business on both sides of this border and most of you do too, so let me say this plainly. Nobody on the other end of those calls picked this either. Your account manager in Ohio is getting the same margin call you are. Some of them are eating tariff cost right now to keep your program whole. A lot of them already have Canadian plants and Canadian employees, and that's not a talking point, that's payroll in Ontario and Alberta.

I'm bringing it up because of what usually happens next. Somebody decides the fastest way to look Canadian is to get loud about being anti-American, a twenty-year relationship goes cold over a six-month news cycle, and then the cycle ends, because it always ends, and you need that partner again with less goodwill than you started with. You can buy Canadian and still treat your American partners well. Those two things have never been in conflict.

The sentiment held. That genuinely surprised me, because I've been saying for years that it never does.

Canadians took about 10 million fewer trips to the U.S. in 2025 than 2024, down 25 per cent. Canadian share of grocery spending went up roughly two points in early 2025 and never came back down. American alcohol dropped by two thirds once the liquor boards pulled it. That's a full year of real transaction data, not a survey asking people what they intend to do.

But then there's this. Outside of food, where a Canadian substitute is harder to find, the data shows basically no shift at all.

None. In hardlines, in appliances, in general merchandise, the customer came in wanting to buy Canadian and couldn't do it. And only about four in ten Canadians say it's even easy to spot a Canadian-made product in the first place.

Read that as a report card on us, because that's what it is. The customer showed up ready and we couldn't tell them which item to pick.

If somebody asked your team tomorrow which items are Canadian, what would they say? And would it hold up if the customer checked?

Here's my favourite pair of numbers, because they flatly contradict each other and they're both true.

Ask a Canadian if they'd pay $120 for a grocery basket from Canadian farms instead of $100 for the American version, and three quarters say yes. Most say they'd go to $140. Ask that same country a few weeks later how much more they'll pay in percentage terms, and three quarters say not a penny past ten per cent.

Ask about a basket and people answer with their values. Ask about a percentage and they answer with their bank account. The bank account is what shows up at the till.

So ten per cent is your envelope. Anything wider needs a real durability story behind it or a range review, because your customer is running that math in the aisle whether or not anybody ran it in the office. What are you seeing on basket size? I'm hearing more trips and flatter tickets almost everywhere.

Be honest about what a flyer rework really costs. The instinct is to pull pages and rebuild them around Canadian items. It feels responsive, and for the customer it does land, so I'm not going to tell you it's the wrong thing to want.

But the flyer isn't a standalone asset. It's the spine of an integrated plan. Change a page and you've also changed the homepage banners, the product pages, the email calendar, the paid creative, the social posts, the signage kits, and the retail media your vendors already paid for. None of those teams report to whoever signs off on the flyer change. Somebody says yes on Monday, and on Tuesday four other teams find out their week is gone. Nobody owns that cascade, which is why nobody prices it before the call gets made. And the people doing all that rework are the same handful who did the last three fire drills.

So flex where flexing is cheap. Add a digital flyer page instead of rebuilding the printed one. Send an extra email instead of reworking the ones already built. Stand up a Canadian collection page that's still there in March when somebody searches for it. The expensive version buys your customer six days and costs you five teams. The cheap version buys them six months and costs you one.

Rip up the sourcing plan instead. None of that changes what's actually on your shelf. If your customer wants Canadian in hardlines and you don't carry a Canadian option, no amount of flyer real estate fixes it. Sending your buyers into the market changes what you sell for the next three years. Almost nobody picks this, because reworking a page feels like doing something this week, and booking a sourcing trip feels a lot like admitting you can't save the quarter. It isn't an admission. It's the only thing here still paying you in 2028.

Get country of origin into your product data. The boring one, and the only one that survives a change in leadership. For most retailers and suppliers, origin isn't a governed field anywhere. It's in a supplier PDF, a buyer's head, or nowhere. So you can't filter on it, can't defend a label with it, and can't tell your CFO in January what any of it delivered. You're also invisible in AI-assisted discovery, because when a customer asks an assistant for a Canadian-made alternative, that answer gets built from structured product data, not your flyer.

Go ask your top twenty suppliers for it, both sides of the border. What percentage of production cost is Canadian, where does final transformation happen, and what claim will you put in writing. A few of your American partners will answer better than you expect, and anybody who won't answer has told you something too.

Get one page into your stores before September 8 explaining the price moves in plain language. Your associates will be answering "why did this go up" long before your pricing memo reaches them, and that day they'll be answering it about gas too.

And if somebody brings you a flyer rework, ask two questions first. Who's doing that work, and what are they not doing instead.

So if any of this sounds familiar, tell me in the comments. What's the balance you're striking right now between what the customer wants and what your people can carry? What are you saying no to? What's actually working?

We're all in the same week on this one. Let's learn from each other.

The real premium ceiling: Three quarters of Canadians won't pay more than 10% extra for Canadian-made

The execution gap: Only ~4 in 10 Canadians find it easy to identify a Canadian product

Date to watch: September 8, counter-tariffs and the fuel excise tax land the same day

Until next week, The Retail Rewired Team