08/27/2026
Ron Kubek has had a long, hot summer. The owner of the Lightning Rock winery in Summerland, BC, and his wife Tracy were evacuated in the middle of the night, via a forest services road to Kelowna, after wildfires spread to within a couple of kilometres of the vineyard.
Everyone is safe and there was no physical damage to the winery but Kubek has had to close the tasting room that brought in up to $5,000 a day.
The announcement of 50 percent tariffs on exports to the U.S. is another blow to the winery that produces around 5,000 cases of high end whites, reds and rosés a year.
“I was ramping up to do 30 percent of my business in the U.S. That died on Friday,” he said, after spending months securing the necessary approvals from U.S. states.
He sent a shipment of 50 cases south last week but expects that to be the last.
“Selling 1500 to 2500 cases into the U.S. would have been huge,” he said.
A bottle of Lightning Rock rosé has a wholesale price of $20, to which a $10 tariff has now been added in the States.
Kubek is stoic in the face of the U.S. tariffs. What really upsets him is that even at a $30 wholesale price, American tipplers are likely paying less to drink Lightning Rock’s wines than Canadians in Ontario and Quebec. Massive mark-ups in the provincially-owned retail outlets in those provinces means the same bottle of rosé has a wholesale price of $38.17 in the LCBO and $43.66 in the SAQ.
“Restaurants usually double the price, which means that same bottle costs around $76. My rosé is really good but it’s not worth $76,” Kubek said.
Lightning Rock is one of thousands of businesses across the country that has been forced to go back to the drawing board. The uncertainty is compounded by concerns over how Canada plans to respond - and what the Trump Administration’s reaction to such defiance will be.
In an article in The Hub, economist Trevor Tombe argued against Canadian dollar for dollar retaliation to the tariffs Trump has imposed.
He quoted the great economist Adam Smith, who said in The Wealth of Nations that retaliation may be justified if there is a probability that it will result in the repeal of high duties. “When there is no such probability, it will seem a bad method of compensating the injury done to certain classes of our people, to do another injury ourselves”.
Tombe argued there is little reason to think that Canadian retaliation will alter U.S. policy. Certainly there were no signs of Trump backing down in his latest rant, which threatened 50 percent tariffs on all Canadian autos from next January.
But it is a mistake to view this trade war in economic terms. It is in reality an attempt by a rogue President to establish political dominance over a friendly neighbour; a display of chest-beating and grunting designed to produce a submissive response from a government Trump considers subordinate.
The last minute demands on trade sanctioning; the first right of refusal on critical minerals; the elimination of cultural and language protections; the repeal of public procurement rules; the exclusion of tariff relief for heavy trucks; and, the enforced purchase of U.S. fighter jets were all designed to undermine Canada’s ability to self-govern, without external interference.
At a press conference in Quebec on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the attitude at the negotiating table was that Canada is a subsidiary of the U.S. and that Canadian industry should be disadvantaged in relation to American industry. “That is not something we’re going to accept and that’s before you get to constraints on our ability to sign trade deals and the very fundamental issue of culture,” he said.
The calls from those such as Trump’s tongue-bather-in-chief, J.D. Vance, for Canada to “stop taking advantage of the people of America” is designed to give the appearance of solidity to the flatulence coming from the White House. But even the normally docile Fox News was pointing out that these new tariffs are tax on American consumers.
The point of retaliation should not be to inflict economic pain on the U.S. in the long term - the numbers involved are too small for that - it should be to exact the maximum political price from Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
As David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former advisor, noted on social media, the new trade war is going to hit the battleground states of Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Alaska the hardest. The predictive markets have all four as toss-ups in this November’s mid-term Senate elections, with most giving the Democrats narrow leads in all four. Add in North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas and the Republican majority in the Senate (53 versus 47) is hanging on a wobbly peg.
Carney indicated that he’s thinking along those lines at his press conference in Quebec on Monday, when he said car workers in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Alabama all depend on Canada, which buys more American cars than the European Union, Japan and South Korea combined.
If the Democrats do control Congress they will have many more tools to contest the President’s trade policies, even if it is unlikely they will have a veto-proof majority of 60 senators.
So on balance, I would argue in favour of strong retaliation to aid their cause.
Where Tombe is right is that there is a great deal to do within Canada to improve domestic competitiveness, to reform taxes that discourage investment, to recognize professional credentials and to make it easier to build major projects.
The absurdity of Ron Kubek being able to sell his wine more cheaply in the U.S. - even after the imposition of 50 percent tariffs - than in Ontario or Quebec, shows there is much more work to be done in “giving ourselves more than any foreign government can take away”.
