The Real Cost of Cheap: How Convenience Undermines Canadian Industry
June 24, 2025
For decades, convenience has been the unchallenged virtue of modern consumerism. It is the metric by which platforms are judged, products are evaluated, and supply chains are designed. But convenience, like all values, comes at a cost. And increasingly, that cost is borne not by those who demand it, but by the domestic industries and workers quietly displaced in its pursuit.
In Canada, this trade-off is neither abstract nor theoretical. It is visible in our manufacturing sectors, in the rise of low-margin retail importers, and in the increasing dominance of foreign-controlled logistics networks. The promise of convenience—faster delivery, lower prices, endless choice—has masked a systemic erosion of national economic capacity.
To understand how we arrived here, one must begin with a basic observation: convenience tends to favour scale. And scale, in a globalized economy, often belongs to firms with access to transnational capital, vertically integrated supply chains, and labour cost arbitrage. These firms—be they digital marketplaces, conglomerated grocers, or logistics giants—reshape consumer expectations in ways that smaller, domestically anchored businesses simply cannot replicate.
The result is a market in which Canadian firms are penalized for doing the very things we claim to value: employing locally, sourcing domestically, and reinvesting profits within national borders. Instead of rewarding these behaviours, the algorithmic logic of convenience platforms sidelines them. It filters them out of search results, pushes them to the bottom of app interfaces, and excludes them from pricing models built on volume and velocity rather than resilience or reciprocity.
To some extent, this is a failure of policy infrastructure. It is the outcome of countless policy choices, economic incentives, and design decisions—each rational in isolation, but cumulatively corrosive. And undoing its damage will require a comparable act of design: taxation regimes that do not disproportionately favour foreign e-commerce behemoths, procurement strategies that factor in domestic economic contribution, digital infrastructure that prioritizes visibility for businesses rooted in Canadian soil.
However, it is also a reflection of consumer behaviour. For all our stated values around buying local and supporting Canadian industry, we continue—at scale—to default to the cheaper option, even when we know better. Some of this is structural: many Canadians simply cannot afford to shop with their values. But much of it is habitual, conditioned by years of artificially low prices, algorithmic nudging, and the path of least resistance.
This is where consumer responsibility enters the conversation. It is not enough to prefer Canadian products in theory. That preference must become practice. Every dollar spent on a foreign-owned good displaces economic activity that could have occurred domestically. Every click toward the cheaper import is a signal—to the market, to investors, and to policy-makers—about what we truly value.
Tools like The CANADA List exist precisely to support this shift in behaviour. By offering independent evaluations of ownership, manufacturing, and domestic reinvestment, it enables consumers to navigate past the veneer of convenience and toward decisions aligned with long-term national interest. And by offering the list for free, making it sortable and filterable, it makes finding the products that contribute the most back to the Canadian economy straightforward and accessible.
Does everyone needs to be perfect? To shop Canadian at all cost? At every corner? In every store? For every purchase? No. First: such domestic insularity will actually be long-term counterproductive in a global economy driven by international trade. But also: there's no need for that level of perfect, that level of absolutism. Rather, everyone should just do what they can, when they can, to the extent they can.
It was recently estimated that if every Canadian shifted $14/week worth of purchases from foreign to Canadian, it could drive a $10B/year shift in economic stimulus. $14 is (sadly) just a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, and a couple of apples. So: you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be obsessive. Just a few small shifts can combine to a big collective difference.
That difference may take some time to show, but it will: it will show in new companies and new jobs. And it will also show in new products on store shelves. Because let's face it: companies sell whatever it is that consumers are buying. If we're buying Canadian, that's what we'll be sold, more and more and more.
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