Canada can drink Canadian beer out of Canadian cans: President and CEO of Aluminium Association of Canada

In the recent aluminium tariff “trade war” between the US and Canada, the common beer became a sign of the entire fiasco. It commenced on 6^th August when the US announced a 10% tariff on aluminium from Canada.

However, this was the second time in three years that such a tariff had been imposed by the US, with the Trump administration claiming that Canada had immorally increased its exports and become a “threat to US national security.”

The owner of a small Ottawa brewery, said: “As It Happens that the tariff was costing his company an extra two cents for every can because no beer cans are manufactured in Canada. Statistics Canada data from 2018 shows that Canada imports more than two billion beer cans annually.”

“So we brew our own beer, we smelt the aluminium, but we import the beer cans. It’s hard to see the logic in that.”

Precisely, after the US tariff announcement, Jean Simard, the president and CEO of the Aluminium Association of Canada, stated that he would be pushing the Canadian government to retaliate by applying tariffs on American-made aluminium products. “We can drink Canadian beer out of Canadian cans,” Simard said.

A long time ago financiers from the biggest economies like the US and UK selected Quebec as the site for aluminium production because of its hydropower potential and set about erecting dams to power a smelter complex throughout the Saguenay River Valley. The Inuit and Cree communities had little say in the process that displaced them for the sake of North American aluminium industry.

Canada now has nine primary aluminium smelters eight in Quebec and one in Kitimat, BC – with three owned by US-based Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), five owned by UK/Australia-based Rio Tinto and one (Aluminiere Alouette) owned by a consortium that is six per cent owned by Quebec.

Bauxite, the major raw material for aluminium, is not mined in Canada, so the aluminium smelters import the ore from Guyana, Jamaica, Guinea, and Australia.

Huge companies such as Crown Holdings Inc. and Ball Corporation manufacture billions of beer cans to sell back to Canadian breweries. Ball Corporation buys some of its aluminium rolls from recycler Novelis.

A spokesperson for labour union Unifor commented that they would be in favour of Canada manufacturing its own beer cans on a large scale. “We are in favour of an increase in any sector of manufacturing in Canada,” he said and added that Unifor is “not opposed” to using recycled aluminium.

“Maybe it’s now time for recycling to turn on a dime. Year after year, Statistics Canada data has shown that our recycling of metal is on a downward trend, with less and less diverted from landfill. Perhaps if there were regional secondary aluminium producers in every province, along with local can manufacturers to supply the more than one thousand small breweries across the country, we would ‘drink Canadian beer out of Canadian cans’.”