I went shopping for groceries last week and the first display at my neighbourhood METRO store was a special on green grapes. They are usually the kind I buy, large and sweet. Then I noticed the sign the grocer had added by hand: product of the USA. I walked away with a bitter taste.

Not one to spend much time on reading labels, I made a quick decision. By the time my hubby joined me after parking the car, I was quick to state that the US grapes would not cross our threshold.

It is easy to check food labels or websites like MadeInCanada to make informed decisions about the products we buy, but does this carry through for services as well?

As a Canadian-owned independent PR business, we compete with multinationals and holdcos; should I expect clients to shop local for communications services?

Here is the problem. A bag of grapes tells you where it is from. A law firm, an accounting practice, an ad agency or a PR firm does not come with a sticker. There is no Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notice on a services contract. So, while grocery aisles across the country have turned into small acts of quiet protest, the services side of the economy, the side that actually employs most Canadians, has stayed mostly invisible in this conversation.

That is a gap worth closing, because the numbers suggest Canadians want to close it. Statistics Canada reported that in the second quarter of 2026, more than 42 percent of retail businesses said they had changed their marketing to promote Canadian products over the previous year, and better than a third of them saw sales climb as a result. The Bank of Canada has tracked the same instinct showing up in how we travel: Canadians took close to 10 million fewer trips to the United States in 2025 than the year before. And CIRA’s most recent Canadian Internet Trends report found that nearly two-thirds of us say we prefer buying from Canadian companies when we have the choice, with more than half naming support for the local economy as the reason why.

None of that data is about groceries. It is about behaviour, about where our loyalty goes once we start paying attention. The question is whether that attention stops at the checkout counter.

It is worth remembering what “buy local” actually protects. When a Canadian business chooses a Canadian accountant, marketing agency, law firm or logistics partner over a multinational with a Canadian mailing address, the fees paid stay in the Canadian economy. They become local payroll, local office leases, local suppliers, local tax revenue. A holding company headquartered in New York or Chicago can have a polished Toronto office and a Canadian-sounding name and still send the bulk of its profit south. That is not a knock on those firms. It is simply how ownership works, and it is exactly the distinction Canadians have started making with dairy, steel and lumber.

Services are harder to see, which is precisely why the decision matters more, not less. A tariff on softwood lumber shows up on an invoice. The slow migration of decision-making, strategy and profit out of the country when a business defaults to a U.S.-owned service provider shows up nowhere until years later, when you notice how few homegrown firms are left standing in a given sector.

This is not an argument that Canadian businesses owe loyalty to a Canadian provider regardless of the work. Competence, fit and value still come first. But it is an argument for adding one more question to the shortlist, the same way we now flip over the package in the grocery store. Who owns this firm? Where does the revenue ultimately go? Is there a genuinely Canadian option that can do this job well?

Right now, that question rarely gets asked in boardrooms and marketing departments the way it gets asked in kitchens. Maybe it should. If tariffs on grapes and steel can change what ends up in our shopping carts, it seems reasonable to ask whether they should also change who ends up on our vendor list.