Shortly after the war in Ukraine began, someone walked up to St. Sophia’s Orthodox Church and threw buckets of red paint all over the front door. The church is one of about 400 operated by ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. The paint-throwing vandal, therefore, believed himself to be striking some kind of symbolic riposte against the Russian war machine.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Even a cursory bit of research would have led him to realize the folly of his ways. About half of ROCOR parishioners are Ukrainians. St. Sophia’s Orthodox Church, which had been vandalized in the name of Ukraine, has a Ukrainian deacon.
While that particular church incident was the most egregious example, it was far from the only bit of deeply misguided vandalism that took place here in Canada following the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war.
A sweet old Russian lady, Natalia Mitrofanova, received death threats to her bakery, simply because it was called “The Russian Spoon.” This despite the fact that Mitrofanova served a range of Ukrainian desserts at her restaurant, and was an outspoken critic of the war. Shortly after that, the Russian Community Centre of Vancouver (which spends most of its time hosting children’s plays and providing language-learning classes for kids) was vandalized to the tune of thousands of dollars worth of damage—covered in blue and yellow paint, the colours of the Ukrainian flag.
Then came the strangest “pro-Ukrainian” movement of all: calls for the NHL to kick out all its Russian hockey players.
Let’s be perfectly clear for a moment: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a terrible thing, extracting atrocities on a civilian population the likes of which has rarely been seen since the end of the Second World War. It is a horrible, horrible situation.
But Alex Ovechkin had nothing to do with starting a war with Ukraine. Nor did Mitrofanova and her bakery.
Protest against bad situations is a good thing, but it has to make sense. Which brings me to the Gretzky winery boycott. This makes no sense.
Tariffs kicked in this week. Canadians are angry with our neighbours to the south. I get it. But we’re getting dangerously close to vandalizing-a-Ukrainian-church-to-support-Ukraine territory here. We gotta stop and think things through. For the record, I think this trade war nonsense is a futile exercise that will leave both countries worse off. The good, bad, and ugly of this situation is that buying Canadian products is good, tariffs between US-Canada are bad, and Trump is ugly; on the inside... and the outside, he's ugly-ugly.
A knee-jerk America-equals-bad approach isn’t going to help. The Gretzky thing is even more baffling given that he’s a bloody Canadian legend. But he’s somehow found himself on the wrong side of the equation simply by proxy? That’s all it takes now? Nothing more than a mere mild association to something American and we’re hitting them with the ban hammer?
We need to set the protest bar slightly higher, otherwise we are going to find ourselves cancelling people and businesses that don’t need to be unnecessary collateral damage in the trade war.
I mean, think about what a boycott of Wayne Gretzky Estates winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake would actually mean in practical terms. Let’s say the boycott works, and people stop going. Now what? Well, first they start having to cut back on hours for bartenders since there are fewer customers to serve. That’s a Canadian worker losing hours, losing work, losing money.
Now they’re selling less wine and whisky also. Which means they don’t need to produce as much. Which means they don’t need to purchase as many grapes or as much barley. Now some Canadian farmer who sells them grapes and barley is losing work, losing money.
And for what? Because you were mad that Gretzky wore a red hat? And for that, we’re going to put Canadian employees at his winery out of work? Seems like a self-inflicted wound to me.
But hey, what do I know, I’m not thinking clearly this week, as I'm already going through the detox withdrawals from being cut off from American bourbon, thanks to the LCBO stripping it from the shelves.
James Culic wants the trade war to end so he can get his hands on a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. Find out how to yell at him personally at the bottom of this page, or leave a comment at the bottom of this column, or pick a side in the trade war with an all-Canadian letter to the editor.
