Month: June 2015

The Nova Scotia government has announced today that the province is now open for DTC wine shipments of Canadian wine purchased from a winery (retailer shipments and shipments of non-Canadian wine are still not permitted). See the press release here: Nova Scotia Opens Borders to Import Wine. As a result, Nova Scotia becomes the third Canadian province to publicly announce that it is open for interprovincial wine shipments. For a review of the situation in all provinces, see my DTC Shipping Update Page. 

As reported earlier, a dispute over meat labelling, has resulted in the WTO ruling against the U.S. and in favour of Canada and Mexico. The next round of the battle involves the possible implementation of retaliatory tariffs. Canada has requested permission from the WTO to introduce a 100% surtax on a number of products if the U.S. does not comply with the ruling (the products are listed here and include U.S. wine). If those tariffs were actually introduced, they would obviously have a very negative effect on the sale of U.S. wine in Canada since prices would sky-rocket. However, the U.S. Congress has already introduced a bill that would repeal the meat labelling law which appears to have broad bi-partisan support as well as support from the U.S. meat processing industry which sees the labelling law as too costly.