‘Canada is not for sale’ hat offers tough lesson in domestic manufacturing

TORONTO — The weeks since Liam Mooney and Emma Cochrane dreamt up a viral hat meant to fend off any notion that Canada will be taken over by the U.S. has been more of a crash course in manufacturing than in politics.

The pair of Ottawa-based marketers behind the “Canada is not for sale” hats made famous by Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week say they’ve realized how difficult it is to produce a ball cap fully made in Canada.

“Imagine you’re a snake and you’re trying to consume a giant bowling ball. That’s what we’ve been experiencing here,” said Mooney, co-founder of business consultancy Jackpine Dynamic Branding.

Over the last few weeks, the duo approached several players in the apparel sector to help them and mostly heard the same refrain: they don’t manufacture hats fully in Canada because the cost is so high and the demand isn’t there.

Mooney and Cochrane have since found some hats completely made in the country but haven’t settled on a long-term solution, so they are mostly relying on ball caps imported from Vietnam, Bangladesh and China and toques from the U.S., which then get embroidered in Canada.

The difficulty in making apparel or accessories completely in Canada stems from years of blows to the country’s textile industry, which lost much of the clothing manufacturing capacity it developed in the 19th century as industrialists migrated to Canada and took advantage of the introduction of the sewing machine.

“They started the apparel industry in Canada in large cities, so Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg … but what happened by the 1980s was these industries started to go overseas,” said Henry Navarro Delgado, an associate professor of fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University.

They were drawn away from Canada largely because labour, materials and clothing components like zippers, thread and buttons were cheaper elsewhere.

“A T-shirt in China, depending on the complexity and if it has a print or not, could be produced for as low as $1,” said Navarro Delgado.

“Can you imagine that? We just simply cannot afford that.”

Now, data from the World Trade Organization on clothing exporters show Canada doesn’t even make the top 10 while China and the European Union reign supreme. They’re followed by Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Pakistan.

But take a peek at the flip side — importers — and you’ll find Canada in the sixth slot as of 2021, trailing the EU, the U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom and China.

A lot of the clothing manufacturing left in Canada is tied to military or firefighter uniforms along with apparel for extreme environments like the cold, said Navarro Delgado.

Most of the components they use aren’t completely Canadian-made.

“Jeans, for example, have rivets, have metal buttons, have metal zippers and a specialty thread for the embroidery,” he said.

“When you get to these very complex garments, it is almost impossible to produce them locally. You just can’t.”

Yet Jimil Ataman, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s department of human ecology, said many small companies persist, often by importing materials and pieces seamstresses in Canada put together.

“But all of this drives the end price up in a way that I think most consumers are frankly very shocked by,” she said.

“We’ve all been so socialized now for years and years and years that something like a baseball cap should cost $15 to buy, but the fact is that if you wanted to produce that ball cap under ethical circumstances, entirely under the labour laws and standards of Canadian policy, then the price for that is going to be much higher.”

Mooney and Cochrane’s “Canada is not for sale” ball caps sell for $45 to $55, while toques go for $40.

The idea for the hat came to them on Jan. 8, when they were watching Ford on Jesse Watters Primetime address U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media musings about how he’d like to see Canada annexed to the U.S.

“Emma (Cochrane) and I looked at each other from across the couch, sort of sprang up and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this. Like this is absurd, this kind of disrespect,'” Mooney recalled.

By that evening, they had spun up a design and nabbed their first sales.

The hats were made-to-order, so every time a sale came in, they’d fulfil the purchase by getting a hat embroidered.

Orders for about 50,000 hats flooded in once Ford wore one of the hats at a Jan. 15 meeting with Canada’s premiers and prime minister. Around the same time, Shopify Inc. president Harley Finkelstein talked about buying one on social media and knock-offs started to spring up.

Mooney and Cochrane knew they needed a model that could make massive quantities, but a made-in-Canada hat wasn’t easy to come by — or even often asked for.

“We heard from a number of suppliers that it’s not actually something that people come to them with as a request very very often because it’s just so much cheaper to make it overseas,” said Cochrane.

While they continue to search for a fully made-in-Canada solution, they’re embroidering hats in Toronto, where they’re able to produce 1,000 a day.

Though Mooney admits it’s been “a journey” to get to this point, he and Cochrane also find it humbling to see how so many people in Canada have rallied to try to get their product made.

“There’s a common solidarity,” Mooney said. “When the chips are down, we stand together.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 24, 2025.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press