These U.S. companies moved to Canada. Will there be others?

Amid the economic uncertainty of the trade war between the United States and Canada are some silver linings. Companies are choosing to leave the U.S. for a new home north of the border, thanks to changes in trading policies, immigration practices and even energy regulations under the Trump administration.

“Each one has a slightly different context in this larger picture,” Julian Karaguesian, a lecturer at McGill University and an expert on international trade, told National Post. “But they all have the same common theme, that amidst a broader pullback of American companies from Canada, we’re having these small, symbolic victories, which are great at this time when people are hurting.”

Here are a few examples.

The Siebel Institute of Technology , the oldest beer brewing school in the Americas, is moving to Montreal citing regulatory changes in the United States. Siebel said this month in a social media post that it would move to a site near Molson’s original brewery on Jan. 1, 2026.

“The decision follows a comprehensive review of operational costs, industry trends (and) increased student visa challenges to enter the United States,” it said.

This year, the Trump administration made cuts to academic research, reduced the number of visas for foreign students and increased taxes on some elite schools. It revoked Harvard’s ability to enrol foreign students, a move later blocked by a federal judge.

John Hannafan, Siebel’s general manager and director of education, said: “Recent regulatory changes in the U.S. have made it much more challenging for many of our international students, who have become the majority of our student body, to attend classes in person. This relocation of North America classroom operations to Montreal allows us to pivot without sacrificing the student experience.”

Canada has reduced its own student visas over the last two years from record highs. But Karaguesian said it’s a different story in the U.S.

“The idea that you could potentially be rounded up in the street, even temporarily, by an ICE agent, scared a lot of foreign students,” he said. “ It’s not the Canadian way to go and round up people. And we don’t have anywhere near the kind of anti-foreigner message in our country that’s currently the case in the United States.”

Phillips Distilling Company, the maker of Sour Puss liquor, recently signed a five-year deal to produce its colourful sweet-and-sour beverage in Montreal after several provinces stopped stocking American-made alcohol.

“The vast, vast majority — about 98 per cent — is sold in Canada,” Andy England, the company’s CEO, told Global News . “In many ways, we think of it as being a Canadian brand. All the more reason we should produce it in Canada now.” Production began at Montreal’s Station 22 distillery in the city’s east end this month.

“I was totally against retaliatory tariffs,” said Karaguesian, “but the use of procurement policy by provincial liquor boards, taking U.S.-made alcohol off the shelves, in this case it produced a small victory. And also the main market is here.”

CarbonCapture Inc., which was set to build a direct air capture facility in Arizona this year, pivoted when U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright terminated billions of dollars in incentives from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Now it’s up and running in Innisfail, Alberta, in partnership with Canadian company Deep Sky.

Alex Petre, CEO of Deep Sky , told National Post that “recent changes in the U.S. and I would say the overall political instability” was behind the move.

She added that Deep Sky does not actively seek out such businesses. But “interest from American companies in Canada has definitely increased tremendously in the past year.”

In September, Trump gave a speech at the United Nations in which he called climate change a “con job” and said talk of rising temperatures came from “stupid people.” He added: “The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

Petre said Washington’s stance on carbon capture “has really been unclear and sometimes unfavourable in this past year. It’s hard to set yourself up to innovate and to deploy new technology if you do not have regulatory stability, as well as line of sight to how to fund such endeavours.”

She added: “On the flip side, Canada has what is probably one of the most supportive regulatory and financial systems currently set up for carbon removal, and specifically for direct air capture.”

Karaguesian said that, while much can be tied to recent changes in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, the Trump administration isn’t the first to battle Canada on the business front.

“We should remember that during (U.S. President Joe) Biden it was also bad,” he said. “The Inflation Reduction Act put a trillion dollars in tax credits to relocate to the United States. Trump is using tariffs. Biden was using subsidies, and that pulled away investment from Canada. The trend started more than a decade ago. It really started in the aftermath of the financial crisis.”

“I don’t want to read too much into what happens afterwards, but it’s almost some kind of omen (of) the future direction of international trade,” Karaguesian said. “I don’t think we’re going back to deep globalization. And I don’t think the Americans are.”

But he looked at Sour Puss as “a microcosm, an example of a company now moving to produce the product close to its market. And maybe that’s a sign of the future.”

He also pointed out that Canada has a lot of untapped wealth. “We’re sitting on, per capita, the largest inheritance in the world in terms of natural mineral wealth and natural resource wealth, and the second largest in absolute terms, after Russia.”

He added: “And we’re perfect trading partners for East Asia. So that gives me hope that … we will be able to offset some of this by diversifying trade. Part of it will be companies moving back to Canada to be close to their markets, or because we have more clean energy credits, or because we’re not rounding up people in the streets.”

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