Owners of top Canadian whisky company spark backlash after plan to close one of its plants in Ontario and shift bottling operations south amid US-Canada tariff war
N
early a decade ago, a reserve batch of Canada’s Crown Royal whisky struck awe in the hearts of critics. “To say this is a masterpiece is barely doing it justice,” wrote the British reviewer Jim Murray, adding that the company’s upmarket offering took rye to “new heights of beauty and complexity”.
But earlier this week, holding a hulking glass bottle in front of a gaggle of cameras, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, slowly poured the hazel liquid on to the ground.
“This is what I think of Crown Royal,” he said, standing defiantly next to the puddle. He said the company’s owners were “a few fries short of a Happy Meal” and “dumb as a bag of hammers”.
