Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling on Canadians to boycott Crown Royal, after the parent company that owns the whisky brand announced plans to close a bottling plant in Ontario and move the facility's operations to the U.S.

During a September 2 press conference reported on by CTV News, Ford poured a bottle of Crown Royal out in front of reporters, declaring that "everyone else should do the same thing," and calling Crown Royal's parent company Diageo "about as dumb as a bag of hammers" for its decision to close its Ontario plant.

Crown Royal was first introduced in Canada in 1939 to commemorate a visit to the country by Britain's King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The whisky is made with Canadian grains and water from Lake Winnipeg, and was first made available outside of Canada in 1964. Not long after that, it became the top-selling Canadian whisky in the United States.

Although Crown Royal has been produced exclusively in Canada for decades, Diageo announced on August 28 that its Ontario plant would be shutting down by February 2026, as part of a strategy to move it's U.S. bottling operations closer to American customers. However, bottling for the Canadian market and the rest of the world will continue to come out of the company's Quebec facility. 

The Ontario closure is expected to impact roughly 200 Canadian jobs, and has faced criticism from both sides of the aisle in Canada, according to The Guardian, including New Democratic Party MPP Lisa Gretzky, who called for provincial liquor stores to pull Crown Royal from their shelves. 

“We’re not going to stand by and let you just try and squeeze a little more money out for those wealthy shareholders at the risk of 200 people in our community," she told local media in Ontario.

This comes as Canadian liquor stores have boycotted U.S. liquor in response to Trump administration tariffs. Jack Daniel's parent company Brown-Forman reported that sales to Canada had dropped by 62% year-over-year during the most recent fiscal quarter, with CEO Lawson Whiting blaming "significant headwinds" from the ongoing trade dispute.