Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
bbc.com
bbc.com
Instead, the Europeans caved, Japanese caved (PM resigned after doing so), Republic of Korea caved (PM resigned after doing so), India of course caved and so on, shattering any prospect of collective action which might pull the rogue hegemon back into line.
Now, the US is simply able to renege or renegotiate the bilateral deals whenever he feels like it, forcing the other party to face down the US by themselves - not many can do this, maybe only China. Anyways, I wish the Canadians well and I hope they gain global support
This capital can then be reallocated into domestic investment to continue to decouple from the US. Very similar to how Germany learned the hard way that buying fossil gas from Russia wasn’t going to prevent aggression. Canada has started this with their recently announced energy investment plan, Europe can do this with Eurobonds.
PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339577 - August 2026
China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932 - January 2026 (a component of China’s next five year plan includes LNG infra investment to support imports from Canada)
On Eurobonds:
Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708337
(Canada and Europe collective hold ~$9T in US treasury debt, almost 25% of total outstanding debt)
Part of the reason Ray Dalio was on Bloomberg saying to sell bonds and buy gold or Bitcoin. Treasuries used to be where capital would “flee for safety” and that concept is breaking down.
Dalio Says Sell Bonds, Buy Gold, Bitcoin as Debt Crisis Looms - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-21/dalio-say... | https://archive.today/jlUBA - August 21st, 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284950 - March 2025
> “How can I decouple from the US as fast as possible?” is what this leads to.
> Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. The US will apply pressure for short term gain against allies while they move away long term.
Canada has had a long term investment and productivity challenge with too much focused on North and South. I suspect that this is now the catalyst for East and West investment.
I think the calculation was that no deal and the natural consequences are not that much worse than the deal on the table short term. And taking into account the future of the above it was going to be worse.
“We take the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.”
> In the final hours of negotiations, the U.S. tried to include restrictions on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, Carney said.
> "Unacceptable," the prime minister said flatly.
> Plus, the U.S. tried to restrict Canada's protections of its languages, its culture and its sovereignty, Carney added. He did not provide details of what those restrictions looked like.
What are we waiting for.
That was the EUs top priority. The other issue was that each country had its own products they didn't want to lose sales from.
More generally, the EU isn't built for a world of presidential powers exercised at whom, which is becoming more of an issue this decade.
For the most part, the rules based international order is built around the idea that following it is in everyone's best interest and going against it will have negative consequences. That is why it has lasted so long.
Its not literally followed rigidly, but there are certain norms that are followed 90% of the time, and that makes things more predictable which is a good thing.
How often are diplomats executed to send a message to there home country? Basically never. That is the system. Its far from perfect, definitely not comprehensive, but does do some good every now and then.
Again, what is meant by a rule based order is not that there are solid rules upheld consistently as in criminal law, just that there are norms which are usually obeyed.
But you already had that - this tariffs “deal” was just extortion, adding a tax for nothing
Why did intel sharing stop ? To extract more from the EU: extortion
The Ukraine is bleeding and getting destroyed, day by day. And things are getting worse, by Russian reciprocal responses, for every escalation success Ukraine has achieved.
Recent examples: Attack ships in Azov sea -> Odessa ports essentially blocked, attack Russian warehouses -> your warehouses are getting destroyed.
What path of victory do you see enabled by US (or EU, for that matter) actions? It is just prolonging the war, by giving the Ukraine (and gullible western audience) an illusion that Ukraine can win it.
> In that sense some choices are more worthwhile than others, even when they involve concessions to a bully. So, despite recent Gallup poll showing that majority of Ukrainians are for negotiated end of the conflict a.s.a.p. https://news.gallup.com/poll/711992/ukrainians-sour-washingt..., it is worthwhile for European powers to give concessions to Trump, to achieve what? To bleed Russia more and hope that it somehow collapses (or suddenly decides to give up)? Despite the very real (bloody!) costs to Ukraine?
Responsible governance around something like when and how to retaliate (if at all) against tariffs comes down to one of the most fundamental forces of economics and trade: real leverage. Whether or not the US should exercise its leverage to attain outsized and favorable terms on the economic stage is the peanut gallery conversation that happens on social media. The two worlds couldn't be farther apart. What will actually happen in the end is just a math equation that has never changed and will never change.
For Europe to become fully self-sufficient when it comes to defense, for one thing.
The world has the technology. Canada has the resources and the manufacturing capacity. Europe has the money. It can be done.
Look at Ukraine. They are becoming a military superpower in terms of technology and experience.
Aside 1: there are quite some areas where European weapon systems are state of the art, but you won't hear about that unless you are more in the know. The US is hurting itself here in a big way. Going alone = $$$$$$$$$$$$
Aside 2: The European Union has been conceived as an 'ever closer union' from the beginning as to lower the likelihood of new wars on the continent; something the USA pushed us to btw post-WOII. Canada and Australia have raw materials, something which Europe doesn't have abundantly. Sharing development costs across the free world is mainly why you see Canada, Japan, Australia etc having a heightened interest in Europe. There is world-wide a lot of interest in the European defense sector, but South Korea and Israel have also interesting defense sectors.
I think Israel has become politically just as toxic as the USA (or moreso even). It seems incredibly unwise to make your defense industry dependent on a currently openly warmongering genocidal state.
Israeli?
edit: why was this downvoted lol, am I missing some meme about "Israelian"? That's not a word.
I also think there is a huge difference between america's political toxicity, where the concern is directly about things the USA might do to the country in question vs Israel where unless you are in the middle east its more indirect concern for a third party. When times get tough, its easy to forget about third parties, you can't forget if you are the one who is the victim.
Which is probably why you see a lot of Israeli arms deals are with countries that are nervous about their neighbours. e.g. Greece just bought a 4 billion dollar missile defense system from Israel. Presumably because they are nervous about Turkey's increasingly aggressive stance.
that was a significant different europe than today.
What is different for post-war Europe is that the USA forced Europe to stop developing their own complex central pieces, making Europe fully dependent on the USA. These pieces are critical and expensive and forces/limits the design parameters of connected systems. This handicapped a lot of Europe grown hardware. These critical dependencies are getting patched away atm, but that will take time because they are complex and expensive.
Firstly, yes Europe and its allies are rapidly becoming more capable and are now funding said capabilities.
Secondly, it sadness me to see people cheering on the growth of the war/defense sector.
Tao Te Ching - Chapter 46
When the Way governs the world,
The proud stallions drag dung carriages.
When the Way is lost to the world,
War horses are bred outside the city.
Sure, they were the world's largest producer of raw uranium ores until 2009, since which they've run second.
But it's simply wrong to claim Canada doesn't engage in raw mineral refinement, still to this day the McClean Lake uranium mill remains one of the world’s largest uranium processing facilities producing refined Triuranium octoxide (U3O8).
For example, Germany now expects America involvement in Ukraine despite Germany funding the war against Ukraine for years with their purchase of Russian oil
The world seems unhappy unless American kids are dying for them. Their own children are unwilling to do so, but little Jimmy from iowa is supposed to.
If you want to know why Americans support trump it's because Americans of my generation knew American kids who died fighting for foreign countries. Nothing radicalizes a population more.
The US couldn't be talked down from its Desert War follies, Gulf War (1990) was a 42-country coalition which runs counter to "Their own children are unwilling to do so, but little Jimmy from iowa is supposed to".
The follow up, post 9/11, was US led misplaced revenge stupidity with a weaker coalition of the essentially unwilling doing their insufficient best to talk an enraged bull on steroids down - the Afghanistan chapter was more pure "US way is the only way" own goal.
Now that you've elected Trump, he's the made a world less safe for all, US citizens included.
it would be so disruptive that europe would have to make and use an alternative, and then the US could not regain that market
In Europe there's Weego or whatever it's called which is just a standardized QR code layer on top of the instant SEPA payments you can already do?
Sideloading is not at option from 2027 since it will be made much much more difficult than it is today, requiring users to enable it via developer options and wait 24 hours.
Pretty sure they will order 3rd party stores to open up. Sure, iPhone users are f'ked but at least Android will prove itself.
But what might work would be if the EU dropped back to the minimum copyright term of the Berne Convention - 50 years. Preferably measured from first publication.
are the trade barriers in the room with us?
Not only USA products. Most countries with low safety standards and known for dangerous products are barred from trading with the EU, or at least many of their products. Recently, even big Chinese on-line shops are being targeted for selling dangerous products and lying on the description on that products.
I understand that quality and safety is a diminishing goal for the USA. But I hope that other countries keep the care for their citizens as a achievable goal.
> is not entirely incorrect
With enough re-interpretation nothing is not entirely incorrect. Agree on the part that it is misleading.
What they call food across the pond is actually trash, and I would be disgusted if we allowed that to be served to humans on our side.
It's something else entirely to point to a specific country and say that "anyone who imports from there is going to get taxed an extra 15%". That's a specific barrier to a specific trade.
EU and US egg safety rules are mutually incompatible.
Yes. And I'm saying this in the EU.
e.g. Ein Beispiel ist die verschiedene Sprache.
Although perhaps German is one of the stranger cases, given that I've seen the English phrase "Made in Germany" on some political posters around here: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
This is also a problem for trade between EU member states.
There's other examples of course, e.g. the Cybertruck is not road legal in the EU. Though I can hardly say that's "in the room" given how unpopular the vehicle is even in the USA.
Honestly if that is the best you can come up with, please try a lot harder.
The local jobs market is currently demanding a lot of C1 German. This does not seem unfair to me. Does make it challenging to sell services to Germany if you can't provide it at that level.
Or, to put it another way, imagine my response had been:
Hör mal, Kumpel, wenn du glaubst, du kannst deine Dienstleistungen in einem Land verkaufen, dessen Landessprache du nicht sprichst, dann glaub mir als jemandem, der es gerade versucht: Das ist verdammt schwer.
that is a subsidy to american businesses and a barrier against german ones, when germany trains its Citizens in both german and english
it silly, but it is a barrier with a measurable dollar spend related to it
This is the difficulty with discussing "trade barriers": things that are simply handled differently in different countries can be (arguably) economic factors that discriminate against one side or the other, hence they're trade barriers. Complicating it further, one can create barriers that have plausible deniability, or point to unrelated factors and scream "TRADE BARRIER".
I know someone who was involved for a while in the softwood lumber discussions. Just an absolute snake pit trying to suss out what are real barriers, intended barriers, relevant inputs... and all of this in the context of negotiations over the same, so everything is also "does he mean this or is he distracting us from something else or just building up a talking point to surrender later?"
the logs in canada are just worth less than the ones in the US. Differential advantage is a real thing that exists.
If the US government really beleives it to be a canadian government subsidy to loggers, it should be more than happy to give the tariff money to the canadian government, making canada's taxes and fees exactly what the US thinks they should be.
BTW, I'm Canadian. IIRC, the trade courts didn't find that the complaint about fees wasn't legitimate, it was that American logging companies had other, offsetting economic benefits, so the bottom line was that they weren't disadvantaged. So the U.S. simply refused to abide by the ruling and didn't pay the fine it was supposed to, so that receiving the fine or some portion thereof, became another thing to negotiate in the next round. Unbelievably hairy stuff.
Isn't that kind of America's thing?
"No, not like that!"
All the rest of this is designed to distract from the real issue: Americans love Capitalism, except in the rare cases where they don't come out on top. Then everyone else is being mean and unfair.
It's funny. When European governments charge high fees, Americans deride them as socialist and anti-capitalist. When the American government does it (as it does here)? Why, it's the natural order of things! Our fees are the "correct" fees. It's everyone else that's wrong!
Please.
One example: In Canada, there's a vibrant french language film industry, meaning films in french that originate and are made in Canada and then marketed abroad. The english language equivalent is anemic because decades ago, as part of trade negotiations, the Canadian gov't gutted subsidies for english language film production as a trade barrier against Hollywood.
1. Bring back manufacturing jobs 2. Remove trade barriers 3. Make US rich by collecting huge amount of tariffs
If 1 is true then there is no benefit for countries to remove trade barriers or pay tariffs because now there is no leverage (manufacturing jobs to protect).
If 2 is true then there is no leverage for other things to happen - countries aren't going to voluntary remove trade barriers without keeping the jobs or paying tariffs.
So and so forth.
Not saying I agree with it, because it sends the wrong signal, but I can understand the reasoning at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_Bil...
Once is an accident, twice is a pattern. It isn't that Trump specifically is the problem it is that there is a sizable enough part of the US population that will actively vote in that kind of governance.
Trump will leave, either via election, being ousted or via the Grim reaper. But the things that got him to that position are still very much in place and potentially even stronger than ever.
I said it before he even got elected the first time, he is an echo of the future that is coming. A prototype of something that will be handled more competently in future for better or worse.
The UK's Neville Chamberlain is remembered for saying of an agreement with Hitler, "peace for our time"*, and by this agreement, appeasement; less well known was that he did pursue re-armament and mutual defence agreements while attempting to deescalate.
Hopefully we won't be here in 8 years wondering how the USA got carved up into a Canadian zone, a Chinese zone, a European zone, and an Aztec zone. That last one might be from a TV show I watched as a kid.
We aren't the ones who are destroying it, and we have a backbone strong enough to say this isn't good enough.
If what you say is true, then the next administration should understand how one sided the damage done to the relationship has been. No economic trade partner should have to tolerate attacks on their sovereignty and unreliable trade negotiators.
It's a nice thought, but I wouldn't "bank" on it.
The uniparty foreign policy blob that always does identical stuff regardless of party like: signing the JCPOA with Iran / killing the JCPOA and starting War with Iran, or rejoining UNESCO and paying back due obligations / re-leaving UNESCO and WHO... etc.
Biden didn't remove the Trump Tarrifs on China for instance. But this goes across party lines and back for decades. Neither side is interested in tearing down the surveillance state stuff is a good example.
trump won the primary and then the election
republicans who didnt want his policies and could see that the inflation was in a large part the result of trump's handling of covid would have put somebody else up for president
Look into the policies and results the Biden administration had on American manufacturing versus the contraction in American manufacturing caused by tariff implementation. Biden even invested heavily in infrastructure in red states just because it was good positive ROI policy.
Now we see Democratic Socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani doing things like cutting permitting red tape on small businesses and it’s the exact kind of thing the Republican Party claims it stands for.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act actually raised taxes for lower wage Americans and increased the budget deficit, the exact opposite of typical Republican talking points on those subjects.
We have to remember that in a lot of cases, policy is not the same as messaging. This is especially pertinent in personality cults. This something the US hasn’t really experienced in the US presidency in quite some time if at all, and that has made it a…unique…experience. The idea of consistent policy is currently meaningless, because it’s all about whatever is on the demagogue’s mind today.
This was a common attitude 2017-2020, and they got disabused of that notion when Trump won in 2024. I would further argue the muted response during Trump I based on an idea that thing would "return to normal" emboldened Trump II - so that was not a winning strategy. The only country that seemed to have the correct read, and translated it into policy was China. Every other trading partner of the US seems to be floundering still.
EU should really have a plan to ditch US collective monopoly in all sectors, especially tech. Just like China we should have our own payment systems, mobile OS-es with mandatory bank support, own app stores, own cloud systems and so on... Call it gaulism or any other catchy phrase but US leverage should be reduced to minimum - EU should be able to threaten US with full ban on a subset of it's companies/trade. Now such thing is plain impossible to imagine
Unlikely. Customers are not there anymore. Emotional boycotts triggered by disruptions last until another big disruption happens. The next president of USA, with all this power, does not have the power to force each Canadian citizen to buy Kentucky Bourbon again. Resent caused by insults and abusive behavior work is everlasting.
India and US still have not signed any trade deal. Not sure what's the basis of your comment.
No one other than close US allies caved.
And even then, they all realize Trump is a mad man and cannot be relied upon.
We indent to do this, they propose that, there is aspirations of this. They caved but only in the most symbolic fashion possible. I see a lot of diplomacy at hand.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." - Theodore Roosevelt,
politics vs reality. they could correct though by selling US treasuries - but that would make the world economy sneeze which might result in pneumonia.
USA market is "yuuge", but rest-of-the-world market is much much bigger.
PM's resignation stemmed from unpopularity not due to tariff negotiation, but diminished ability to pass laws after the ruling party lost significant number of seats in elections for upper and lower houses.
As for other countries around the world, the world-wide inflation caused many ruling parties to lose support.
It has been said that when the tariffs started that the Japanese delegates went to Washington to negotiate. The delegates asked them "Since you are trying to negotiate, what do you want of Japan?"
All they got back was "Well, what can you offer?"
Turns out they had started the tariff war with absolute no idea on what demands they wanted to make. Japan used that to their advantage because without any specifics, they were free to write the terms.
The world needs leadership. And Canada is helping with that.
I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will. The answer is in shifting trade away from the US and isolating their economy. It takes longer but it is what will work. And even if their behaviour does not change, their power will fade with their economy.
there's plenty of barriers without tariffs holding up trade between blocks and countries.
Learn from what they did well and what they did poorly, copy the good parts.
We can't afford to cut all ties with United States due to our geography and history, however it would be prudent for us to reduce our dependency.
I don't think majority of Canadians wish to see the nation in such a vulnerable position again with regards to US. Banking on a single player in terms of security and trade has proven to be a risky endeavor.
I have much love for the American people, but I support the actions of our government.
Sorry we failed you all, world.
I hope we are able to elect competent leaders in the future that can mend relationships to some degree, but you all can clearly never again allow us the same amount of global leverage that we had through most of the post-war period.
When a Canadian new grad is faced with an option of going to work in SV or in China which do they prefer? Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer? A society with no freedom of speech? Where people are arbitrarily jailed if they voice an opinion against the government? Where the government places citizens in concentration and re-education camps and runs them over with tanks? I mean to me the choice is clear.
How many large American companies have offices in Canada? How many people and what slice of the economy does this support? Lots.
So yes, the US has drifted and is drifting from the ideal. And maybe it was never the ideal. But it's much closer to us than China in every imaginable facet and will likely remain so for the next many decades. We need to filter the noise out, definitely stand firmly for what we believe in, but also compromise and look at the longer term.
The facts are still the facts. People like you can fantasize that somehow going over the ocean to remote countries can offset going over a truck to the world's largest economy. Or ignore the ways that our economies are so tightly coupled.
I just listened to Carney talk about this and at least he's more or less a responsible adult. He said we and the US share a lot of common thinking and values and he would like to work with the US. Where he draws the line is when the US tries to take away our ability to make independent decisions. And that's fair. But it doesn't sound like he's aligned with you and so I can only guess where your politics lie.
EDIT: Let's see if I can restore my credibility:
A record number of people immigrated from Canada in 2025: https://thehub.ca/2026/04/03/can-anyone-solve-canadas-brain-... and the article claims their most frequent destination is the US.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2026013...
In 2020 by far the country with the most Canadian ex-pats was the USA.
You can tell here that the immigration trends are still there: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2025007/artic...
And while it seems there was a big drop in 2024 the numbers have come back up: https://www.maynardnexsen.com/publication-legal-immigration-...
Re: the DSA I'm always fascinated by the amount of mind share US politics seem to own in certain part of the Canadian public. You want to decouple from them but you obsess about their politics. I just listen to what they say and I am interested because I don't want to decouple and I see how coupled we're going to stay.
Is it still the largest economy? By many numbers, it is not.
The United Kingdom used to be in a similar position and Ireland was like Canada. Nowadays, Ireland does not need to cave in to its neighbor's demands.
EDIT: Ireland very cleverly reduced corporate income taxes to lure in many multinational corporations. Kudos to them. I doubt Canada can replicate it. We have resources and resources are hard to move around. I hope we can get our economy to produce more added value products but so far that hasn't worked out.
As I said, by many numbers, it is not (and you know it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
I apologize then, I thought that as we used the same source, you would have noticed the many references in the link you shared to the PPP ranking.
Measuring it in a foreign currency doesn’t without accounting for that is just answering “how many iphones can country X afford” (handwaving away the nuances of what GDP measures with “afford”) which might be a statistic you care about but probably isn’t (and isn’t for the point that was being made).
Same can be said about paying 100x more on prescription drugs and counting that as GDP. Also having the most expensive french fries doesn't make it a bigger economy just because iphones are cheaper.
This is actually valuable for drug exporters (and yet another reason Trump can bully countries around - US market is the most lucrative market there is).
It could be said that the US was the largest economy when it was 10x the next by most measures, because it was clearly just better than the alternatives. Not so much now (their model still turns out the best per-capita numbers for a large country though).
The more important measure is really who has the economy best configured to win a war. I expect China to be able to out-produce the US at mass cheap components, especially for drones, so for military purposes I'd expect China to have the long term edge in the sort of moderate intensity conflict we're seeing around the globe. Hard to be confident though, and the exact nature of such a war is unclear because diplomacy would be a huge factor.
India might be at 18.9 and US 32.4 in PPP but access to US market is worth around 10x more - that's the nominal GDP difference in action.
A American, who can see the writing on the wall leading into the end of the century.
It’s a transnational world, despite all that’s happened. Leftists in America obsess about Corbyn and Sheinbaum. Right-wingers supported Bolsonaro and now Milei. Liberals used to have the hots for Justin Trudeau. Everyone thinks the grass is greener, they just disagree on where.
Beyond that societies can change quickly. Germany, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Peru, Chili, South Africa, every country in the USSR, and China too have changed values dramatically in short periods of time in the past 100 yrs.
Also, China is not putting out videos that say they will dominate any country in the Americas. I'd urge us to take people seriously when they say what they value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V359k45CBY0
I don't have a quantitative way of measuring this but I disagree Europe and Canada are closer in values. Canada has some "Europe" in it but a lot more "North America". If you put a random American and a random Canadian in one room they'll have a lot more common than a random Canadian and a random European. Random examples are suburbia and gun ownership.
Many Canadians are dual-citizens. About a million US citizens live in Canada. Many Canadians work and travel to the US. Business, personal, family relationships etc. Similarly about a million Canadians live in the US.
I've worked a lot with Europeans and Americans (I still do, I work for a large American company with offices in both). I've traveled to the US and to Europe. If you've done that a lot then you know the difference in feeling and culture.
because you have a western centric view on freedom, democracy and human rights. it is certainly not your fault, you were brainwashed to believe it, you are the victim.
when the US elected moron like Trump twice, with the congress full of traitors openly putting a foreign country's (which we are not allowed to name) interest first, when the UK has been in managed decline for decade, when the EU is literally ruled by far left extremists, you want to promote the western freedom and democracy? LOL
I take that as a joke.
Let me address the 2nd point first: some US people are stupid and/or extreme right wing. Because only such a state of mind would explain why something in the center appears to them as "far left", or even "far left extremist". Perhaps it is because the bad US education system never introduced to them what left extremism actually is. E.g. the desire to seize all means of production out of private hands. That is: capital, farm land, companies. Or they would have heard about things like "dictatorship of the preletariat". If they now search for such ideology in EU countries, they wouldn't find anything. But hey, oftentimes they don't even start to search. Due to lack of knowledge and due to having already made up their worldview. No desire to check this worldview against actual facts.
And sure, things like freedom is culturally. As a european, I often see that US people declare their country as the epitome of freedom. And they never talk about e.g. their slavery past. They think that the US is most democratic country and little can they show how this alleged democracy loving country is doing to ban gerrymandering (a thing that in REAL democratic country doesn't exist!). And they think they are the best at human rights, but few people know that their own government solds drugs to get money to overturn southern american society. Or that the US killed far more people --- without verdict! --- abroad than even the awful 9/11 criminals.
But then again: some people can clearly see how e.g. the level of freedom, democracy and human rights vanished in Hong Kong after a real far left extremist regime took over there. And some people are so blind finding excuses for the actual far left extremist regime --- and blaming ones that entirely aren't of being exactly that.
85% of Canadians live within 100 miles/160 km of the border. These are very integrated communities.
Yes, but the culture and values start shifting as soon as you cross the border, and they shift more the further south you go.
I take it this ambitious Canadian grad hasn't had the temerity to protect his privacy before entering the land of the free[0]
You do not have to accept Chinese values to trade with them. And the US themselves does not give a flying fuck about values. They would prop any dictator if it helps to fill pockets. Stop this scaring game.
>"but also compromise and look at the longer term"
In the longer term we should learn to stand on our own and do not put ourselves in the position when the US would be able to strangle us economically.
There is no possible future where our fate is not interlocked with the USA. The USA will always be able to "strangle us economically". Though why should they do that. Carney knows this very well which is why he's generally not burning any bridges. He's being assertive but knows we're going to need to work together - and he says as much. I mean just yesterday he was pressuring the provinces to get US booze back on our shelves, and they agreed. So we're gonna go through another back and forth here but eventually we'll get a new agreement. Maybe soon.
70% of our exports, or about $450 billion dollars go to the USA. $23B to China. This is structural, fundamental, been this way forever, will be this way forever. Half our imports are from the USA. I'm from BC and many business here would not exist without significant trade with the US. There is no replacement with China. China doesn't need or buy the things they make. BC's economy would look like Syria's if we were to decouple from the US.
I'm all for some diversification. I'm also all for building more things in Canada and finding more markets. But this idea that we will decouple from the US is not grounded in any reality. Yes, we're upset. Yes they've made very problematic statements and are ruled by a child. This will pass and Canada and the US will still be here.
Other than economically it's worth mentioning that if the Russians were for some reason interested in taking a bite off Canada the only thing standing between them and us is the USA. We can't even defend ourselves.
Canada at least used to be cleaner and safer and only slightly poorer than the US but since 2019 the divergence has been incredible and now I regret not leaving sooner.
Anyone even slightly above average in intelligence or work ethic will do better in the US, don't let online leftist echo chambers convince you otherwise!
Wow. The US trades way more with China then Canada does. What does that say about values. Your statements are hypocrisy at its finest.
>"This is structural, fundamental, been this way forever, will be this way forever." - "been forever" part is true. "Will be" is totally up to Canada.
>"But this idea that we will decouple from the US is not grounded in any reality" - not yet but is should be the goal. Not decoupled in a sense real isolation but making sure that Canada has enough trade partners and can live without trade with the US.
The present behavior of the United States means that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand need to grow up stop waiting for Britain or the United States to give you something both are past their prime.
You don’t want the United States to be your mommy or your daddy do what is in your best interest moving forward, and I think the rest of the world is catching on do what is in your best interest oh and I don’t mean start or participate in a war.
The clown in the White House time will pass however the damage has been done, and it will take decades to recover from it.
Hopelessly naive, and honestly if this is the mean opinion in Canada I have concerns about their continued membership in FVEY.
If US would wage such 'wars' in past 60 years as China is doing now, world would be in massively better shape and tens of millions would be alive. This is how you expand your hegemony economically in 21st century.
Man, I get the argument you are trying to make, but it simply doesnt work, not in 2026, not when we know how much evil shit US has done to many other countries and its people. There is no reason to ignore all those atrocities unless you want to cherrypick your facts and reach the desired conclusion.
Now a clown wants to rectify that, you run to China? China will literally own you in 50 years.
China absolutely wants to influence Canada. They put in effort to influence Chinese-Canadians. They want our intellectual property (whatever they haven't "acquired" already). They want our manufacturing (whatever is left of it). They interfere with our elections. And sure, they want to sell us stuff as well.
What's our best interest? Democracy, freedom, safety, economical prosperity, "healthy" society, etc.
Australia and New Zealand are far from here so I can't comment. It was never my impression that the US wields a ton of influence there anyways. Canada and the US are neighbors.
Canada has had close relationships with the US for a long time. We fought together in WW-II. But I wouldn't characterize these relationships as "mommy or daddy". We work together and sometimes we don't. The US is the "stronger" partner in this relationship for sure but we have held and still hold our own.
Western liberal democracies need to stick together because what's the alternative? Would Ukraine have held on without the support of the USA? And yes the US could have done better and yes the current admin has done less. Are Canada, New Zealand and Australia going to defend Taiwan? Or South Korea? We've had unprecedented prosperity since WW-II. In the west but not only in the west. The world seemed to be heading in the right direction, and now it's maybe not so much, but breaking the "west" into this multi-polar beast is not a step in the right direction as the world stands today. We have things to fix, here and in the world, but we need to also work together to get there.
Anyways. This is what I am looking for.
We have already compromised a lot, too much and we have decades if not centuries of destroying entire cities and economies to make the Americans happy.
But we simply cannot stand for this anymore. Not when it is clear that American values, at least the values of the current republican elite, are the values of Epstein and degeneracy.
We have given everything to Americans and they have been ungrateful to an insulting degree. No more we simply can't afford it. I don't like Carney that much but no choice was given.
Furthermore well is quite obvious that while China is no paradise for free speech; things like flock cameras or the way the judenburgueoise will punish anyone who criticizes Epstein's beloved country, are blatant proof freedom of speech in America is not absolute.
To anyone in a third-party country, it's incredible that someone still says this without any doubts in their minds about a country whose regime leader is Jeffrey Epstein's best friend and a known PDF. He was voted in by public support. Which values is this compatible with?
Does that mean China's "values" are better? No, but it means it's at the very least not clear cut at all, and you're still pretending that it is. I get that this is due to indoctrination from since you were young, but you're now an adult and need to come to terms with the idea that these things are now far from black and white. It's like a French person saying "the Germans are much closer to our values than the Russians" in 1933. I'm sure you would've said that.
> When a Canadian new grad is faced with an option of going to work in SV or in China which do they prefer?
One who wants to positively contribute to the future of humanity? Realistically, by far the biggest lever to do this is the transition to renewable energy, and by now effectively all of this is done in China. In SV a modern new grad's choices in 2026 are basically working at an AI lab or AI wrapper startup. That's 90% of current SV new grad positions.
He did not win the popular vote in 2016 and I doubt he won it in 2020.
"What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have"[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
However he did win the popular vote in 2024. Meaning that people took a look at his first term, took a look at the Binden years, and thought to themselves "hey, I prefer the first guy". (Or perhaps althernativly, "no way I'm voting for a woman"),
I guess this is democracy in action right? Optimizing for popularity over quality.
I also doubt he won the popular vote in 2024. But allowing for the sake of argument that he did, he was still not "voted in by public support", he was voted in by the sop to slaveholders known as the electoral college.
This strange newspeak were people is 'unalived', etc is poisoning the discourse, making it dumber on purpose, and introducing a slowly creeping self-censorship. I can't understand why is not receiving a much stronger opposition.
Are Canada also against lgbt people, abortion and other common human rights?
I imagine Europe and Australia. "We're not as bad as <random Asian/African country>" is not something to boast about.
Germany legalized same-sex marriage two years after the US, and it's really a non-issue in both countries today. Scott Bessent is married to a man and I don't think I've seen a single politician comment on or care about it.
The reason people on the Internet feel differently is that they have an incorrect understanding of these issues.
And abortion in Germany is practically legal for the 3 months. Though CDU is against abortions the current government hasnt done any step to stiff it, quiet in contrast to Trump government.
Many Americans just ignore Trump. Probably they really think they live in the greatest nation on Earth and Trump is just a minor annoyance or something.
This fact is strange and confusing to many people involved in LGBTQ advocacy, who see sexual and gender diversity as linked issues. They don't understand how someone could possibly square this circle, so they occasionally try to construct 4D chess theories of how Trump secretly hates gay people too. But there's really no evidence of that.
Some of them are, some of them aren't.
Unless the US makes a huge correction in 2028, we are looking to be like the handmaids tale. And I would say China is a culture closer to Canada than that.
But I'm pretty sure a lot of the Uyghurs (or Tibetians) being prosecuted in China are/were also citizens. China's human rights record is also capital-B Bad, and I hope Canada (and the EU) manage to significantly outperform both..
Freedom of speech only exists on paper. One side screeches about "cancel culture" but then hides behind it to mock school shootings, but god forbid you say mean things about dear leader on television!
The current admin doesn't jail people for having wrong opinions. It just sends them to other countries to do the jailing. Or to Gitmo if they happened to be in the wrong part of the world at one point or another.
Alligator Alcatraz and ICE camps sure as hell seem close enough to "re-education" camps to me
If these are the values you are looking at then the difference is slimmer than you think. Until you said tanks I was fairly sure this will be a bait and switch.
I also would like to see Canada stop negotiating with the USA. If Trump says “if you aren’t going to do X, we will do Y”, Canada should just say “so be it” and move towards other trade partners. If you want to trade with us in good faith we are completely open to it, but the bipolar level of instability in trade should not be tolerated.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-spavor-kovrig...
We were punished for following the terms of our extradition treaty with the US. We even treated her super well, letting her stay under house arrest in her fancy Vancouver mansion. We did literally everything we could given the circumstances.
China can and will sabotage western economies at every possible opportunity.
pretty sure the tibetans would disagree, to cite but one example
Two terms of Trump and mishandled foreign affairs has real consequences.
I don't really agree. For one, they did help China, the US eventually caved because US businesses and consumers got really upset. The same can be true here. The admin doesn't care, but the business owners do. They're already being squeezed by tariffs on their parts, further damaging their exports will cause them to complain to the admin. That's something Trump has historically caved on to some extent.
Also keep in mind that the way Canada will do tariffs is the way they should be used, not blanket but strategically to have as little impact on Canadians and as much impact on US businesses as possible.
Reciprocal tariffs will be crafted to specifically to avoid damaging the Canadian economy. Input to Canadian manufacturing for example won't be touched, but other sectors where the product is more of a luxury or there's an easy replacement available will be targeted. Perhaps the digital services tax or similar will make a return.
Don’t tariffs on imports from US help speed that along?
Disagree, the timing is right before important upcoming midterms, and Canada can chose to target potential swing states with the direct results of what happens when you vote republican.
Your reductive statement just fodders further divisiveness and apathy.
We've dealt with propaganda and political change in the past. What worked has always been outreach and engagement, slow deprogramming, in person.
- A corrupt, multi-tier judicial system
- A staggering amount of money in politics
- A woefully misguided superiority complex
- Acceptance that the people have no power anymore
- A complete lack of willpower to go out and protest
- An underfunded and underperforming education system
You guys need a guy like Zohran Mamdami as president.
They are not a rational equilibrium tactic.
The op missed: "There are no deals" here, there are 'some adjustments on some things, partially implemented'.
Most people do not realize how much of a shift that is.
In the past there was always a ton of EU countries helping the US out, in whatever crap the US started. And a lot of European soldiers died. Those soldiers did not help Europe but the US, because of being allies.
Even when some European countries got called names for not helping in Iraq because they called out that the whole Weapons Of Mass destruction was a load of bull** . It did not stop others from helping the US.
Yet, now, what we see as "help" is so minimal, and even countries like Spain not just refusing but active blocking. It shows how much relationships have deteriorated.
Trump thinks of Europa like a vassal state, and every time we say no or delay, it drives him nuts. Or our best "yes", if often a "well, we need to have agreement in all the countries, see you in a few years". Do not think its coincidence, its done deliberately.
In the past when the US said something, beyond maybe France, most countries quickly followed. This is gone ... We know the world has changed, and the old order is finished.
As for the rest of the world, yes the silence in regard to helping the US is deafening. You can see the diplomatic frustration of politicians when they have to talk about Trump and the admins actions. They cannot dismiss them but they really don't want to support them either.
What the Trump Administration does not get is that the US is no longer central to the world economy. Everyone else has a lot more productive capacity now. Trump is running on a 1980s world view.
https://www.ft.com/content/d9922d0b-51a0-48be-811b-42e08f909...
This is the problem of the 2nd Trump admin, the first time was considered a fluke incident and didn't pan out so bad as there was a lot of longer term folks keeping things sort of in check. The 2nd time, it was apparent that there is a significant enough faction of the US population that will ensure this kind of power structure keeps coming back. Trump is but the first of many to operate like he does. There will be more like him.
I must warn some people, who knows which side of politics that will come from. Don't think 'your side' is above it, this kind of rhetoric and rot and creep in a lot quicker than one would think.
Lol >90% of our oil exports still go to the US. China could be good to grow our exports but it's not replacing the US.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
And canada's prime minister is former head of the Bank of England. If there is a deep state, a system of backroom negotiations based on personal connections, Carney is part of that network. Carney is a respected friend of the people who control international monetary policy. Trump is a transactional acquaintance of royals, all whom look down on him as an uncouth commoner. Canada is not the underdog in this fight.
But once they are 'prepared' as best they can, one approach is for other countries to decide / accept that the US is mostly a lost cause while Trump or most other Republicans are in power, which will happen at times. It will affect their economies but they cannot control that. Negotiating with the US only encourages more bad behavior.
The rest of the world could then recreate (or continue) the global trading system, including the WTO, simply excluding countries that violate its rules. This puts the ball in the US's court to participate or not, never slamming the door in the US's face, always welcoming and encouraging them rhetorically, by their rules, and genuinely ('we look forward to our friends in the US joining and enjoying the benefits of doing business with the rest of the world').
In the meantime, global trade rules would be created in the interests of the other countries, without the US having a voice - a great boon after decades of US domination of such rules. This incentivizes the US to join sooner rather than later.
(It seems to me - I have no expertise in this area.)
One, US has been the largest buyer of imported goods. As much as people think turning away is difficult and needs planning.
Two, turning away requires time and planning. Supply chain isn't built in one day. People need time for that.
In the short term - like next 3-4 years - it is going to look like countries caved. But in the long term Liberation Day will be remembered as one of the days which put a nail into the American exceptionalism.
ultimately the US is buying stuff, but its the stuff thats actually valuable and not the USD you get from it. its even easier to move when you cant even buy oil from the gulf anymore, whether in USD or otherwise.
the supply chain problem arrived in trump 1's covid disaster, and hasnt exactly been solved for getting stuff to the US again
There are still more fundamental materials markets that will take years/decades to move away from but that is already happening.
More broadly however, the question that I think everyone should ponder on is, "If the US falls as the world super power, do you think the alternative will be better?"
A huge part of the US's spending is on the military and that is used to stabilize global trade, that is so that the USD is still THE major currency. But recent moves looks like they are trying to keep that while also kicking out the struts that hold up the entire system. It is very illogical, maybe there is a bigger plan but somehow I don't think there is.
Perhaps not, but if you just accept every abuse thrown at you, pretty soon the USA will be just as tyrannical as China. Sometimes having the self-respect to stand up for yourself is more important than the costs.
At the very least, if the US falls as a super power, it seems like we are heading to a tri-polar world (china, EU, USA), at least in the near to medium term. Its not like someone else is going to take over as the sole super power.
The whole 'security' was by intimidation, there is no actual meat on that bone.
The US is already behaving the way we expected China would if they become the king of the hill.
Pax Americana used to guarantee peace, prosperity and nuclear nonproliferation for the countries participating in it. Now we get threats of invasion, threats of being left to fend for our selves, cozying up to a country that is literally trying to conquer our neighbors.
I don’t think it’s anymore a question of _if_, the old world is gone and not coming back.
The WH is running 'wars by executive order' - neither the population nor Congress support it.
I don't think he could every in a million years justify invading anywhere.
Only 'doing stuff from afar, with the air force and special operations' - at most.
We'll have to find out if he loses Congress in a few months, that may make things nary impossible.
The 'real test' for this entire thing is 'what happens after'.
Does the US go back to something recognizable?
Forever MAGA?
Remember - this stuff is not historically abnormal, granted, it took 2 world wars to get us to behave.
It depends on the 10 years after Trump is gone.
It could get worse, it could get better.
If countries of the world decide to trade among themselves, their economies are going to be a lot smaller.
This won't last. There are consequences for behavior on all scales. If you prove yourself untrustworthy and treacherous, people will treat you as such. International politics don't move very quickly, especially if coordination is required. But it will eventually move.
"Winning" at all costs has never ever been sustainable and I don't think see why this time will be different, especially with diminishing real power.
"They make it a desert and call it peace(winning)."
Trump has burnt up the single most valuable asset any country or person can have. Trust.
The countries of the south on the receiving end of US/western 'help' have been disabused of viewing US as 'a shining city on a hill' by their own experience, long time ago.
They saw Carney's Davos speech recognizing the hypocrisy of 'rules-based international order' as just another hypocrisy: you were quiet while those rules suited you, now you squeak, when you are on the receiving end.
But yes, the people in the west are waking-up.
I have gone through the fall of communism. From years when most people actually believed in it (I did not live through that, too young), to years where people knew the system is a sham, but things looked unshakeable, to years where 'something' was in the air, but a real change was unimaginable, to the sudden and very real fall.
We are in 'something is in the air' with the current western system. The problem is that for the communist countries, there was an alternative - the western system (yes, the west's soft power of jeans & coca cola worked). And the communist elites lost their will to power (or had already pre-planned path to oligarchy). Nowadays, there is no clear alternative, and the western elites seem determined to keep the system at all costs (see all the surveillance technology, the push for AI is also relevant). So, the change will be much messier and possibly bloodier than the fall of communism.
Are those different things?
And China, based on my understanding, is looking for ways to reduce US influence anyway at least domestically. So, a worsen-yet-controllable US-China relationship maybe considered beneficial on that end. The tests (lockdown etc) done during COVID time has proven that Chinese people endures much more suffering before they begin to rise up, so the economic problems introduced by not caving to the US is just a small cake for the lead party to handle.
Your characterization that India has caved is factually incorrect and seems to be driven either by ignorance or by mischievous intent.
The US has done more to destroy the system it designed and benefits from in the last 1.5 years than at any time since 1945.
What this entire fiasco is about is China. China is the new superpower. It threatens the American global hegemony because it can't be bullied. Why is China the new Big Bad? To sell weapons. Pretty much the entire of American foreign policy is about selling weapons.
So Liberation Day was a ham-fisted way to try and isolate and bring to heel China. It has failed spectacularly because the dumbest sychophants imaginable are in charge of this administration. Because while doing all this, we're witnessing a lootocracy on the largest scale ever seen. When Trump took office in 2017, the national debt was ~$16T and it had taken ~200 years to get there. It just got over $40T. That's like $2T in interest payments every year just to service the debt.
Long ter bond yields keep going higher. That's going to be a really big problem, particularly because there's a political desire to lower interest rates. That's ismply not going to happen and record-high inflation is going to continue, if not get worse, all while real wages stagnate or decline.
So the US can't economically compete with China. Well, it can't militarily compete either. The US has been deceisively been totally defeated by Iran, an absolutely pointless war of choice. And they think they can bully China? Get the hell out of there. Part of the problem is the (now) $1t+ in annual military budget is just more looting from government coffers.
Empires don't die slowly or quietly. That's really what's happening here. The seeds of destruction for the Gulf security architecture have been sown. While Europe is still an American vassal state, realization is growing that the status quo cannot continue. Unfortunately I suspect a fascist takeover will happen long before Europe divests itself from the US protection racket.
I believe that the late 2020s will be written about in history books as the beginning of the end of American empire.
In the long term the world will adjust to the new reality. As a simple example take the oil crisis from 1970s. The U.S adjusted and now is the world’s biggest producer.
It will take time but in 30 years I would be surprised if Europe would still buy U.S weapons, let U.S tech services rule EU digital markets and so on.
Im also pretty sure that people start looking more to China than before.
The US administration twists facts to suit their agenda. For example, they often complain about the trade deficit the US has with other countries. However, that deficit often (depends on the country) only exists if you exclude digital goods (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.).
If the rest of the world were to restrict the import of those digital goods, in the interest of fairness, the tech lobbyists would swarm D.C. in panic.
Remove that the trade is fairly balanced.
It’s insane that the US administration (said as an American) doesn’t continue to treasure a values-aligned, peaceful, stable, independent neighbor along a massive unprotected border.
But I don’t understand this energy carve-out argument.
That is the ironic part.
The US trade deficit is mostly balanced out by service (often not counted) and investment flows. The US could theoretically end most of its trade deficits if it balanced its budget, thus reducing demand for treasuries. However, that would come with other pitfalls. It would either entail tax increases, spending cuts, or both at the government level and it would then bleed into the standard of living of most Americans as foreign investment slowed down.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to see yields go up as foreigners invest less into the US as they get dinged sending goods here. So maybe that’s ironic…
Macroeconomics are a different beast but I think it still holds (and not that Trump knows a thing about them). A country with a productive economy may buy some valuable products from other countries. It becomes a problem if it's buying everything and not selling anything.
It feels good to say things like the EU and Canada should just ban whatever, but the US can just ban imports of critical goods from Europe too and harm European industries (I’m not in favor of this but it’s certainly an option).
So if the EU can cozy up to China, well we can drop the whole Taiwan issue and cozy up to China too. If Europeans don’t care about democracy in Taiwan maybe we shouldn’t either. Oh and by the way, China is helping Russia prosecute its war against Ukraine (just like Iran and North Korea) but I guess Trump sent some mean tweets so NATO is over, all the alliances are over, the EU and Canada will cozy up to China, and ban all American products. Things that can be easily discarded by both sides aren’t worth much.
Besides we can just distill Chinese modules and release open weights like they do now.
The USA has a long history of organizing coup d'états on democratic governments to prop up their own dictators. Let's be honest here, you guys don't care about Taiwanese democracy, only about keeping TSMC running.
Canada's GDP is 32% exports. Of that, 75% goes to the US, or ~25% of Canada's GDP or $1 out of every $4.
US exports to Canada are 11% and 16% go to Canada or around 1.7% of US GDP.
If both countries decide to start ramping up tariffs, one of them is going to collapse and one won't even notice a difference.
As a reference - in the country I live in, exports to the US rose in the year after "liberation day". Because of 2 things; Americans like to buy stuff and tarifs imposed on everyone doesn't cause importers to source elsewhere - it's just business as usual.
Take for example something as mundane as coffee. Do tarifs mean Americans drink less? (perhaps not). Do they grow more locally (well, no, not least because of ramp-up time to new production.) Tarifs are just a local tax on consumerism.
So take your example above. 25% of the Canadian GDP goes to the US. The question then becomes how much of that is going to be sourced elsewhere instead? And can Canada find an alternative market to make up the difference?
About 30% (of that 25% above) is oil & gas etc. That's easilly sellable on the global market. Not that they'll need to, the US customer will simply pay more. The next 21% is car parts, machinery etc. US Auto makers are already dependent on external parts - maybe they can get them from somewhere else? Somewhere without already higher tarifs?
Other big chuncks are Consumer, Forestry and Industrial goos (15%), Metas (12%) and agriculture (10%). None of these are easily sourced (cheaper) elsewhere.
In other words, tarifs make for good headlines. And there will inevitably be some winners and losers. But the effect on Canada's GDP will be minor. I'm not even sure that Canada needs to reciprocate - Canadian consumers are very good at simply not buying American products. No govt can force the Canadian people to buy Budwizer....
>> If both countries decide to start ramping up tariffs, one of them is going to collapse and one won't even notice a difference.
I agree, but probably not the same way you think. It's US suppliers who depend on exports that very much will notice. American products are very expensive, and Canada is one of the few markets where they are viable. That's why DJT is so upset with alcohol bans in Canada. There are lots of markets for Canadian goods. And ultimately this whole process is encouraging Canadian producers to explore some of those markets, which in the long run is good for Canada.
> American products are very expensive, and Canada is one of the few markets where they are viable. That's why DJT is so upset with alcohol bans in Canada.
American alcohol is "very expensive" and Canada is the only viable market? That makes no sense. It's not like Canada is a bastion of cheap labor.
DJT is bringing up the alcohol sales most likely because business leaders are bringing it up. The overall impact to US GDP is miniscule.
> There are lots of markets for Canadian goods. And ultimately this whole process is encouraging Canadian producers to explore some of those markets, which in the long run is good for Canada.
If there are lots of markets for Canadian goods then why aren't they selling into them now? And the US is the biggest consumer market in the world (2x bigger than the EU which is the next biggest). Losing the biggest market in the world can't be argued to be "minor".
Take hockey sticks. Does this mean Minnesota stops playing hockey? Or they play without sticks? Or maybe they'll buy their sticks from...?
Where I live there was much doom and gloom. Then our exports went up....
Of course small exporters are predicting calamity. It's a good sound bite, and it's definitely the obvious prediction. I'm just not convinced it'll have that effect.
No, it's not. The bulk of Canada's oil sells at a discount (the WCS price), because most of it can only be bought by the US.
In order to change this, Canada would need to dramatically ramp up pipeline capacity to its coasts, and Canadian domestic politics stand in the way of that more than anything else.
* https://www.gem.wiki/Ksi_Lisims_FLNG_Terminal
* https://www.ksilisimslng.com/
* Juice media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI
( note: thanks to a savage sinus blockage my energy terminal capacity-fu is sketchy ATM, feel free to correct and rank global LNG and contrast against oil
edit: Sabine Pass Liquefaction (Gulf of the Americas) is larger than the three I've mentioned: https://www.cheniere.com/about/where-we-work/sabine-pass)
2.) The casual way that you talk about the collapse of my country is offensive. But we’ll be good - thanks for your concern.
“We were close to reaching a comprehensive agreement with the U.S., but they made changes, including threats on French language and culture and Canadian culture that would never be acceptable for that reason,” Mr. Carney said in French. “That marked the end of that stage of negotiations.”
The best comparison I heard for the cultural idiocy is that it's like asking for the US to end SEC football. And ending French language in Canada has about potential benefit for the US as ending college football would have for the Canada: zilch.
There's so much stupidity going on in the US right now that voters don't believe it when it's described to them, because it's sounds like it has to be biased. This is an indictment against the voters, however.
The negotiations are because Canada taxes US cultural exports (movies, etc.) and gives that money directly to their Canadian competitors.
It’s perfectly reasonable for any country to ask that their exports not be penalized with taxes, which is what Canada does to many US cultural exports.
It's not fragmented in a bad way. Having different shampoo brands just over a border is increased competition. We don't want a situation where one company makes all the shampoo.
At some point you have to stop worrying about the things you cannot change. If trump wants a lose-lose deal, so be it.
For the last time...that's not how trade works! People who say this in this context mean well, but are committing the exact same category error/misunderstanding of economics that Trump and his supporters are.
What is the category error here? Where is the misunderstanding?
If you really believed what you wrote, why do you think trade deals exist in the first place? What function do you think they serve?
However, you are overstating the level of dependence. It is significant, but certainly not total. It also cuts both ways to a certain extent.
Also, I explicitly said "energy". That includes electricity (you can't export that anywhere else really) and natural gas (almost all of which is used domestically or exported to the US).
Short term the US needs the energy we sell as they don’t have sources to replace it with. Long term the pieces are already moving into place for more O&G exports via the pacific and selling electricity to ourselves with stronger grid connections.
Our reliance on US trade will diminish slowly, then all at once.
Also your comment implies that Canada's only export to the US is oil. Canada also exports lumber and agricultural goods, as well as electricity, amongst other things.
And the reason why Canada can't just cave is that Trump will just continue to increase his demands, amongst other reasons. Even in this series of negociations when they finally came close to something the US added demands remove Canada's requirement for French on their packaging (even though French is 1 of Canada's 2 official languages) and separate trade ties with other countries.
Is shit gonna suck for the next while for Canada? Yes, but there is literally nothing they can do to prevent it other than give up their autonomy as a country and become a US puppet, which a vast majority of Canadians are adamently against except for a tiny minority in Alberta.
As best as I can tell ~40% of Canada's exports to the US are energy, making it the most dominant export sector by far. One estimate I see is ~$160 annual value [1].
By comparison, lumber accounts for ~$6B. That's a rounding error.
Energy is the most significant Canadian export and it's deeply tied to the US (unfortunately).
[1]: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
If Canada had the ability to sell that oil on the global market, we’d get a better price for it (if you only have one customer you can sell to, you have little pricing power). Western Canada Select trades at a discount to WTI.
US refineries are built for a mix of heavy and light oil and that’s not practical to change. The US can’t just replace Canada with its own oil or imports from elsewhere.
What about Venezuela? Another potential source of heavy oil? It would take decades of investment and development to bring that up to the point where it produces an extra 4 million barrels a day for export. With the uncertain political environment there, it’s unclear where that would come from.
It is a particularly interesting position when the US is trying to counter China. The only hope the US had was an alliances with other Western-style nations, but instead it has been nothing but attacks and diminishing.
Maybe Trump bets on his great relations with Putin and Kim instead.
The US put countering China way behind on its priority list, below "owning the libs" and settling old scores. I am convinced that if the Iran decapitation had worked like Venezuela, which seems to have been what they expected, then Cuba would have been next.
The point is to prop up Putin.
Attacking one of Russia's few allies and weapon suppliers is counterproductive to such a goal, even if higher oil prices also help the Russian state finances.
Yes, the Iran operation 100% served Russia and China. It could not have gone better for them.
And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.
China yes, Russia no.
> And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.
For this to be intentional, the USA would have needed to intend Hormuz to be closed, rather than surprised and upset by it.
(Not that it matters much, but estimates I see say about $50bn, which is closer to the destruction of Wildberries than it is to $100bn).
Cuba is completely insignificant beyond some ideological value.
To get an easy win compared to Iran just before the midterms? Of course, it could end up in a mess, but it's a mess already anyway.
How are those two things squared? Capitalism to these people isn't about free markets, it's about privatized gains and socialized losses.
- when the executive branch owns 11% of Intel. Can I get in line for them to buy 11% of my company, cash?
- when “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls” can come from both Trump and Sanders, about the government manipulating consumer choices.
Capitalism and free markets, in fact, cannot coexist.
Its the people that are the problem. These policies and politics will outcast Trump because middle Anerica and The South are filled with morons.
Leadership matters.
A different leader could take the country in a different direction - with the same voting base.
Eg an actual policy of isolationism instead of instigating multiple foreign conflicts.
That's not even close to an accurate number now. There are many sources e.g. (1)
It's a shame that people mostly learn the hard way, and forget easily. But that's not the support now.
1)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-falls-33-low...
that wasn't even accurate on the day he got elected, considering a third of the country did not vote at all.
What a sad and tired take. Trump won both the electoral and popular vote. Discounting the opinions of over half the country as morons is exactly the type of behavior that got him elected.
This is the exactly the same sad, tired take one hears from republicans whenever you disagree with them on any issue. Pick a random issue, you'll find a republican claiming "this is why donald won" etc.
How have elections been going for donald and the GOP since then? How about approval ratings? Seems like it's way less than half the country now. Less than a third, even. We The People are speaking, let's listen. After all, ignoring Americans is exactly the behavior that caused the GOP to lose elections and the people's approval.
It’s with referring to half of the country as morons. If that’s the starting point for a debate it’s not likely to be a sincere one.
I agree that it is not a good or sincere starting point for debate.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
Speaking as an independent non-voter.
see independent voters polling don’t matter in the electiona since you don’t vote. /s
Some days I feel I could start a whole revolution against taxation without representation...
You’re telling me that this country is capable of learning?
A lot of extrapolations are made out of the 10 people who responded.
Or maybe I want something a little more significant than "we asked around the newsroom, and 35% of fox news reporters approve of the current administration". Cool, thanks, but that's not helpful or even a useful datapoint.
The state of the art (which confirms this ~35% approval number) is far more rigorous than that.
Start with a meta-review of historical accuracy and transparency, eg: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...
Details on methodology and sample size can be Googled, eg: https://poll.qu.edu/methodology/ , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/24/ev... , https://www.google.com/search?q=Marquette+University+Law+Sch..., etc.
Sample size is less important than you might think, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...
I doubt that is going to happen. Trump is going keep the strings behind the party, fucking everybody hard, until finally he dies or otherwise implodes. What is left of American democracy when that happens is a whole another thing.
He didn't say that it would be $1.99/liter.
The EU should abolish their tariffs and let the clowns in the US do whatever they feel like.
> while reaping the benefits of access to your market.
Huh, what? Trade is a win-win situation: you and your people benefit from imports, too.
And that also answers your second objection - if governments never gave preference to business interests over people, the world would look very different.
And the rest of your domestic businesses and consumers suffer.
You can also tax all right-handed people and give the proceeds to all the left-handed people in your country.
The only real concession the EU made was just allowing Trump to tariff them at a certain rate, and not counter-tariffing back (with various escape clauses).
While the EU response certainly wasn't a feel-good display of chest thumping, I think it was somewhat effective. He was able to strut around and feel big, and they were able to move on.
The only reason the EU would really want to apply counter tariffs against the USA would be to either make a point, or because they are actually afraid that exports from the USA could outcompete EU products unless tariffed, but this just isn't really the case right now.
___________________
The only form of retailiation I think the EU should actually be pursuing is the equivalent of tariffs on US software. This is the area that the USA is a highly competitive 'exporter', and putting up barriers agaisnt these software services would be a good way to hurt the USA, and protect / stimulate domestic alternatives.
No. Van der Leyen also promised EU investments into the USA. This is betrayal as well; that money should go into EU countries. Or Canada.
The EU has no mechanism to make those investments in the USA, and no mechanism to force any member state or company to make investments.
They literally just made up a number and said "oh yes, we'll make a bunch of investments" with zero intention of doing anything to make it happen.
Russia went into the war with armed forces that turned out as you say (possibly except the nukes, hard to tell unless they attempt to use one); the war forced them to develop substantial drone and anti-drone capabilities that the EU nations are not yet in a position to counter.
I suspect that if my country gave Putin what we give to the US - military bases where they can do whatever they please no questions asked, real-time intelligence access, unofficial favored supplier status for anything that might be control-relevant, quiet veto power over any national policy decision deemed "strategic" - then we wouldn't have to worry about invasion - from Russia anyway. Why invade what you already own?
I think that price is a little too steep, though. Not to mention that the US would then be at least as willing to topple governments/invade as Russia currently is.
If you don't get it, I am talking about the Russian naval base on Crimea that helped directly in taking over Crimea.
Then, because it isn’t on-premise anymore where you could just continue running without paying for the service contract you lose direct access to the product. So that might even mean whole companies going under.
You pull the plug the money stops rolling in. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something vs buying something but buying is a ALOT easier than selling.
You can easily choose where to buy but choosing to sell is a lot trickier. Pull the plug on AI and the EU will switch to Chinese models. Trade negotiations and relations are very fragile and difficult to curate and maintain. Very easy to rip up.
There are entire governments in the EU with workflows built around Microsoft products that have no real 1:1 alternatives. If a governmental procedure stipulates that a ministry uses Windows w/ Office365, it uses Windows w/ Office365, no room for an argument. If anybody pulls a plug here, the consequences will be unimaginable.
It's nice that a single German state has switched to LibreOffice, but the rest of Germany, or the remaining 26 countries might take years, if not decades, to certify and permit someone else's solution.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
In an all-out economic war, anything could happen. The source code of Microsoft products probably exists somewhere in Europe (since they have European offices) and definitely binaries, since it's run on European servers. Once nobody plays by the rules anymore, all bets are off.
That said, a trade war would hurt both badly and it would be an epic fail on the side of the US administration. (Since the EU would not start such a trade war by itself.)
The US are making a fortune on gas at the expense of Europe an it's not that the promise to buy gas is meaningless because unenforceable within Europe, it's that it was already happening in practice. And that makes Europe even more dependent on the US (while the complaint was that we could't buy gas from Russia and depend on them).
But this is also why the EU is aggressively pursuing and building up alternatives, including investments in Canada's ability to export LNG, but also buildouts of solar, wind, and batteries.
Solar and batteries come with their own dependencies on China, but at least those are a different sort of dependency than fossil fuels. If China stops exporting solar / batteries, the ones we have will still keep functioning for decades while alternatives are built up.
Unfortunately, this couldn't be further from the truth:
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/12/head-of-iea-roasts-euro...
Here are some specific numbers:
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/many-building-r...
The EU is heavily investing in renewables, but mainly to phase out coal rather than gas, and it's absolutely not electrifying its economy.
You can see this in the EU Emissions Trading System. It covers about 40% of all emissions, but leaves out buildings (dominated by gas) and transportation (dominated by oil). Since electricity is covered, it actually encourages oil and gas over electricity.
Furthermore, member states like Germany are resistant to taxing gas higher than electricity:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/17/germany-warns-...
Despite the wars in Ukraine and Iran, gas is still encouraged over electricity in many European countries.
China and some other Asian countries have adopted the opposite approach. They aim to replace oil and gas by all possible means, including coal (although it's not the preferred choice).
The EU has been massively increasing its imports of gas from the US since the war in Ukraine started.
Promising to buy US gas is not a false promise it is primising to do something that is already reality.
I think you also underestimate the links between government and energy companies when it comes to import policy, even if perhaps there nothing formal at EU level. On the other hand, you are also implicitly acknowledging those links when you mention pursuing alternative suppliers.
The only thing that Europe is "aggresively" doing is failing again and again on strategic issues.
Not to mention current EU stated goals is to reduce consumption by 50% by 2030. Which is coincidentally pretty US and Russia imports combined sized, and timed pretty well with the expiration date of the EU/US trade deal.
The UK is the same as the rest of Europe. They don't leverage their gas reserves and have a shambolic renewables and nuclear strategy (or lack thereof...)
But re:DMA see the most recent Apple app store post on here. Kinda feels like the EU folded too easily there as well.
This would not be the first time that Apple unilaterally claimed something was DMA compliant, and then the EU had to come out and say "no, that's clearly not"
https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/18/tracking-and-new-commerc...
Not sure how credible this is though
Apple recently received a very favorable settlement instead of serious fines and enforcement actions for blatantly refusing to follow the DMA for the entire time it was in force.
In November 2025, they were working on gutting GDPR; I don't know what exactly actually passed so far.
EU has carbon tax internally and they are rolling out CBAM to prevent "carbon exports" (manufacturing stuff outside EU and then importing those product without tax). CBAM is currently used directly some high-emission sectors: iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers, cement, electricity, and hydrogen.
EU importers require granular data on the embedded emissions (both direct and indirect). US companies in these supply chains have had to overhaul how they track and verify carbon intensity down to the sub-supplier level to help their EU buyers comply with strict European reporting standards.
EU will gradually expand CBAM after allowing supply chains to adjust.
If anything, the major gap is the EU's lack of cheap drone manufacturing, but even that is starting to make progress with help and integration from Ukraine.
> In 2025, Russia produced an estimated 7 million artillery shells,
vs.
> Germany has rapidly scaled up artillery ammunition production, led by defense giant Rheinmetall. Output targets have surged from roughly 70,000 shells per year prior to 2022 to a projected 1.1 million to 1.5 million rounds annually by 2027–2030,
so now vs. "projected" and Russia still heavily outnumbers the former Nazis.
Which is to say give me a fricking break, I live in the closest EU and NATO capital city to Southern Ukraine, I know my shit.
The EU also simply has way more capacity to scale up shell production than Russia does, and the EU is building up stockpiles while Russia uses up everything they make.
Germany (by itself) is apparently out-producing the US artillery shell production.
* https://www.newsweek.com/germany-overtakes-us-in-ammunition-...
Russia's GDP is below that of Italy (and barely above Canada, who is in NATO):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
If the Europeans really want to, they could produce a lot more by converting over to 'war mode'. Certainly they need to do more with current geopolitics, but there is no need to crank it to 11.
As an Italian there's definitely been a perceptible shift due to the increase in defense spending. Leonardo now makes TV ads (something I had never seen before), they advertise on newspapers (...)
Off topic, but it's funny to me how the Leonardo TV ads basically skips over the defense part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXytSNOt_0I
Not wrong, but GDP is a rough metric of economic and industrial capacity. So if Italy wanted to, it could convert its economy to produce tanks and missiles at a similar rate as Russia is doing. And Italy is just one member of NATO:
Exactly. (What do you think happened during WW2? When war broken out everyone learned to make tanks (and planes, and machine guns, and…). In Ukraine a whole bunch of people learned how to make drones that never made one before. )
Italy can make more expensive tanks that would amount to a bigger GDP. It doesn't mean it'll make more and better tanks.
Just because Italy is making one kind of tank now does not preclude them making another type of tank later on. If a design change needs to be done, the important part is that there is some kind of tank building capability around, and the rest can be adjusted as needs arise.
This is pure NAFO-oid cope, which it shouldn’t surprise me seeing the technical audience here (no Svechin stans on HN, that’s for sure, knowing your Svechin doesn’t ever bring any VC money nor big-tech employment), but still. Back to arrr stupidpol for me.
dunno why youd want tanks and not drones though, when even russia's new tanks with anti-drone defenses can be taken out by 30ish drones
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...
And I said "had", because this was before Ukraine destroyed most of their oil plants, and refineries, and their navy, and their petrol fleet, and the online stores, and before they killed a big chunk of their male workforce. And before they have an increasing debt with China and NK that they will need to repay somehow.
At this point everybody knows that the Russian economy will not survive after the war is over and that the country most probably will split.
Europe can deal with a ruined post-Ukraine war Russia.
They would just stand some suffering, but for sure 500 millions of motivated people can build more and faster than 100 millions of a Russia tied by deliberate anti-efficiency rules build to please oligarchs. The only question is how much damage could Russia do, before Moscow and St Petersburg are reduced to ashes as retaliation if they dare to try the final solution.
The hybrid war is the real problem. Russia can sponsor still many street "Syrian" terrorist attacks in Sweden, or cause a train wreck here and there, or burn Malibu for basically peanuts. They can do this for years and years.
I really would love to see this, but the sad truth is that there are no real alternatives for a very big amount of software products. In the end, the eu residents will simply have to pay more for a lot of software products, and that's it :(
Yeah, there will be immediate pain but if EU competitors can spring up because the American software giants are disadvantaged it'll slowly erode the reliance on US's software.
It's also a matter of two advantages the USA has:
1. being a homogeneous market culturally-linguistic, there are dozens of countries with very different cultures and languages in Europe, it's not as easy to scale continent-wide as it is to scale country-wide in the USA.
2. exhuberant privilege of the USD, it gives a major advantage on capital markets where capital is sloshing around in the economy, it's much easier to find billions of USD parked somewhere wanting to get better returns. The EU doesn't have this privilege, investments need to be more conservative.
Canada should abolish their tariffs and let the clowns in the US do whatever they feel like.
He did a pretty good explanation of the difference between theory and practice in his Rest is Politics Leading podcast interview recently :).
Sticks in my mind and well worth listening.
China put tariffs specifically on the sectors that voted for Trump and depended on sales to China.
When the other party is not playing the same game, or not playing in fairness, then the best game theoretical move is to cease cooperation and retaliate.
Since you are getting hurt you play tit-for-tat to get the other to knock it off.
So you add export taxes to items they care about (oil/fertilizer/...) and compensate the losses incurred by existing industries.
You also add tarriffs on items that have alternatives, like alcohool.
Maybe add tarriffs on items with elastic prices, say 100% tarriff on digital services. Software services will have to adjust prices so they end up the same after tarriffs since few people will accept youtube or netflix doubling in price.
This hurts both countries but will get a result - either free trade or no trade.
In the meanwhile, Trump's entourage has derivative bets on this and take massive proffits shorting everyone. For them, this is all massively profitable.
For bilateral trade it doesn't matter much whether country A imposes import tariffs or country B exposes export tariffs.
Basically, the whole talk about retaliatory tariffs is silly.
Why?, retaliatory - in response to US, tarriffs - taxes, whether on export or import, as you noted, doesnt matter much. Effect depends on who needs to either sell or buy the tarrifed items the most.
Just cut the crap, and unilaterally remove your tariffs and refuse to play the game. If the US wants to tax their importers, that's their own domestic silliness.
I can't understand why there isn't a single country that did that.
how did you dream this up?
Don't assume EU is stupid.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/08/18/voka-invoerheffingen...
Europe can afford to kick the can down the road and wring as much out of the remaining trade as possible while forging replacement deals with others in the meantime. They know how to buy time with Trump using flattery and sleight-of-hand, and are doing a pretty decent job of it given the rush.
Canada has no such luxury, because Trump already views Canada as weak and exploitable, and so his assaults and "we've decided to change the deal" will never end. That requires a different response tactic, even though it will cause a lot of short-term pain.
You'll also note the veiled threat in Carney's speech yesterday: "Canada fuels American growth: supplying 99 per cent of their natural gas imports, 85 per cent of their electricity imports, 60 per cent of their crude oil imports. I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that energy."
Timing an energy war to November would be brutal.
He provides some details about the last minute demands that the US made including restricting Canada's ability to trade with other countries. He also refers to the US signature as being written in "pencil".
The words were mostly diplomatic. The expression was not.
You mean Pedophile Island?
Ganging up on the US isn't likely to work well.
Is out of ammo.
Cannot win against Russia in the proxy war with Ukraine.
Cannot match China with their long term energy plans.
Has debt that explodes
Has a president that sells early access to his tweets for 100k$ a year ; insider trading in the open.
The USA are not in a good posture right now.
Ukraine existing even with Trump waging war against Iran negates this argument
Ukraine is keeping its head out of the water despite Trump doing everything it can to help Russia. It shows how much Ukraine is resilient and innovative with drones.
Trump has depleted the ammo needed by Ukraine and Taiwan.
Imagine if he had helped Ukraine by forcing Musk to provide Starlink connections reliably and provided Patriots as needed.
BRICS is just that for oil.
The US is not indefatigable. As of March 2026 the nine largest foreign holders of US Treasury securities are Japan, UK, China, France and Canada.
All nations the US is jerking around. If they dump bonds US in big trouble. Oh, and the US is almost $40T in debt.
We'll go trade with other countries and stop giving the troll the attention it craves.
This was one of the very embarrassing things that happened to Donald as a boy, done by Freddy Trump (his late older brother), when everyone had enough of him.
Take the USMCA - Canada and the US at times team up against Mexico and then the pendulum swings, line item by line item - no one has anyone’s back and they all have short memories
A deal with the US when others turns away from them is still a good deal
obviously democracy is still better than the alternative though
One note: aren't these sentences strange - like a series of half-thoughts? Especially the 2nd paragraph.
> Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market. > > We have worked in that context. To strike a fair deal that would provide the best access to the U.S. market and greater certainty to Canadian businesses and workers.
Yes, I had the thought that it sounded a lot like speech.
Thanks.
Yes, but the pain is likely unavoidable. The alternative is much more pain, but slightly later/more spread out, from repeatedly giving in.
Further, dairy and poultry are an interesting one. Do you think the US is asking us to eliminate supply management? Because you should know they aren't. They are asking us to keep it, but also to allow the US to dump their subsidized excess production here. How do you think that plays out?
But let's imagine that dairy became free trade (which is not at all what Trump is looking for, btw): Imagine that Canadian farmers, much like New Zealand farmers, make a product more efficiently than the US and start taking the US market? How do you imagine that plays out? Hint: It yields new protectionism, because the US can only win in every area.
There is no good play here but waiting for this pedo bag of shit and his administration of conmen and pedophiles (like that greaseball Nutlick) to be gone. At the same time removing all dependencies on the US.
So is your position that only Canadian firms should be allowed to operate in Canada in general? Foreign competition helps us because then we benefit from further specialization and trade which increases everyone's standard of living.
> Imagine that Canadian farmers, much like New Zealand farmers, make a product more efficiently than the US and start taking the US market? How do you imagine that plays out? Hint: It yields new protectionism, because the US can only win in every area.
Well, who else benefits is consumers who get to purchase products of higher quality, convenience, and affordability. Also employees of the dairy sector who face higher competition from firms bidding up their labour. Investors, who have more investment opportunities and therefor higher yield. Government and entitlement recipients who benefit from tax revenues from these incomes and investments.
When you are 1/10th the size of your neighbour, this generally doesn't work to your benefit. Every integration has led to the hollowing out of Canada. NAFTA cum USMCA has been a catastrophic mistake for Canada, and we're so deep down that well that loads of idiots wants us to dig even deeper.
Right now the only rational action is starting the six month expiration on USMCA. It not only was always a bad deal, the compromises we made for it stay while the US tries to hollow out even more industry.
Fuck that.
Why won’t the same logic apply to Canadian tariffs?
Being in Canada though this does look v. short sighted of the US. All this is going to achieve is pushing Canada much closer to other countries, particularly China, which at least superficially these negotiations were meant to prevent.
They don't respect anything. They stand for nothing. Their only concern is to pay lip service to Trump's crazy ideas.
Also, of course, extracting as much money from the state as possible
Wow, a global Great Depression II really does look like it is in the cards.
s/Trump.*ideas/Line their own pockets/
For example, the first tariff wave was a huge transfer of wealth from citizens to corporations in the OBBBA. First, the income from tariffs was projected to offset the tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Then, when the Supreme Court found them unlawful, the money had to be returned. But first the corporations let consumers pay the tariffs by increasing product prices, but now it is the same companies who get the tariff refunds. And since they are obviously not going to give the money back to the customer, it lined their pockets.
Unfortunately, Canada (where I live) will feel way more pain from this than the US. I am not sure Trump will have respect for this at all, but the alternative was to put in a permanent trade deal that significant disadvantaged Canada.
Similarly, people who don't have self-respect don't respect others.
Carney is very popular for a reason.
What exactly does this word mean? It definitely doesn't mean a stable set of agreements that can be relied upon to ensure a stable future business environment. That's not in the cards.
What I suspect Carney is doing, and fully support as a Canadian, is running down the clock. An agreement is America isn't worth anything without leverage to back it. The main goal is to stall to delay the damage as much as possible while diversifying away our economic dependence on the US. There is no other long-term goal - everything else is just appearances and showmanship.
And we already have an actual NATO example, where one member attacks countries around the world, one of those countries fights back, threathening to attack american bases even in europe if needed... and now other nato members might get involved in a war that was started by one of it's own members, that no one else really wanted, and side on the side of the agressor ( https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/nato-chief-reaffirms-allianc... ). To turn back into economics, what happens when EU declares an "economic war" against china, china retalites (by eg. banning exports of something we really need)... does canada go along and threathen it's own economy? Or do they form a new "NATO" with "everyone-else except EU"?
It's unfortunate and in some ways unfair. I hope the Canadian economy will move towards more open trade partners and will proposer.
The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is. A logical consequence of the tariffs is that Canada, Europe and other American allies focus more on those who are willing to trade with them, including China.
If I put a 2/3y contract in place with an American supplier, there's a fair chance that I might have to deal with 10-50% tariffs at some point during the contract. This does make (long)-term business deals with the US risky.
> The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is.
This is something so far removed from the way normal, constructive way people (have to) think and behave with each other as a prereq to participate in society that they will inevitably fail to see this parasitical dynamic, because there is no way they can relate to that from their own frames. Even when we learn about this we will instinctively dismiss it. It doesn't fit our frame of reference, so we decide this can't be true.
Most obviously Southern Ontario is living in a dreamland where inexplicably ICE autos remain a viable industry ad infinitum.
Some forced reality, by any means, will in the long run prove to be welcome.
Canada has manufacturers that the US doesn't (and won't for at least 5 years) and vice-versa.
The Quebec PM did say that if the dairy industry wasn't happy they wouldn't put US alcohol badk on the shelves, which would have effectively killed the whole thing.
While a factor I doubt this is the whole story though.
No story can be told in a HN comment. No story can be fully told in words.
However, having spent much of my existence around the Canadian diary industry it is clear that it has always been the biggest sticking point in US and Canada relations. Not just today, but that's been the case for my entire life.
It'd be like trying to convince the US to reduce their Corn cartel. Except the corn industry keeps prices low, paid for by the American tax payer and demand mandates, and the Dairy cartel keeps prices high so consumers pay for the lack of competition.
I suppose that explains why Canadian's won't allow the staple foods to also be supply managed, only accepting it for luxury foods (and once tobacco) that wouldn't cause a crisis if they disappeared, but on that realization we're back to dairy being more like taxis than essential calories.
We now know that if we allow other countries to have undue leverage over us, they will eventually use it against us. Have to think long term here. What kind of Canada will my grandchildren inherit?
Isn't that already the practical reality when the USA has unfettered access to sell the food the animals eat in Canada? Having control over the milk supply doesn't offer much when you don't have any live cows in which to produce it with. I remember what Canadian dairy farms did during the US corn subsidy heyday (hint: they happily bought the corn that sold for less than it cost to produce). Canada is only fortunate that the US backed off on those subsidies a decade or so ago, but that could very easily reverse again, especially if there ever became motive to sink another country.
> We now know that if we allow other countries to have undue leverage over us, they will eventually use it against us.
Doesn't that make dairy an especially poor food to weather conflict as it is, generally, quite hard to keep from spoiling? Your case might be stronger if we were talking about wheat or something like that which can sit idly in bins for long periods of time, but there is no such protections on it or anything else other than poultry and eggs which are also hard to maintain.
I don't think so. Time really isn't on Carney's side either.
Carney's new tariffs fall on those who, in aggregate, did not vote for him. The average Carney voter has been very vocal about wanting to pursue this tactic- that's why they elected him. (That average voter is an Eastern retiree whose holdings are generally in real estate, so they don't care about any other economic sector beyond that which keeps their property values high, especially compared to the feel-good Elbows Up stuff.)
But Carney's currently having trouble just keeping the country together at this point. That's why he's approving projects he really doesn't want to approve out West, like those oil pipelines, because the West has credibly signaled that that they might just ban Carney and his Eastern voting block from making law and collecting tax from them if development of their part of the country is hindered any further. But if it's not hindered, they'll grow in political power, which is also an inherent threat to Ottawa's power (just not immediately).
And yet here Carney is- for the second time now- imposing more economic roadblocks that drive up consumer prices and put more people out of work for no reason other than his voting block wanting it that way. "Just retaliate" might be the least bad option for Carney to pander to that voting block, but every concession to them drives the country closer to separation, and that has time pressure too.
Outside of the small fringe communities that support it, the reaction of the broader country has been to actually shift MORE into hardline stances against the US, as the effort is seen largely as an American manufactured thing.
Additionally, I'd advise to take with caution perspectives from any sources that would characterize the province of Alberta as "the west".
Not really, though. Despite what even a good chunk of Canadians (or yourself) might think, the country doesn't end at Toronto.
If the government wasn't worried about the effects, they wouldn't be in any hurry to approve the infrastructure projects; they've been in the works for a very long time, stalled out. Urban Easterners claim to believe the planet will explode if they're built, and the governments they elect act accordingly, but it's really just a power thing.
Additionally, I'd advise you to not think you know better than the people that actually live here.
The government's actions are much better explained by a sudden actual, panicked focus on actual development of the economy towards some combination of diversification and domestic demand - after the governing party's leader was replaced by arguably a much more results oriented PM after having been governed for a while by a much more vibes oriented PM.
Opening up the pipeline projects required more than just "conceding" to Alberta, it required negotiating with BC and the native tribes that would have a say in the path and ensuring they got the concessions they needed. Boring work. Not really meme material and doesn't make the headlines.
Between all the things the government has been doing - the oil sector work, the acceleration of military procurement, the various bilateral trade agreements, and work on easing internal trade restrictions, acceleration of internal projects - it's easy for some interest or another to cherry pick a particular set of events and use them to paint a narrative.
These narratives would be more compelling and maybe work better at other times, but the issue currently is that the American president is just so effective at drowning out any of these. There's nothing quite so unifying as an obnoxious tyrant rambling on about your country in disrespectful terms.
The commentary (mistakenly) assuming my nationality could probably have been left out of your response :)
It's basically what Canada is doing to the US with dairy, except with Chinese cars.
From the US strategic perspective this is moving out of the frying pan and into the fire.
But hey, they have cheap shit, so what better wagon to hitch your country to?
There are zero Canadian automobile assemblers; they are Canadian subsidiaries of American companies, with some parts manufacturers being here.
Assuming American companies (and companies from subordinates like Japan) leave, what would be the problem in having a similar relationship with China? Is it because their manufacturing is more integrated?
Toyota has massive assembly plants in Canada which net export vehicles to the USA. My rav4 hybrid was built in Woodstock Ontario.
Some EU carmakers are fighting back but it's very hard when politicians managed to have energy price in the EU being about 7x higher than those carmakers in China do pay.
I'm not for tariffs but China is dumping and if we don't all want to end up being vassals of China, we should at least protect some of our industries.
And as "good" as chinese EVs are, I'm sorry but they're not anywhere near the quality of, say, what German cars used to be.
If western carmakers had been given a reasonable timeline to switch to EVs and reasonable energy price, the situation would be different.
EU carmakers may be saved by people preferring to buy cars from their own continent but that remains to be seen. The latest BMW EVs, for example (once you remove the spying / remote control issues: but that affects chinese EVs doubly so), are apparently very fine machines.
To be fair, German cars aren’t anywhere near the quality that German cars used to be, either.
Nice Jedi Hand Wave there.
That's the issue.
China invested in producing cheap energy. Most of the rest of the world did not.
At root, economics is about turning energy into goods and services. If the root industrial input of your competitor is cheaper than the cost of that same root industrial input to you, you're gonna need some incredible efficiencies elsewhere in that production pipeline to pull even.
At this point, the EU should be all about keeping the other major powers at arm's length, (economically and militarily), while pursuing renewable electrification with all deliberate speed.
That should be everyone else' strategy going forward as well by the way. Without cheap energy in the next global economic phase, your nation or bloc is dead in the water.
You mean coal[1][2]?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
China dominates global clean energy investment, accounting for more than half of the $1.1 trillion invested worldwide between 2019 and 2025, while the United States contributed approximately $236 billion, representing less than a quarter of the total. - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/china-spen...
Though coal has dropped as a percentage of their portfolio fairly dramatically, and in absolute twh has been stable since 2010, with other energy sources growing.
Especially with being well behind in the current AI arms race. You need the opposite of a "workers utopia" to do all the things the EU needs to do, and do them fast.
They either stay with the US or become a vassal of Xi Jinpeng.
EU and even USA should start doing something reasonable. Like introducing quota on how much overall can be imported/exported to protect local markets. Like lets say 40%.
Everyone gets a piece of cake.
But lets be honest, germany (my country) also never played fair. We gained quite a lot of export strength through the Euro and overall german politics.
And its not just the energy prices, it was quite clear what the energy prices going to be but no one really invested into reducing them early or fast enough at all. No one cared. BMW new factory in hungarie though does has a lot more reneablw and was able to continue production despite hungaries energy issue.
In China a person makes 500-1000 per month, in germany the same person makes a lot more.
China you have raw resources and cheap labor and cheap energy on EVERY SINGLE point of the process. From iron ore to the assembly itself.
And it doesn't matter much anyway because with the current and future grade of automatisation, a lot less money is getting directly to the people.
We need laws enforcing the rich to pay the taxes and/or invest A LOT more a lot faster and a lot broader.
We need real politics and not this garbage happening in germany or in the USA or in Russia.
They are 80% there for 30% the price as a consumer it’s a tremendous deal
What percentage of European automotive manufacturing costs come from energy?
Every baffling, self destructive move Trump makes, basically always aligns to a long stated goal of Russia.
Let's be serious, that has nothing to do with the Canadian situation, which has more than enough going on without needing to imagine things.
Edit to add: the extent to which many of you will apparently blame anything and everything on Putin is extraordinary. Just because the sun shines on Putin as well does not mean he made it do so.
europe and east asia whove been helping to fund and arm ukraine are also taking the real pressure from iran and the US halting energy exports from the gulf.
the oil price for high enough to where russia gets paid the same amount despite having most of its infrastructure blown up, vs having its infrastructure blown up and also the oil proce being low.
The war with Ukraine is currently doing huge damage to Russia. Maybe Putin wants to be more securely in charge of a diminished Russia. IMO again, I doubt that.
He would also want the munitions stockpile to be depleted, which it is now.
Though I do agree, not literally every move Trump does is on a string from Putin and the Iran war isn't one; it sure still is mighty convenient all the same to make the US military look weak and incompetent.
The irony is that China is the big winner from all of this, simply by staying above the fray and making trade deals with all the countries that more bellicose superpowers start fighting. When your adversary is making a mistake, let him.
This is impractical. There is a hierarchy of thousands of Mullahs that ascend when you kill off one. There is no "head". It's a distributed hierarchy or hydra, rather than an effective dictatorship. ofc, Trump wanted to appease Bibi and Trump fired most of the advisors who object to his bad ideas, so it was a perfect storm for a global quagmire.
They represent two completely opposite poles, geopolitically. Not horseshoe theory compatible: they are mutually exclusionary.
They could be both pulling at the strings, often in different directions with varying success. It could even be tracked by the people going in and out of favor with the admin: MTG, Carlson, Gubbard riding high? Russia's pull is stronger. Them becoming pariahs reduced to criticizing the Iran war from the peanut gallery? Israel has taken over.
The Green Movement in Europe, which Trump opposes, was best thing to happen to Putin.
As far as I can see, where Trump goes wrong is the same place the social democrats go wrong: believing in economic fallacies. In Trump's case that would be the belief that tariffs are beneficial.
He also on rare occasion aligns with very socialist leaning politicians like Elizabeth Warren, like when he sought to prevent private equity from buying up housing — which totally misdiagnoses the cause of the housing shortage. But it's these economic fallacies that makes Trump popular for the same reason social democrats are popular. The vast majority of people don't understand economics.
"We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market."
[1] _ https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement...
The US was a good faith actor, especially relative to its power. Now it is not. It is not good for the world's most powerful military and economy to stop "pretending" to be a good faith actor, and it is not something you should find any joy in.
I mean, in a way Trump's tendency to back out of everything, good or bad and base his entire foreign policy relationship with your country based on who he last spoke to is predictable, but predictable in a way the only winning move with US relationships is not to play
I'll throw in China, which might want whats best for Chinese influence even more than it wants to sell you cheap consumer goods, but it's also very, very predictable in what it wants from any sort of international agreement with you and these days has an abundance of capital and the ability to sell you most things the US can sell you for less...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/melania-trum...
The world is watching this story just like the world watched Davos.
Last night will encourage further decoupling of the US for nations other than Canada.
idk if Trump 2028 will happen or not. I will say with conviction no matter who is in office by then will not rebuild trust around the world in their tenure. Too much damage is done to the US's reputation.
The only way that the US can start rebuilding this trust is that the incoming Democratic President and Congress (assuming we are so lucky) immediately starts by prosecuting Trump and his family (and results in actual jail time, not just fines or small stays), zero out their government contracts, fire most of the people installed in government since 2025, expand the Supreme Court, and remove the fillibuster. I know people think ideas like that are extreme, but really, what else is going to convince the rest of the world that the US has cleaned up their act? It has to start at home first.
If Trump goes to prison, that’s when I leave, because that will be the moment historians point to as “no going back”.
And I reject your premise that putting one's leaders in jail will only lead to an infinite spiral of partisan kangaroo courts because other democracies manage to hold their leaders to legal account without going into a death spiral.
And it's honestly weird and more than a bit disturbing how controversial that simple concept has become. I guess we really do want kings here.
But... that's still perfectly legal, isn't it? All of these little backdoors the founding fathers added to the executive as some vestigial organ of monarchical power just because they couldn't trust the people in "we the people" maybe should be reconsidered. If we don't want presidents to be able to pardon themselves and anyone else without limit, there are ways to make that happen. Never even bothering to convict any president of a crime doesn't even attempt to fix that problem however.
It does say that the president cannot pardon an impeachment, but that's not the same thing at all.
can you really point to a single government where they dont illegally communicate outside of logged channels, or any such things, to scam the voters? or where they intentionally promise something they have zero intention of keeping, or lying about whether its possible. and of course some such things are not considered crimes because the very people who would then be violating the law would be the ones who MAKE the law.
the vast majority of politicians worldwide are super criminals doing things that if you or I did even 1/100 what they did, they would lock us up and throw away the keys.
So I’m hoping the justice department either doesn’t have enough of a case to convict, or has enough of a case that the whole country falls in line. The in between, it’s time to get out. Because shit will go downhill very fast.
So what you're saying is that the Republicans would become an angry party consisting of those who embrace impunity for their politicians regardless of the brazenness with which they break the law.
I really cannot imagine what that would be like.
That has always been clear, seeing how it is the default mode of operation for empires throughout history. The solution here is separation of powers: the ruler itself is bound by rules and institutions that provide a check on their power, and in turn those institutions protect the ruler after stepping down.
It is Trump and the Republican party that chose to abandon that solution. There already is no going back from that choice.
a de-nazification program similar to germany post-WW2, combined with a shredding and full rewrite of the US Constitution by western allies to bring it in line with estonia's as an example, in addition to clearing house with the Trumps is the kinda thing that would start building trust
I'm not hopeful for a full Constitutional Convention, but every possible effort by any means must be made to put into law every "unwritten norm" that the Trump administration took advantage of.
Impeachment is the mechanism to remove a rogue president, and the entire GOP is party to a "soft coup" against the Constitution of the United States. I agree it will take a complete societal rejection of MAGA and the Unitary Executive theory for allies to ever trust the US again.
But the audience of this transaction isn't just the microcosm of Trump in the world at large and time at long. Canadian's supporting their government standing on doing things the right way will set the right expectations for others when dealing with them.
Thankfully this US admin has ensured it won't have a long run.
If Bob shows evidence of not sticking to deals, there's little point in Alice striking any deal.
The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.
Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks.
If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files”
The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.
The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class.
Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating
clearly they are smartening up
Leading but honest question: Are those candidates the same as Trump? I do not see how they share anything other than strategy and spin, and those things don't make policy.
Wag the Dog (movie) came out like 3 decades ago
If Chuck Schumer is asked about the weather, he'll first check with Netanyahu.
Just look at what Senatorial campaigns Schumer supports and doesn't. There's a lot of suspicion that Schumer (and the DSCC) is going to leave Abdul El-Sayed out to dry because he's anti-Israel, basically. Mandela Barnes got similar treatment in 2022. And yet you have blockbuster challenges like Jaime Harrison's, which spent $130M to oust Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10. Trump won by 12 so I guess he gained 2? Well done, everybody, the system works.
Oh and what did the DNC do with Jaime Harrison after he spent $130M to lose by 10? They made him the DNC Chair. The Democratic Party loves a loser. Just like Howard Dean.
The DSCC funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall funding in these races, and they have their own goals which may or may not be aligned with the party as a whole.
If your single issue is Israel funding (which it probably shouldn’t be but that is your choice), the Democratic Party and presidents did far more to reign in Israel’s behavior than republicans.
Support for Israel's current government (elections in October 2026) being but one example.
Republicans do this too. Two of the seats they're at most risk of losing are Maine and Alaska held by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (respectively). They currently have 53 votes (well, 52 with Mitch McConnell MIA). That means they can pass things with 50 votes (and JD Vance's tie break) on anything that can get past or doesn't require cloture (eg approving judicial nominations, reconcilation). So, every time you have a controversial nomination or bill, you'll often find Collins and Murkowski vote no because their votes aren't needed. The leadership is insulating them from attack. But when their votes are needed, they're there (eg Collins's required vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh).
As for the number of Democratic senators who voted against weapons for Israel, it is significant because it never would've happened 5 years ago, but it's also mostly performative because there's no way it was going to pass.
As another example, Democrats did a rare move to invoke the filibuster last year to stop ICE funding. This resulted in a government shutdown and important programs being punitively defunded (eg there was a reserve fund for food stamps that was intentionally not tapped). What happened? The Republicans needed 60 votes to force a vote. There were 52 votes. 8 Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with Republicans. That's so weird. It's the exact number required. What a coincidence. Whatever that number was, 1, 5, 8, 12, it doesn't matter. There will most of the time be that number of exact senators requried. This, by the way, is part of the rotating villain role within the Democratic Party.
This is how calculated it was. All 8 of those who crossed the floor were either retiring or they weren't up for re-election in 2026 so the voters couldn't punish them. John Ossoff, the current liberal darling, was going to be one of the 8 but he's facing re-election this year so Chuck Schumer whipped another vote to replace him.
Another classic example was the Epstein transparency act. Trump threatened members who signed the discharge petition. Mike Johnson actually shut down the House for 7 weeks to try and get those that did to change their vote. yet when the discharge petition got 218 votes (the minimum required), suddenly the votes in the House and Senate were almost unanimous. Well, if support was almost unanimous, why not just have a vote to begin with?
Mitch McConnell can really be credited with pioneering a new era of obstruction in the Senate. He realized there was a political cost to some votes. Some things were popular and he didn't want to pass them so he'd just make sure they never made it to the floor for a vote.
So my point is that imagine the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2029 and that same Israel funding bill came up. Will all those Senators and House representatives vote for it when it might pass and become law? Nope.
I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain.
They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back.
The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.
I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well.
It’s a manufactured controversy with only a handful of trans athletes (usually at high school level) in the entire country. It does not make the slightest difference to the lives of the vast, vast majority of voters. If you let it outweigh factors that actually affect your life then you’re a dumb voter.
Is the crucial statement there. Not “it is”.
> It affects women and parents of girls
No it doesn’t. It’s a new boogeyman to demonize that isn’t actually a factor in almost anyone’s lives. Not to mention that the people pushing this issue are proposing things like genital inspections to ensure the boogeyman never arrives:
https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-republicans-pass-bill-genita...
As the parent of a girl I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about that than I am of a trans kid wanting to play sports.
I agree with "seen as" vibes think of the children era being foolish but its what liberal parents are talking about. Mega followers never accepted trans in sport or life so this doesn't change viewpoints.
The "issue" is only an "issue" because some people on Fox News told you it was an "issue." Ask what you're being distracted from.
Suddenly, not wanting trans folks to participate in civilization, Conservatives have gone all in on the transvestigation bullshit that includes genital inspections, accusing conventionally less feminine-looking cis women of being men, etc.
These people are just bigots.
I don't think anyone here was ever trained on nuance, so how are they going to separate that from political platitudes???
Both parties are against them, owned by oligarchs and mega donors that are actively trying to increase the wealth gap and make average Americans fight each other over the petty dilemma of the week, rather than the real fight of the whole country vs maybe a couple thousand ultra rich douchebags.
Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.
This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.
Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.
You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful.
Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe.
And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.
-Independent..
I want to vote for someone who sticks to their plan, who is as honest as possible, who actually cares about Americans instead of saying some catchy phrases and looking good on camera while shaking hands with lobbyists and harmful industries - it's ludicrous!
I agree with the sibling comment that the dems rank lower because their base is made of people who begrudgingly vote for them when the time comes and spend the rest of the time being frustrated that it's our best option.
The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.
This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.
The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.
We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.
So the prediction sounds right? The Republicans have burnt the youth vote pretty badly and have never really recovered.
(See, e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte... and https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls. Annoyingly, the polls don't cleanly break down into generations; Gen X would be the ~44-60 crowd for that election.)
Sure, lots of people were not happy with Bush dragging the country into two wars, but most Republicans remained Republicans, and the angst (based on facts or otherwise) against Obama is what made the Tea Party Movement so big.
(Of course, there was the whole social media thing that became huge around the same time, but the design of social media doesn't favor one side over another...)
They like the way his administration has been terrorizing brown people. Dig in with any of these ~simpletons~ undecided voters and it’s literally that simple.
I despise this current administration. Yet, when I talk to people, I treat them with the same respect as I would my own parents -- don't matter who they are. I have had fun conversations with near toothless factory workers, literal walking stereotype caricatures of MAGA guys, who really aren't bad. They're just trying to live life and keep their lives together yet here's the world, changing all around them. Then this big mouth assures them it will be all right if you vote for him. They get worked up about things like DEI, LGBTQ, foreigners, etc. Sure it sounds stupid but it is what it is, you deal with it using tact. And here I am, born and raised NYC who was a minority at my public high school (may time the only white kid in class), dated the rainbow, and have a lot of experience with a lot of culture. I usually have a hard rock/heavy metal look so I fit in and they feel comfortable. I just tell them fun or funny stories about cultures and all variety of people I knew. These stories help to clear up misconceptions. Like literally the dentally challenged MAGA fellow I mentioned before told me on my way out that he enjoyed my stories and that he learned something new about people. That's the magic -- story telling and gentile nudging of opinions. Rome wasn't built in a day.
I'm actually hopeful in my own way, but the current political environment is being shaped by adult aged children on both sides and it just gets worse. Though they always say, it gets worse before it gets better. Keep nudging that knowledge.
https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...
> Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report.
> The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.
> “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row.
It's simply facing the same fate of agriculture: automation.
Politicians want to sell to people they can bring back manufacturing jobs, but it's not like in china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand. It's all automated everywhere.
(edit: seriously? Who downvotes this. The preceeding comment mentions a video, I share the source, wtf. Don't shoot the messenger.)
Is a factory making 2GB RAM chips twice as productive as one making 1GB RAM sticks?
Because if manufacturing output is merely constant while chipmakers’ output has skyrocketed (on paper, as PCs went from 32MB RAM to 32GB over a few decades), other manufacturing output must have fallen a great deal.
> it's not like china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1jci...
They mean it is not the case that in China they make these things by hand.
Half of these (or at least, instances of these) happened in the past week or two; most of the rest have happened in the past 2-3 months. I'm not even being exhaustive. You could
"Everything" is an understandable shorthand in this case and while technically hyperbolic it's really understood that it really means "most things that matter on a domestic and foreign policy stage."
Are you sure, it seems mostly based on illegal share trading. Murdering foreigners and sending soldiers to die is a lever Trump/his handlers keep pulling because they 'win' $millions every time.
Do you have evidence for this?
I think you’re giving him too much credit. He is just a mouthpiece for various people, he can’t make a plan and stick with it, and never has.
Here is an article from the newyorkfed with an excerpt which isn't in line with what you are claiming. And it is quite likely that even those that didn't raise prices initially, aren't going to keep absorbing those costs forever (no such thing as free-lunch), these studies were done only 3 months into the tarriffs.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/06/are-bu...
"Consistent with textbook economics, tariffs generally resulted in higher prices to customers. Indeed, roughly half of businesses reported raising prices of goods directly subject to tariffs. Interestingly, a significant share of businesses also reported raising the selling prices of their goods and services unaffected by tariffs. Many businesses indicated they increased prices to cover other rising costs such as wages and insurance, though it is possible that in some cases, businesses were taking advantage of an escalating pricing environment to increase prices. For example, something similar happened in 2018-19 as firms increased their prices on dryers when tariffs rose on washing machines from China, even though dryers were not subject to tariffs."
Ever visit Alibaba and learn that the importers are still paying $1200 for 12 washing machines and then reselling it to you with a Maytag logo on it for $1200 EACH?
Pack it in everybody! This guy thinks they worked as intended, that’s all the evidence needed! Case closed!
Ignore the way everything is more expensive. Ignore the way everything on digikey has a dedicated tariff column. Ignore the general chaos and the rest of what your lying eyes see, a hackernews throwaway account is pretty sure that the new tax on imports is unrelated to imports being more expensive.
You don't have to take my word for it though! I don't even know why you're trying to make this argument when you can just go look through a grocery store and see how much more expensive food is now than just a few years ago.
Argentina and Brazil should be a warning example to everyone. The paper Argentina Paradox by Taylor gives good insights into how trade barriers played a fundamental role in hurting this once very prosperous economy.
Right now Alberta and Saskatchewan are not suffering at all (2% of exports affected) from Trump's tariffs.
This is by design.
He (or the "smarter" people he surrounds himself with) is attempting to drive a wedge in Canadian unity.
Danielle Smith is, btw, totally onside with playing this to her advantage to get things.
Export tax, as just as it might be in these circumstances, would be used as pretext for wholesale foreign interference and domestic disruption on a level we have never seen in this country. It would end up being a profound self-own
If you are in Alberta or Saskatchewan, the government is decided before your election is done. There is no Senate, like in the US, to balance your needs vs others.
Despite this unbalance, there is a clear majority of Albertans who are anti-independence. (I agree that the government, run by a radio entertainer is shameful and disgusting.)
this is consistently a self criticism in alberta that we arent actually getting our money's worth from our oil
Speaking of "Reddit opinion".
it is easy to tax exports, but this makes the export less profitable (for the entity making that export). Unless you mean the producer raises prices to cover the new tax - in which case, the export is now more expensive, and less of it gets exported.
It doesn't really help with the tariff situation much in any case - a political problem requires a political solution (such as reciprocal tariffs). Both sides hurt, and there's no good outcome.
Depends whether demand is flexible or not.
Uranium and potash from SK are huge bargaining chips.
AB separatism is meaningless and it's emphasis and influence is propped up by Canada's adversaries.
Wearing my forecasting hat…
Canada holding $200 billion in USA treasuries, one of the largest exporters of oil into the USA, and integrated supply chains for everyday goods. A fast and painful price shock is coming for every average American.
Canada has and will continue to be very dependent on the USA. No amount of new trade partners can change the fact that the largest economy in the world is a 2-hour trip down the road while everyone else is an ocean apart. This has a risk for long-term price pain for decades.
Generally speaking, capital and commerce steer towards efficiency. Goods from Australia will always be “less efficient” than goods crossing between Canada and the USA and Mexico due to geography.
The only way to make up for that difference is if goods are dramatically cheaper to produce (i.e China) to make up for the geographical barriers.
While it may work for beef, it can’t work for everything. So, Canada is generally stuck with the USA until it can find ways to export/import efficiently from other countries, and some things, like produce, can never work.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/australian-beef-...
So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
That's the reality of most mature democracies from UK to Germany to Italy.
If anything, that makes change slower and based on coalition consensus, not a single winner-take-all individual mood.
Which means that there isn't much to "work" as previous arrangements keep holding and they hardly change.
I would never exchange our democracy for a king electing one like in US, Turkey or Russia.
I'd rather have our democracies slower, the governments more unstable, but representative.
It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.
It’s quite ingeniou.
European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.
We still aren't doing border checks on EU imports.
Still, Boris Johnson wasn't as bad as Trump.
The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.
The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.
For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.
"Forced into the Brexit outcome"
Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.
And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.
Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.
So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.
Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.
The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.
Please state the official "consistent" position regarding the main problem caused by your own decision to leave: the Irish border.
You can be like Norway and join the EEA: full access to the single market, but having to make a financial contribution, accepting most EU laws, and with free movement of people. You get an exemption on some laws, but you don't get a say in any of the rules of the single market.
You can be like Switzerland and join the EFTA: partial access to the single market (notably not the banking sector), still have to contribute, only have to follow EU laws when it comes to trade, and still free movement of people.
You can be like Turkey: a customs union meaning no tariffs apply to EU trade, but you have to apply EU tariffs on all other trades and have no say over them.
You can be like Canada: a comprehensive free-trade deal which covers the majority of goods, but it means having to follow EU standards and requirements without having a say in them, and it probably won't cover services.
The EU was never going to give every Briton a magical gold-shitting unicorn, no matter how much the UK was going to plead and beg for it. It was more than happy to negotiate a deal on any of the options like those above, but it was up to the UK to decide what Brexit was going to look like.
But the Brexiteers promised the voters they could have their cake and eat it - "Brexit means Brexit", after all. Everyone invented their own personal idea of a Brexit, and the various interpretations were always going to be fundamentally incompatibly with each other! The negotiations went so horrible because the UK had absolutely no idea what it wanted, and any option was going to be wildly unpopular as it did both too much and too little at once. And all of that is before you take Northern Ireland into consideration, where the wrong move would result in a literal civil war...
Brexit wasn't a negotiation. It was a therapy session to help the UK find itself.
Well, there was one thing that was crystal clear and consistent across the entire Brexit shitshow: out with the migrants.
Well, they got their wishes, and ended up with fruit rotting on the fields.
They are usually negotiated by a nation's crack team of experts. America just does not take any of this seriously anymore.
There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.
The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.
If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.
[edit autocorrect changed divisive to decisive]
Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.
As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.
A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.
Germany's first two constitutions quickly failed because they weren't democratic enough. The US constitution - despite its obvious flaws - has somehow managed to make it 250 years without causing huge issues, but it is now becoming quite clear that there should probably be a revision to prevent another giant mess like the current one from happening.
They'd rather fall into Russian models of government where a single person can promise you the world and you give it the power to do so, rather than bother with things like "compromise" or "representation".
Re-electing somebody who openly attacked the institutions, instead of taking what happened on Jan 6th as a wake up call is the clear sign.
Why do I single out the Democrats? Because after Trump, they're going to have the first chance to fix this so that it can't happen again.
That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.
As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.
Population aside, there's no system that fixes what's broken in the US in the 21st century.
Trump, sadly, is the symptom of deeper structural ills that have been building in America for decades.
I mean, you still have the "every 4 years", or worse, "every few months". It's not at the pace that Trump changes things, though.
In short, attenuate executive power.
It really feels strange, odd, yet unsurprising that the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.
It’s worse than that. This doesn’t suit the US. It suits Trump (or at least, that’s what his addled mind thinks).
Literally the only losing move was to mess with our relations to them.
Show us it isn't just lies and bad faith.
I've got a better idea.
1) Repeal all DMCA-like laws. Make it explicitly legal to break a digital lock to repair a device, run custom code, install third-party parts, or just tinker and hack with your own devices and software.
2) Ban parts-pairing. Prohibit manufacturers (looking at you Apple & John Deere,) from using cryptographic serialization to block independent mechanics and technicians from swapping parts.
3) Legalize "Adversarial Interoperability" (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...)
4) Copyright reform.
That's it. This would make things cheaper and better for Canadians. Lutnick and Trump would seethe eternally, but it would be downright excellent for Canada and a shining beacon unto the world.
Yes, there is no war without pain. But I am willing to face the pain.
However, in the long run, the pain might bring good. It might help products from other countries to enter the Canadian market. I hope to see more food, cars and appliances from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa in the Canadian market.
Elbows up, at last.
I'd be happy to see the solution to consumer pain And economic productivity to pass permanently pro productivity and pro consumer policies.
Anti monopoly stuff. Maybe a growth policy like land value tax.
I'd need to hear from some experts to know which specific policies would be best though. Ideally you choose some policies that are not perceived as going nuclear, or which leave open counters, or which you would want to remove after a deal is made.
In general, going heavier into consumer/data protection laws and proceeding to prosecute both the Canadian and American monopolies would be amazing though.
IMO you don't want lawfare -- but rather you want to remove bad laws like the DMCA (and related), and the life-plus-70 copyright term, and thus foster more innovation and growth.
It's easiest to repeal anti-consumer/anti-commons laws.
A rather large amount of Canadian industry is benefiting from these regulations. Adopting policies like these would be tremendously disruptive and cause a lot of short term issues, upsetting manufacturers, foreign owned subsidiaries (who employ a lot of people), unions and retailers.
I'd love to see copyright reform though.
Why?
This didn't even exist until 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act
And how would something like banning parts pairing "cause a lot of short-term issues"? Existing supply chains would remain intact. They'd simply be broadened, eventually, by new entrants. If incumbents leave the market in a fit of pique, you can rest assured that the gaps will be filled, and that those incumbents may very well be liable for breach of contract if they refuse to service existing Canadian customers.
Sales of US vehicles in Canada would approach zero in just a few years.
Yet what I'd suggest is to go a step further rather than retreat: Subsidize EV production (including from Chinese firms) on the condition that final assembly or some fraction of production is done in Canada. Keep the jobs, make cleaner cars more efficiently, and make them available to Canadian consumers at reduced (subsidized) prices.
...Then export those subsidized vehicles to Europe and wherever else, where they might benefit from favorable EU-Canada or Brazil-Canada trade policies.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/12/disenshittification-natio...
Politicians tend to not want to do things that display them as directly responsible for eroding their support base’s quality of life.
That's an understatement. Hypothetically if Canada were isolated from the world, it would regress in the quality of life in 10 years. The most capable Canadians have moved out, mostly to the US. The average Canadian has unwarranted sense of nationalistic pride about them (compared to their neighbors).
Isolate US from the world, and assuming that the govt does not meddle too much with local businesses, in 10 years they will bounce back to being more self sufficient than it is now.
The biggest 'enemy' of Canada is not America(s). It's the Canadian govt itself. Most Canadians cave into their tribal instinct of 'us versus them' and cannot see past that own manipulative govt.
Canada has not only proportionately significantly more trade restrictions (between countries) compare to US, but it also have significant restrictions to trade and free market within Canada: example quotas on milk, dairy, beef and chicken. There are more taxes at every stage of a transaction with little benefits ( yes people mention 'free' health care but it's another subject). Relatively unaffordable housing mostly due to taxation (For example the tax part of condo in Toronto/Vancouver is cumulatively about 35%) etc.
Just to be clear both govts of US and Canada are tyrannical. Americans on an average distrust their govt more than Canadians - hence they overall do better in keeping their govt overreach in check.
Its one thing to correct the meaning of the word "self sufficient" and its straight up bad faith to talk past the actual meaning of the comment
If you think Canadians have more nationalistic pride than Americans, you seriously need to get glasses.
Americans literally pledge themselves to their country every day of school.
Literally every American has been force fed nationalistic pride propaganda since their first days at school, continuing for 12 years.
Never mind the average American. They’re all stuffed full of it.
Plus when one side is an unreliable negotiator (the US) there’s not much rational behind continuing.
- the US imports 60-70% of its oil from Canada
- 100% of the natural gas
- 85% of energy imports
- 25% of Uranium
- 20% of all mineral imports, ahead of China
- the Great Lakes hold >80% of the USA's fresh water
- patrolling the almost 9000km border is mostly up to Canada
Despite the size disparities, they run close to a trade equilibrium: US exports $420B, imports $450B. There is a lot on the line for the US.
Man, I remember watching the '88 election debate as a young teen. So many people were saying this then. Look at us now.
We have SO MUCH potential in Canada. It’s incredible. The only thing stopping us is ourselves.
What drives me nuts too is that my kids find work in places like tourist traps and Tim Hortons. When I was a kid I got to learn to build things, use tools and machines, use my body, plan projects (albeit very menial ones in my teens), and figure out what the hell all this abstract stuff in school was really for. I was applying math, drafting simple designs, writing to customers about orders, and using skills I hadn’t found real-world uses for up until that point. They’re missing out so much. But our city is, too. My kids are worth far more than serving coffee and frying fish and chips for tourists. And they’d be worth even more in ten years if real opportunities existed here. They’d have knowledge and skills they’ll never find in those places.
It really drives me crazy. So much wasted potential. We can do better, but we need policies that enable us to do it.
In context, this only applies to oil that the US imports. That number means that of the oil that the US imports, 60-70% of it comes from Canada. The US currently produces more oil than any other nation. Your note should read "the US imports 60-70% of the oil that it imports from Canada"
- 100% of the natural gas
As mentioned above, this means that US imports of natural gas come exclusively from Canada. The US currently produces more natural gas than any other nation too. Your note should read "100% of the natural gas that the US imports comes from Canada"
It makes sense that Canada is sole source for imported natural gas since that is a product that is most efficiently transported in pipelines, like crude oil.
The way your numbers are framed seems to me to imply that the US is a net importer of oil and natural gas when in fact we began to ramp up exports of oil and natural gas (and coal) in 2006-2008 time period. Those exports helped the industry remain a dominant political force and provided a lot of seed money for the corruption that we have seen in the US since.
No, instead the Trump tariffs have specifically targeted the regions of Canada that a) elect left of centre governments and/or b) have manufacturing economies.
So Ontario's auto sector, BC's forestry, and Quebec's aluminum and aerospace sectors.
Meanwhile Alberta and Saskatchewan -- which have compliant quite honestly pro-Trump governments -- have only 2% of their exports currently impacted by tariffs.
It has the look of an attempt at regime change, masquerading as economic policy.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-to-secure-the...
> US mines produce roughly 500,000 metric tons of potash per year, only about 8 percent of the 5.9 million metric tons of apparent annual US consumption. The remaining demand is met through imports, producing a net import reliance of about 92 percent. Reflecting the high concentration of global potash production, most of that supply comes from Canada (79 percent), with smaller volumes from Russia (12 percent) and other producers (9 percent) including Israel.
It would be decidedly un-Canadian to leverage electricity, potash, or other commodities necessary for survival in trade negotiations -- despite what Ford may suggest. We're nice, but we won't bow to bullies. Elbows up, eh!
And you don't have to ban them, just make them more expensive. Your US brethren did vote for tarriffs. With that comes higher prices.
When electing a candidate, not everyone endorses every specific policy of that candidate; casting a ballot does not imply total ideological alignment (nor even full knowledge of all policies), especially in a two-party FPTP electoral system. Many people vote based on broad messaging, loyalty, economic sentiment, or identity instead of in-depth platform analysis. To wit, Latino voters did not realise how helping to push ice-cold reds into power would affect their lives. They simply didn't know or understand. Now they do. Canada's next actions, counter-tariffs, and burgeoning global economic ties I hope will further open the eyes of mislead citizens.
Harris lost the popular vote by 1.5%, which does not a landslide make.
As much as it pains me to say it as an American, little will change unless US citizens are negatively impacted. Trump is losing power and support in the US precisely because people are becoming more aware that he's hurting them.
It’s Vietnam Hearts and Minds all over again.
Another Musk moment: most aluminum in the US comes from Canada. Most of Musk's vehicles are built with aluminum. These tariffs will directly increase Tesla manufacturing cost in the US, making them even less competitive.
However the US government is not rational anymore, otherwise this will get challenged and thrown out. That’s a long shot though.
As a Canadian, I’m so tired of the US’s antics. Everyone I know is. Sun Tzu teaches to never fight an enemy with their back against the wall, and I think the US will find they’ve emboldened Canadians to absorb pain as there’s no escape.
More "relative" than you think.
Look at the wars the US fought after WWII: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. The US suffered a lot less pain than any of those countries and was in a lot stronger position. But those countries were willing to face the pain, the US wasn't. That's why the US lost those wars. The same pattern goes now with Iran. You kill people on those countries, those countries hurt the American voters in their pockets.
In trade wars it might be the same mechanism. For the American people, a trade war is mostly to follow the glorious orange leader. For Canadians it is a matter of national sovereignty.
Economic growth and inflation have kept pace with gross debt for a long time, and if the US continues to stay on top of the tech industry, the raw numbers will likely continue not to matter.
Most of that was inflation, so it hurts U.S. citizens. I mean, you could reduce it even further pretty easily, but I'm not sure you would want to pay $1,000+ for a Big Mac.
Or more precisely, for every man, woman and child in Venezuela.
USA only plan to get rid of this self-inflicted mess, seem to steal as much resources from other countries North and South as they can grab. Trump is not even trying to hide it.
Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy per
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...
I’m trying to encourage people to understand the facts in a forum dedicated to intellectual discussion.
All countries on this planet at some point were faced with a similar choice: capitulate or fight to the death. Ironically those who chose the latter are the ones who survived.
As for betraying Canadians, Trump is not responsible for representing Canadian interests. I wouldn't want him to either. (Speaking as a Canadian.)
The Federal Reserve studies on tariffs have shown basically no net tangible benefits to tariffs: any import protection industries gain from tariffs is cancelled out by the cost of the tariff on consumers.
And of course, the two governments' accounts of the collapse of the talking are in direct contrast: within hours, both placed the failure to make a deal on the other party.
It appears to me that any discussion in support or against tariffs here now isn't data-based but just political teamsports.
The old HN would just note the studies on tariffs and move on. But not today's HN!
So here we have a really long thread on HN saying "go team go."
What a sick people.
This will cause some short term pain for Canada, but hopefully they'll have a less insane trading partner after November.
I would however urge my fellow Canadians to continue to or start boycotting goods from the US and travel to there, generally.
And likely encourage Americans to come visit here. Come ski here this winter. You're more than welcome here.
“What’s at stake in the Canada-U.S. trade deal? How looming tariffs could cost Canada 90,000 jobs”. Trevor Tombe, professor of economics at the University of Calgary
https://thehub.ca/2026/08/20/whats-at-stake-in-the-canada-u-...
If they really want to hurt them start making it legal to circumvent DRM on American products and allow build meaningful replacements.
And from a different angle: “giving fines to firms makes no sense since they firm can only get money from customers so it’s just going to make it more expensive for the customer”.
Not an identical situatio, but to say it’s the only consequence, that it becomes more expensive for Canadian, is just not right.
In the short run, yes. In the long run we can start replacing American imports with other countries' imports.
I want to see more fruits and vegetables from Mexico, Africa and South America in supermarkets. Give me less "Made in America" on shelves.
Which highlights the problems with tariffs, they are self harming. You have to be willing to give up better alternatives for some other reason, and food is a hard one.
Bullshit. I already see in the supermarket (Canadian Superstore) oranges from South Africa, lemons from Morocco, broccoli from Mexico, mangoes from Malaysia, fish from the Philippines, coconut from Vietnam, kiwis from Italy, etc.
Yes, oceanic shipping adds to the cost. But most of those countries already have cheaper labor, and that partially offsets the extra cost.
If you were going to take that tariff money to build up a local tomato industry it might make sense, Canada already has a growing hot house industry. But don’t kid yourself, tariffs cost the consumer and for low margin highly seasonal and subject to going bad goods like produce is about the worst case scenario.
If you want people to buy stuff from you Americans then just try to stop pushing forward American imperialism down into everyone's throats. This isn't just about money, it is about my country's sovereignty.
We get to get taxed on the other side by paying more for Canadian goods.
Only if I buy "Made in America".
Whenever possible, it won't happen.
Again, if you think that tax is valid, feel free but tariffs costs are born by the consumer in the tariff applying country, ask us how we know…
https://www.thepress.co.nz/rural/360955858/bumper-harvest-ap...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91531349/trumps-canada-trade-war...
The companies who are forced to raise prices are politically well-connected, mostly as part of his party, and I’m sure the Canadian government is banking on their executives and his laid-off voters pushing him to cut a deal.
It's time to show a "tariff" portion as its own amount so that people who support the traffis can see exactly who has to pay it. It's them.
I think it's motivated entirely by schemes to stuff his pockets with money.
i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893397/trump-again-shr...
EDIT: Adding a TL:DR, this article explains how the Trump admin reduced the size of two national monuments by 90% and 91% respectively. This is just one example, there are more and most of them are out west in lands untouched for nearly a century. Saved for posterity because once they're gone, they're gone.
Someone's pockets, must be gnomes:
• PHASE 1: COLLECT UNDERPANTS. (tariff "foreign" goods desired by Americans, collect upon import from companies, clarify spiked prices experienced by consumers ‘entirely’ due to prior admin policies)
• PHASE 2: … (let simmer)
• PHASE 3: PROFIT. ("return" tariff costs to companies)
May 16: Vietnam approves $1.5B Trump hotel project (https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-trump-golf-estate-investm...)
July 2: US lowers tariffs on Vietnam to 20% (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500738/pdf/DCPD-...)
If he isn't stuffing his pockets, he's leveraging the populist playbook. In this case, 'scapegoating'.
But let's be honest, he likely has a huge amount of debt. Before he came into office he almost certainly fixed the interest on that debt knowing he could blow inflation through the roof and inflate it away.
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/2275fbf2d96f518e54c2b72edf163f8...
Even positive reporting of the man makes him out to have a massively fragile ego.
If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?
Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that
Going against "business as usual" resulted in higher prices, as predicted and promised.
Nearly everyone here benefited from lower prices afforded by reduced trade barriers. This isn't some obscure hidden fact.
And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.
But you burn the ability to make more deals with the same counterparty again.
If you played this game with your neighbor over a fenceline or tree limb dangerously overhanging into your yard.. you would save a few bucks once, and have an antagonistic relationship for the next 10-20 years of living next to them. Good luck getting the benefit of the doubt next time.
Apparently Machiavelli was onto something
Lumber is a different long standing trade dispute going back to the 80s unrelated to the industries targeted by the 50% tariffs.
Trump created a 10% Lumber tariff in Sept 2025, but it was already tariffed before that. Canadian lumber today isn’t suddenly 50% more expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy as the largest industries.
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...
According to your own article lumber is included already You’re wrong. It was already 45%!
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/202...
The new 50% tariffs don’t suddenly make Canadian lumber more expensive. It was already expensive.
This was all being negotiated together between Canada and US, but it’s not part of the new tariffs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/world/canada/trump-tariff...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
I tried to do some more research before my coffee finishes in 5 minutes, you're right it's not ALL Canadian products or even all Canadian lumber products.
Canada also participates in trade, is located in the same geographic continent, and is also suffering housing issues.
I too struggled to identify which “our” the comment referred to
Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?
His second weapon is throwing a monkey wrench into the works after agreeing to something. Keep the opponent on their back heel.
It works well, until it doesn't. Once you meet an opponent who stands firm no matter what you threaten, you lose your bargaining position. Carney is well-versed in this kind of negotiation.
May also explain why he stopped doing actual NYC RE dev and moved onto his licensing model in dozens of cities (new pools of suckers).
But when every threat & walk back is covered in national media, and he is playing the same game with the same big trading partners .. it loses its effect. Similarly he’s quite old and certainly lost any touch he had.
Another prominent justification for U.S. tariffs has been their claim that, since the United States runs, quote, a 'trade deficit' with Canada, we were 'ripping them off.' Also a quote. But the U.S.’s narrow merchandise trade deficit only exists because the U.S. buys so much of its energy from Canada. Canada fuels American growth: supplying 99 per cent of their natural gas imports, 85 per cent of their electricity imports, 60 per cent of their crude oil imports. I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that energy.
Two things that will prevent that:
- inertia
- it's likely that Canadian lumber before the tariffs wasn't the marginal good, wasn't the highest cost supplier. If Canadian suppliers were making 10% more profit than the previously marginal supplier, the price will go up 40% instead of 50%, Canadian suppliers absorbing that 10%.
These moves increase other countries independence of us, lessening our power and forcing us into a more post America world.
If Trump isn't a double agent then he missed his calling. It feels like every decision they are making is intentionally the "wrong" one.
Like over the last year we (Canada) should have utterly obliterated the US from any element of the Canadian supply chain. Instead everyone just keeps expecting things to return to normal so no one makes the necessary investments to stop it at the border.
Americans voted for Trump, a child-rapist stunningly stupid criminal, twice. It should never return to the way it was.
In 2016, an anonymous woman filed a federal lawsuit alleging that he raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old. The lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn that same year, before the allegations were adjudicated. No court found that he committed the alleged assault.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/howard-lutnick-comm...
I wonder if he tanked those discussions on purpose, his sons now at his former company, profited wildly from the last round of tariffs:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-quiet-winners-supreme-co...
Absolutely not what's been happening. At the speed that Canada is signing new trade deals in a decade the entire balance of trade power will look different. And unlike the unreliable US deals, these deals are much more likely to endure and expand. The only reason Carney felt comfortable taking this position on Friday is because he feels confident that in the long run our diversification efforts can solve our issues. I suspect he figures that we can weather the pain until the new trade deals come to bear fruit.
People fail to understand that our system of checks and balances are not some magic potion - or some Boolean flag - that flips on when a violation occurs; its just the power that is given to certain government bodies and people. The failure to use them is not much different than if they didn't exist in the first place.
> The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.
> Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/why-us-canada-trad...
Premiers are almost united (excluding Alberta's Danielle Smith) in their support for Carney walking away from trade negotiations.
All other issues aside, Trump and the Republicans love to boast that they aren’t bound by anything including their own promises. This is the end result of that.
You’d be mad to cut a deal with the US right now. The Trump Admin will just try to take another bite. They are dishonest and unreliable. Making America’s word mean nothing is the greatest long term damage done to the country and the surest indicator of the end of the American Century (80 years but we can round up)
It's not fair that an entire industry in one country is wiped out and replaced by that of a foreign industry with fewer regulations (and thus lower operational costs and higher margins)... It's bad not only from the business and opportunities perspective, but also from an environmental perspective as the damage is merely relocated to a different country with fewer regulations.
Tariffs help to protect local industry which adheres to local laws. It provides a mechanism for the government to offset the business harms of the regulations it introduces whilst also blocking regulatory arbitrage loopholes which it would otherwise create.
It's pretty straight forward; if the government introduces some environmental regulation which increases production costs by 10% for local producers, but foreign producers don't have to adhere to this regulation, then that just wiped out 10% profit margin from all local producers... If they were only just profitable before, now with the new regulation, their margins are now negative. To stay profitable, the local producer would have to increase the price of their products but this would cause sales to collapse as they will no longer have the cheapest product on the market. They may have the most cost-efficient process among all the local environmentally-friendly alternatives, but they can't compete against the foreign environmentally-harmful alternatives.
And this is extremely harmful in the current financial system which has a tendency to eliminate people's surplus income. Without significant surplus income, the consumer is forced to buy the cheapest product available. Even if the quality is lower and even if it's not their first preference. The entire banking system is predicated on the idea of sucking out every dollar of surplus income out of the economy.
This creates the race-to-the-bottom environment which keeps eroding quality of goods and services; the consumer is forced to accept increasingly low quality goods over time. Price becomes the only metric which matters and this ensures that businesses can never afford to adhere to any ethical frameworks.
Of course tariffs don't work instantly, it can take decades for them to take effect. You can't revive a local industry overnight after it has been killed off. Also, there has to be confidence that the tariffs will remain in place in the foreseeable future. People aren't going to start businesses if they fear that the tariffs which protect them might disappear after the next election.
> Canada supplies the overwhelming majority of U.S. maple-syrup imports.
Canadians are way too nice to do this, but it would be sensational.
But scarcity is the problem. Unless you're able to demonstrate that the low supply is artificial, and that maple syrup producers are a cartel and restrict their own production and distribution chain, as well as block any newcomers from trying to enter large-scale production.
Because as is is, if they manage to sell their entire supply through their sugar shacks, then it obviously means they don't have enough capacity to supply grocery chains, let alone on a national level. That's the literal definition of scarce supply.
So consumers will pay double or substitute with flavoured corn syrup.
But I think overall it does not really matter. A war is a war, so there will be no real winners.
Here we go again.
But it isn’t politically possible for Canada to do this. The two segments that would be most effective, oil & gas and potash happen to come from provinces that already have significant issues with the federal government. One is even flirting with separation, which would be inflamed by export taxes.
Canada is also very venerable to similar actions by the Americans. Refined oil products, fertilizers and oil & gas pipeline transit all come from the Americans.
It is fun to imagine Canada sticking it to the Americans with export taxes, but it will never happen.
"Western alienation" is created and maintained by American propaganda.
because this is nothing compared to when he starts to feel his loss of power
btw there are reports he's going to use ICE to do actions NEXT to voting centers to get around "no armed agents in voting centers" to force the voting to shutdown
electrocution gloves and all
we're in the US authoritarian era, Supreme Court and Congress let it happen and now there's no undo button
One must stand up to bullies otherwise they’ll keep at it. Until the US population feels the pain the rest of the world has been dealing with, nothing will change.
What he’s been doing is only good for his grift game, not the USA.
If you want to bring manufacturing home, you frame a 5-10 year progressive tariff plan with tax incentives, financing, and grants to help build the infrastructure to progressively fill the demand as the tariffs roll in. Commerce thrives in stable environments with predictable changes, not in chaos and broken promises.
Our system progresses in two year increments, by design.
So I ask again, what would you propose?
I'm a big fan of the civil rights movement, but a lot of this kind of stuff like your comment that I see strikes me as nostalgia that doesn't seem to understand what made that movement effective. It was effective because they thought, concretely, about their goals and about what concrete steps they could take that they thought would make progress toward those goals. That concreteness always seems (to me) to be lost in these contemporary discussions, replaced with "do something" and sloganeering.
Another difference, in my view, is that John Lewis was trying to figure out how to change a system in which there was no hope that the next election, or the one after that, or the one after that, ad infinitum, would itself affect the desired change, because both parties were opposed to the policy he desired. In my view, that's not the current situation. This thread started out being about the Trump administration's tariff policy (which I think is awful and stupid). But the next Congress, which will be seated quite soon - certainly much sooner than any kind of civil disobedience campaign would be able to bear fruit - can write laws that change that policy. And the more people are mad about the current policy, and the more they vote for the opposing party because they are mad about the status quo, the more likely that new Congress is to write those new laws.
There are times when it makes sense to lose faith in normal electoral politics, but in my view, the eve of an election where the incumbent powers are about to get routed is a weird time to suggest it.
If even 50% of people just stopped going to work and spending money, things would change veeeery quickly.
A few weeks of inconvenience for decades of a better future? Sign me up.
I do appreciate the concrete suggestion rather than the vague "do something", but another attribute of the civil rights movement was that their goals were modest and their "good trouble" targeted at achieving those goals were things they could actually organize. I'm sure John Lewis would have always loved there to be a general strike to achieve his desired policy, but he and his movement understood what they could and couldn't actually organize.
But the internet makes organizing a general strike exponentially easier than it was in the past.
If you don’t like the general strike idea, what is your suggestion?
I think you’ll need to revisit this in a few months when he finds a way to make the election ineffective, and/or just keeps doing what he’s doing regardless.
And again in 2029 when he doesn’t leave the White House.
My suggestion is to vote for and otherwise help the opposition win a Senate majority.
If the current administration finds a way to steal or override the election, I will be willing to entertain different ideas. I was worried this might be the reality, but now I think the administration is way too unpopular and discredited to pull anything off. So now I think it's just going to be like the last two years of W. Bush. Just incredibly sad and embarrassing with everyone jockeying for control over what comes next.
It brings up the 1940s struggles of labor, industry, and .gov, and labor lost and had its back broken. Could labor outmaneuver industry and the state today if we ran it back?
Not yet. But it’s coming.
I moved ops to a Caribbean nation where we can get parts, (it’s simply not possible to source many parts and services within the USA anymore without paying 2-3x in fees or enduring weeks to months of delays in customs) and iterate at a competitive speed.
R&D in the USA went from riding a sport bike to swimming in molasses with crocodiles basically overnight, way too unpredictable to even sign contracts with suppliers, with random tariffs creating 2x cost uncertainty.
You simply cannot plan or make long term contracts when the uncertainty is so high with no predictable pattern. Ironically, we also cannot sign even with US suppliers, because they don’t know if they will have ongoing tariffs to protect buildout or if they will evaporate, so they also cannot risk expanding production.
It’s a total shitshow and the only reason it exists is to power the grift train. If a company is big enough, some shady deal goes down and suddenly they magically qualify under de minimus or some other supposedly dead exemption. I would not be surprised to see that you could correlate these exemptions with purchases of shitcoicins or similar shady wanker-works. The trade shenanigans do nothing to help US businesses, and drive innovation out of the USA like rats off a sinking ship.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Reign_of_Pippin_IV
Anyway, you have kings, you just elect them and call the presidents, but they have basically the same political role and powers as George III did in the 1790s cut-and-pasted across. The USA needs to get itself a decent parliamentary system.
Isn't that an oxymoron? Parliaments have their democratic shortcomings compared to powerful presidents. And vice-versa. Nations with parliamentary rule are plagued by having heads of state and ministers which weren't in any way, shape, or form elected by the population. A president is at least a democratically elected ruler to represent the people.
Yes, if you make an exception for Germany.
The kind of powers Kinge George III had and exercised in the 1780s and 90s were a quirky historical accident of a constitutional system in flux. Freezing that structure in place in the US, even with a democratic mandate and other admitted improvement, is another historical accident.
Who today would look to Britain in 1790 as a template for constructing a modern constitution?
But the head of state selected by parliament is not elected by the people. A president is.
There's arguably a straight line from the Commonwealth's greater deference to inherited authority to today's tolerance of weak borders, stagnant growth, and declining economic mobility. A king seems like more of the thing that caused the problem, not the solution.
Parliamentary democracy has a better track record, for sure.
Why would any country not to have the following:
Industrial based
Customers based
Stop focusing on exporting too much.
It's Congress who has the power to tax. If Trump wants tariffs he needs to propose a bill that creates them or gives him clear powers. The legal scholars in his cabinet know this, so why has he not proposed a bill?
Trump is stretching the definition of those circumstances to the limit, in my opinion, especially because protectionism is the fundamental policy being pursued. If we want general protectionist tariffs than the law should be passed that enables the executive to do so, but that hasn't been forthcoming.
How effective are tariffs as a trade negotiation tool if your counterparty believes its likely the courts will take away the big stick?
Basically he was elected to stand up to Trump and as an economist, come up with a strategy. He initially appeared to do that, but given that it largely hasn't swayed Trump, he is now backing off most of it. You could argue it's a strategy worth trying since to buck-for-buck hasn't worked, but you could also make the point that the electorate, without being told what the plan is (duh), feels he is weakening our position.
A lot of the strategy has been to wait it out and expect uproar from the US people which... largely hasn't come.. yet?
This isn't some sort of status game. Well, maybe it is for Trump, but not for anyone who's not an idiot. Unfortunately, Carney is an idiot, and is in it for himself and his friends, not Canada.
The way to deal with the bear to the south is to first get rid of all the stupid stuff that is bad for Canadians regardless of Trump, like provincial liquor monopolies and dairy supply management. Don't ask for anything in return - Trump's word is no good anyway - but it may help with public opinion in the US. It will also help with better trade relations with other countries. After getting these other countries to open up as much as they're inclined, unilaterally eliminate tariffs on all countries (including the US). It's what's best for Canadians, apart from a few who profit off the lack of competition from other countries.
For bonus points, get rid of sales taxes, so there is zero friction importing things to Canada. That's great for consumers, and also great for any business that wants to continue or establish itself in Canada.
What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".
The future is unknowable, so that might be the wrong bet. But in my view, it is the right one, in no small part because the political situation is on their (that is, the Carney administration's) side. Political support is what determines the ability to withstand pain. In Canada there is currently far more solidarity with the administration's stance on standing up to US bullying than there is in the US for the Trump administration's (many) price-increasing policies.
If the political situation were reversed, this would probably be a bad idea for Canada! But it isn't, so it isn't.
It seems like if the other side agrees to a deal too easily then Trump doesn't think the deal is good enough. He only likes deals where the other side is getting screwed and has to be coerced into signing.
That's a great observation. So basically everybody should be saying no to him all the time to limit the damage because as long as there's one yes the stupidity will only grow.
I'm so glad there wasn't a single yes, when Greenland popped up.
That means the hardcore MAGA base is a third of the US population. I genuinely don't know how to reconcile that with the long term future of the United States.
It seems like a lot of the governmental structure of this country is predicated on the idea that the People will not elect someone who puts their own interests over those of the nation. And when we do, the whole thing starts to unravel.
0: https://time.com/7809/1-in-4-americans-thinks-sun-orbits-ear...
https://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-...
Not to diminish you statement, but you are right.
Something similar can be said about Canada. In your sentence replace:
US with Canada
Trump with Carney/Trudeau/Others
35% with 95%
and the situation can be summarized as significantly worse in Canada.
This is not a problem that goes away when Trump ultimately leaves office.
On the campaign trail, Trump disavowed any connection to Project 2025 when it was leaked, and I suspect most of his base took him at his word. To anyone not trapped inside the right-wing media bubble, that is somewhere between naive and insane, of course, but people inside the bubble don't live in the same reality as the rest of us.
However, your response does remind me of an important point: two other rather large, looming threats which need addressing are media consolidation and money in politics.
I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.
And specifically any deal made with the U.S under Trump has no credibility, just ask Iran.
US citizen here. Fight back against my government, please, even when the current admin is replaced with another more benign one.
I don't understand what you mean by this? Fight back against what? Protective tariffs?
And Trump has given no thought to his tariffs. There is no analysis underlying it. It's just him acting out like a child and trying to get some kind of "win" that he can sell as a personal triumph.
And if the world would continue to stand up for themselves in the future we might have more balanced relationships.
I'm concerned that governments worldwide are finding tarrifs to be a popular (and exciting!) way to exorbitantly increase the size of governments and goverment coffers which are then used for populist aims. We need to re-educate people that tarrifs are bad.
Trump is officially billions richer since he became president for a second term.
Officially.
The thing to keep in mind is that the current trade agreement was negotiated and signed by Trump himself. He has spent the last 18 months seeing what a terrible deal it is. He does not want a "deal" into conventional sense, that is an agreement that works for both parties. He needs the counterparty to be humiliated and subjugated. CUSMA (the current agreement he promoted and signed) is bad because it works for all parties, it does not subjugate and humiliate the counterparties.
What happened in these particular trade negotiations? Is that the actual negotiators had something worked out earlier in the week, then at the last minute the US made some new demand that was meant to humiliate Canada, and this tanked the negotiations. What exactly did they ask for? It's irrelevant, the point was humiliation.
Actual trade policy, whether you want access to Canadian dairy market, or lumber tarrif rates or whatever, none of that matters.
Is this a common understanding down south?
Edit: after I wrote the above, it came out that the thing they demanded last minute is restricting Canada's ability to trade with other countries. Obviously, no PM would agree to such a thing, it's purpose isn't to have a deal, but as I said, subjugation and humiliation. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/us-canada-trade-war-...
Trump tore down a third of the White House without permission, and somehow it doesn't set off alarm bells. He's supposed to be a steward of the government for 4 years, not a king.
If Trump and his cabal is left unchecked we will be running fast towards something that will make 1929 like child's play.
And no, I am not a liberal. Far from it.
Elbows up, finally!
This is will be painful. But it is what we need.
It is more than time for Canada to learn the lesson that Navajos, Comanches, Apache and Cherokees learned too late: Americans lie, cheat, betray and steal. We shouldn't be cozy with them.
The U.S. was already buying considerably more Canadian goods than Canada bought from it.
If you want political gestures then impose heavy sanctions on Israel and declare that Latinos can get refugee status in Canada because of ICE. That would be an economic win too.
The only argument bullies understand is being punched in the face.
I wish more countries wiuld have the courage of cutting off ties with the US.
Wonder how long it’ll be before Trump throws his toys out the pram again. Wouldn’t be surprised if he moans his allies have abandoned him.
The USA is increasingly the source of economic and military destabliisation in the world and it's getting real hard to justify being the best little doggy for them. I'm not suggesting any action more drastic than calling a shit deal shit, and frankly it's pathetic and embarrassing that this is such a rare occurence.
And yeah, maybe some miracle corrective action will begin with a new president but the thing is, that will necessarily include restoring our "special relationship". You're better off refusing a bad deal outright, rather than trying to reneg later.
The leaks surrounding the deal that was on the table earlier this week did not look promising. e.g. Locking in 15% tariff's on autos made in Canada would have resulted in slow death for the Canadian auto sector, not to mention hamstringing all of NA at a time when their only way to compete with Chinese auto makers is crushing tariffs or outright import bans. Something probably had to move here to get the deal done. Unbelievably, things went in the opposite direction.
Howard Lutnick strolled into the Whitehouse at the eleventh hour and told Trump he thought that they could get an even better deal with Canada than what was on the table[1]. Americans should probably remember this guy. His family runs Cantor Fitzgerald, who has been buying up rights to tariff refunds[2]. Companies hit by tariffs can gamble on them eventually being declared illegal, or they can sell the rights to their refunds for a smaller amount and have some degree of certainty. When tariffs are struck down in court, companies like Cantor Fitzgerald make serious bank. So, here Lutnick is again, whispering in Trump's ear, drumming up more business for his family.
Trump tends to listen to the last person who talked to him, whether it's an economist (This is unlikely, as Trump prefers not to talk to academics) or a bell hop. In this case, Lutnick got in last, Trump decided to move the goal-posts, the talks failed as a result, and now there are more tariffs that will probably be struck down by courts.
Meanwhile, in Canada, people actually seem to be happy that this deal failed. Carney has made multiple concessions over the last year and change while the U.S. has made none and just kept demanding more and more. The general sentiment was that it's time to get tough, even if that means tariffs. Reports are that the latest demands during these talks were for limits on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, exclusive U.S. access to Canadian critical minerals, and even meddling in Canada's French language laws. Any one of these things would have been seen as a deal-breaker during normal times. With the mood being what it was, they were unthinkable. The American contingent knew this, so we can only conclude they deliberately scuttled the deal.
Interestingly enough, Carney seems to have taken a page out of Trump's book by delaying retaliation until Sept. 8th, giving the Americans a deadline for a change. That leaves room for a couple of TACO Tuesdays. However, the messaging from the PM and premiers has been careful to point out that they are ready to hunker down and wait for Trump to leave office. Carney has solid support for this stance while Trump does not, even among republicans, plus the midterms are looming. Trump increasingly looks like the one without the cards.
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[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-us-tariff-trade-talk...
[2]https://fortune.com/2026/03/07/winners-supreme-court-tariff-...
Canada walking away from American Bullying will go down in history of the moment the empire’s descent accelerated.
Fuck all the halfwit racists who voted for trump.
But please get out and vote! And please convince all of your sensible friends, family and neighbours to do the same!
The trouble is that we need a majority.
Well they're at least not identical when it comes to tariffing your friends!
(I don't say this arrogantly, I actually did like both candidates and platforms).
With that being said, I do lament that we Canadians and Americans live in two-party states, which is terrifyingly close imo to a sort of one-party state.
But this may just be another way of saying that most all -isms cannot work.
Strengthening of anti-corruption rules and powers under any system of government should work to strengthen that system of government. I don't know what it would look like though. Any sufficiently powerful entity is just more prone to corruption, so it could move the corruption into different places, as opposed to stamping it out.
Tariffs are the only good thing that Trump has tried to do - really driven by Bessant, the only competent person in the administration.
He's had to react to "Trump's" bizarre decisionmaking, which is really the sum of Israel's and random lobbyist's desires, which has completely thrown off his vision, but "free trade" is bullshit, only benefits big business and the market, only in the short term, and everyone always knew this. It is absolute exploitation of poverty and authoritarian regimes around the world, and ends up in US margins, not in US working people's pockets. Bessant doesn't give a shit about working people, but he gives a shit about shifting the failing US from short-termism into long-termism - and you can't do that when your population is borrowing to buy imports and not working. You are forced into using your military for conquest in order to protect your own supply chains, and your military has been corroded by the same corruption as the rest of your economy, you pay 10x as much for everything, so there was never any need for them to increase production capacity.
The anti-tariff libs are like "it's really taxes!" No shit, Sherlock. Remember when Grover Norquist wasn't the spirit of progressivism? Remember those protest movements that you hollowly ape the language of while openly opposing the policies of - the anti-globalization, anti-free trade movements? Remember how every single thing they predicted came true?
Tariffs are a tax on foreign exploitation and supply chain insecurity. We need to bring that exploitation back onshore. Cheap bullshit is of no benefit if you don't have a job.
Don't be fooled by elites in upper-middle class jobs furiously trying to ban anything that would lower their own incomes for a second - those are the same people who were telling you to learn how to code when your parents got laid off. They're the YIMBY gentrifiers of your neighborhoods. They've got hundreds of thousands or millions of $ in the market and in housing, and it's doubled and tripled while you moved back in with your parents, who can't afford their medication. When housing prices drop, they get mad. Housing prices are dropping right now, and they're getting mad.
Completely unproductive financialized ways of making money are disappearing. They've bet the farm to the tune of trillions on hundreds of giant factories dedicated to word association. If you're a desperate poor person who has made meme-y financial decisions, please sell your bitcoins and your pokemon cards. I'm not even sure if precious metals can save you. You need production to move back onshore. You probably need immigrants gone, because you might have to learn how to pick fruit if you want to be able to eat it - it's the most productive thing the US does.
Also, don't be fooled that there's some sort of economic consensus about how unwise tariffs are because you're online. Most of the people participating in that conversation are foreign elites who sell their own populations to the US for an extraordinarily luxurious living, send their kids here to go to school (and write articles about how that's somehow good for you) drive up your rents, and call you a racist for objecting - when they were literally propelled here on a cushion built by and on the slave classes of their home states. Tariffs are meant to transfer their (the few) success to you (the many) - so you can buy.
They're compradors, and they're propagandizing you for their own benefit.
After the US completely falls, and we're at 90% poverty, 9% comprador, and 1% plutocrat, they'll bring back manufacturing and sell your poverty to the flourishing Chinese middle class - a country that doesn't let the wealthy and foreign interests control its policy.
Yeah no not really because none of the tariffs seem to be tied to human rights or exploitation. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting tariffs on your close, democratic allies.
Your post is kind of anti intellectual and retarded tbh.
It's like they can't help insult Trump and >50% of US voters any time they get a chance.
No intellectual honesty for the fact that there's a large trade deficit with Canada, and facts are facts.
So expect Trump to start spiralling. Also expect lots of astroturfing about how desperate Canada is and that it has no choice (one of those hilarious slop purveyors appeared below).
Canada should begin the process of withdrawing from USMCA, and the truth is that NAFTA cum USMCA has worsened Canada's lot over the past four decades compared to peers. Trade agreements with the US are worthless, and even negotiating with that Epstein pedo cabal of grifters is useless. It sounds like the Canadian team were foolishly going to give in to many things (any concession of any form always comes back to hurt you), but at the last minute Howard "Epstein Island" Nutlick swooped in and tried to extract even more, undoing it all. Which...thank you Nutlick, you disgusting greaseball. You did us a great favour.
Carney internally is playing to a domestic crowd that is actually more hardline on US trade policy than he has projected.
The issue with "bending the knee" so to speak is that the hardship is just as bad as the no deal situation, except with the worse outcome that Canada's future prospects for diversification are diminished.
There is hardship down both paths for Canada, but only one of those paths has a long-term future.
You're right that it likely involves a heavier investment in our own resource extraction, but that seems to be precisely what Carney is moving towards.
As for the amusing side-quip about Russia, chances are Canadians will likely look to emulate some other resource-extractive based economies, like the nordics. The issue is less the extraction and more how the wealth from that extraction gets hoarded. And there too, it would manifest as the need to move away from the American/Russian model of a small set of simple-minded, deranged oligarchs siphoning all the wealth in the economy towards themselves.
And fascism is taking hold lots of other places as well. Canada's a laugh, with Alberta seperatism. And they also had trump trucker caravans.
EU? They're boiling in their own juices with the fact they now need air conditioning due to climate devastation... And many countries make it illegal without health reasons.
Japan and SK are both doing very poorly. China has some of the harshest immigration.
South America is still being fucked with by the CIA and destabilization idiocy.
I understand the tune-out check-out hippie response. There's fuck-all I can do, other than watch.
It is a reasonable position to frame them as opposing authoritarian government policies and for the governments response to be overreach.
The popularity of the trucker protest made and makes sense. Big anti government movements like that attract all sorts of bad actors and the media and government worked to highlight the worst aspects of that protest.
Mentally reducing the trucker protest to "thus Canada is bad" makes you seem like the type of black and white American fool that has created the political environment in the USA.
Well that's a big coded pile of bullshit.
What polices are "overreach"? By what standards? What authoritarian rules are being protested?
Oh that's right. It's all anti-vaxxer and 'cure yourself of Covid with bleach and ivermectin' bullshittery.
I have absolutely no fucking sympathy for a bunch of covidiots. Doubly so, since these chuckle fucks were ALSO pro-Trumpers.
> black and white American fool that has created the political environment in the USA.
And it's hilarious that you wouldn't touch the Alberta seperatism/fascist movement happening right now. You all like to pretend your shit doesn't stink... And well, I smelled it during wildfire season. Turn my sky yellow orange.
But all of this is spoken like a Republican riling shit up on Facebook.
> Trucker protest is _all_ pro trump anti vaxxer / ivermectin
This is black and white "us vs them" thinking. This is fundamentally false and your inability to parse truth out of your political opponents positions will make your positions meet more resistance, ultimately you personally less influential and less useful to your team. Perhaps even net negative.
> Wouldn't touch the Alberta separatism
I am from Alberta. Alberta separatism is far less relevant or popular than the media makes it out to be. Im not sure how to make sense of the difference between CBC's reporting and my lived experience on the ground in Alberta, but everyone around me here is pro Canada and against separating. Even the rural conservatives. I have literally never met someone who actually wants to separate from Canada.
What a joke. No. These people wanted to illegally take over the government. It was written down in their own damn manifesto. Last I checked, taking over a democratically elected government without an election is exactly fascism.
> The popularity of the trucker protest made and makes sense.
The trucker protest was not popular, it was extremely unpopular. It only made such news because the protesters were harassing and assaulting people and causing severe sleep deprivation. Also, it's an insult to "truckers" to call it a truckers protest. Only a very small minority of truckers actually took part. Most were working.
There is no question it was a bad look on Canada, and our police completely failed to handle it in Ottawa. We can all debate on whether the government acted appropriately, but with the Ottawa police complicit in the occupation I don't know what options there where to end it or at least shift the protest into something that wasn't infringing on the rights of the people there to live without being assaulted and threatened.
Name one country that has done this.
How about 29 countries?
"AC penetration stands only at 19% (vs. 90% US, 91% Japan). This is not a cultural inevitability but a regulatory outcome"
And specifically Geneva Switzerland, it requires medical need to install air conditioning. https://www.gazetaexpress.com/en/Why-are-air-conditioners-al...
Most of the wisest ones who had the means have already left. My heartfelt sympathies with the one who are still stuck there.
the amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe this is off the charts.
US's largest trading partner is Mexico. The biggest thing we import from them is automobiles & auto-parts and the second largest is computers and electronics.
We all understand the benefits of trade is meant to bring in - such as goods manufactured by countries whose prowess making those goods better to the benefit of all.
So it's interesting to look at this example. Automobiles - does Mexico have a prowess in that segment? A tell tale sign of "no" is that Mexico has no domestic auto brand. In other words 100% of auto exports from Mexico is actually US automaker production that shifted to Mexico is persuit of cheaper labor, weaker unions, and less environmental and other regulations that gets in the way of manufacturing.
I am focusing on this example because it's the largest segment of our trade with our largest partner - literally the biggest thing the US imports is our own shifted auto production.
The second largest segment is also interesting. Mexico isn't known for its computer and electronics brands either. What's going on? Turns out that Asian manufacturers (eg Lenovo) do the very final assembly in Mexico but all the components come from Asia. It's not actually "efficient" to do this except that when assembly happens in Mexico those components magically become a "north American good" by NAFTA terms and can go all over US and Canada with no duties or tarrifs or restrictions.
So the second largest segment with our largest trading partner is Asian manufacturers exploiting a NAFTA loophole.
As an American who inherently is pro trade (I am an MBA...) this is revealing about the obvious disadvantages of how trade has been configured. The auto example is literally NAFTA being used to bypass American labor laws and environmental regulations while maintaining access to our market by American companies themselves. The electronics example is Asian companies bypassing the long standing trade conditions by whitewashing Asian products as north American goods.
It is obvious that trade pre-Trump was not set up in a smart way from American perspective. The auto is a great example: the government simultaneously made it very hard and expensive to manufacture at home, and very easy to shift to Mexico.
I don't know the details with Canada as much but I no longer assume things were working great and US is meddling lens by default.
As for companies looking for loopholes, it may be fun to blame it on Asian manufacturers. I would suggest that Americans take a good long look in the mirror. US companies were outsourcing assembly to Mexico long before Mexico came under the NAFTA umbrella. Quite often, at least with electronics, those US companies were using parts manufactured in Asia. Should Asian companies hold themselves back, should they avoid using the same practices as their American counterparts, just because it isn't fair to Americans? If anything, they have less reason to because Asian countries are responsible to their own citizens, not to Americans.
I am not "Blaming Mexico" - I am pointing out that the policy as I described it made no sense from American perspective. You are right that the American manufacturs did assembly in Mexico (form Asian components) before as well but it's the same point - an essential Asian good masquerading and benefiting from being a "north American one"
Early on, it may have included semiconductors designed in the US, with manufacturing outsourced to Asia. That outsourcing may have been to a facility owned by an American company or to a foreign owned company. Then the semiconductors may have been shipped to Mexico where another company was manufacturing consumer products. Under such circumstances, can such a product be described as essentially Asian?
Of course, things changed. Asian companies took more control over product development and manufacturing. When they ran into labour and regulation making manufacturing in their own country more expensive, perhaps due to tariffs or perhaps due to their own citizens demanding better, they used the same playbook.
You're right in that it made no sense from an American perspective, but that isn't because it suddenly became cheaper to manufacture in the US. It did not make sense because they lost control of the playbook, because others could do it better.
On the whole, I agree with your point about trade being used to bypass labour laws and environmental regulations. I'll be more blunt with how I phrase it: the practice is exploitative and causes more harm than good. That said, the current American response appears to be driven by the demand for trade on their terms exclusively. Never mind that other countries may want something in exchange for their resources.
So on one hand it's government regulation that makes us not compative. On the other hand the government doesn't ensure this happens by making it easy to bypass via mexico. So the end result is the environmental protections don't kick in and Americans don't make the high (or any) wages.
So we either drop those laws and open up trade, or we keep those laws and make it harder to bypass. Those are the two non-dumb options.
Trump imposed tariffs on an island populated only by penguins.
The British did this to almost 20 different colonies, with the same people groups for the same reasons.
However if you take a step back and wish to argue in good faith, and look at where people did come from when Trudeau decided to open the flood gates 10 years ago, you'll find that India represents roughly 40% of immigrants. I'd say that can be described as "largely", and there is no reason to believe that opening the gates even wider would change those proportions.
Most of Canada is difficult to live in. There are multiple geographic issues (cold/less sun). This is why a vast majority of Canadians live very close to the US border. So while Canada looks like a very large country it is in fact rather small when it comes to habitable space. You are probably not aware of how miserable the east coast is.
Next Canada is a poor country. The richest part of Canada is that part that sells the oil. The rest of Canada is poorer than the poorest US state. Canada GDP capital is not doing well. Mostly going down. Not a good trend. Food inflation etc. On top of that housing in Canada is very expensive. Canada has no ability to expand.
Canada has virtually no companies. All our companies are either banks or like mining companies. No tech and soon no manufacturing. Taxes in Canada are very high but they mostly go into a giant black hole of corruption.
Trudeau wasnt really in charge of the country. He is literally a nepobaby Carney was his adviser for years. The cabinet of Trudeau actually has some of the same people. This is continuity of the same group of elite.
Canada finds it very difficult to grow which is why all the new immigrants ended up in the large cities. These cities are poor and corrupt so they cant grow either. So everything ends up super crowded.
Now focusing on the rather silly things you have said:
" But you'd never believe it, the criticism is that this is too many people, and not many people criticise this "Iniative" as having an unambitious goal"
Were people criticizing it for lack of ambition if not then this is just a red herring. Ambition does not make a project or idea good.
"you would admit that that the past is not the future before making that argument. "
I mean all argumentation and prediction relies on looking at the past and trying to guess how the future will turn out.
In conclusion: Try to understand the nature of the world in a more clear fashion. Look around you. Look at data. Avoid the rhetoric and the politics.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-out-of-nowh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_C...
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/canada/usa?sc=X...
https://www.remitly.com/blog/en-ca/travel/weather-in-the-uni...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and_...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-trudeau-cabinet-mini...
https://jhyndman.info.yorku.ca/files/2017/01/Size.pdf
I would recommending giving it a good hard think. What is it that you really think? Where do those thoughts come from?