The US also demanded a veto over Canada's future trade agreements with third countries and a right of first refusal on critical mineral exports from Canada.
No Canadian negociator would ever agree to such terms which would sign away Canadian soveereignty.
Sometimes I think we are back in the Banana Wars era of American foreign policy.
My theory on Trump has always been that he THINKS he can return the USA to that sorta supposedly grand era, BUT thinks he's found a way to legitimize it by using freely-entered(at least legally speaking) negotiations rather than military aggression.
As someone who believes that soft-power is an indispensable part of any long-term imperialist agenda, I will say that Trump REALLY doesn't know how to play that card at all. The closest I've seen to anyone in his admin demonstrating a feeling for local political culture in their annexationist rhetoric is Bessant saying something like "Albertans are a hard-working, entreprenurial people", which is totally boilerplate and doesn't actually address any precise issues that might be of concern to Albertans beyond the far-right fringe. And they have completely incinerated themselves with public sentiment everywhere else in Canada, with the PQ, an economically continentalist party previously jaunty about not letting the Trump bogeyman deter them from a referendum, now saying they won't hold one while Trump is in the White House.
...the PQ, an economically continentalist party previously jaunty about not letting the Trump bogeyman deter them from a referendum, [is] now saying they won't hold one while Trump is in the White House.
Not that I think grabbing Quebec would be in Trump or the USA's interests at all, in fact, it's probably the LAST province they'd wanna try and assimilate. But if you're seriously interested in annexing some of the more absorbable provinces, anything that weakens the unity of the overall nation is probably a good thing.
The US also demanded a veto over Canada's future trade agreements with third countries and a right of first refusal on critical mineral exports from Canada.
No Canadian negociator would ever agree to such terms which would sign away Canadian soveereignty.
Sometimes I think we are back in the Banana Wars era of American foreign policy.
Trump’s negotiators knew that the Canadians would never accept any such veto. It was a device the US government could use to show that the Canadians were being obstructive.
Only a moron would think that could be the case of course, but this is the world we are in.
One of Trump's tweets today contained a reference to Rob Ford, with the implication that Doug is an inferior leader compared to his brother.
A rhetorical tactic of debatable wisdom, since I think that on both sides of the border, Rob Ford is remembered, if at all, largely as an unintentionally comedic buffoon. Given how little Doug publicizes his connection to Rob, we can probably conclude he rightly regards his late brother as an embarrassment, and thus a better line would be something like "He's even stupider than his white-trash cokehead brother!!"
I am not fond of Doug Ford, but rather liked his straightforward response to trump in an interview this morning: "Well, he can kiss my ass, as far as I'm concerned." Unlike trump, he's not usually a man who expects to be kissed on all four cheeks by anyone.
The thing that worries me is that there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to this other than (as Krugman puts it) a dominance display. And obviously Trump doesn’t really care about harming American interests in the process, unless of course they happen to be his own interests….
It will be interesting to see what we come up with by way of retaliation. There was clearly a concern earlier that some measures might be counterproductive but maybe the risk-benefit calculus on that isn’t what it used to be.
It will be interesting to see what we come up with by way of retaliation. There was clearly a concern earlier that some measures might be counterproductive but maybe the risk-benefit calculus on that isn’t what it used to be.
It's basically asymmetrical warfare. They wanna threaten a shitloada jobs and company-towns in Canada? We threaten a smaller number of jobs in the USA, plus maybe hike up the price of gas for a bit, in the hopes that the damage on the American side will be sensed on a more, shall we say, visceral level.
The latest At Issue mini-panel on the broken down trade talks. Chantal Hebert's analogy to playing strip poker in a bathing suit was priceless. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7319110
From CBC.ca reporting on the Canadian Government's live press conference.
Canada hitting back with counter-tariffs
Darren Major
As promised, the federal government is introducing counter-tariffs on a swath of U.S. goods. These new retaliatory tariffs will have a sliding scale of 15, 25 and 50 per cent.
The new levies will hit about $27.6 billion worth of U.S. goods, Ottawa said, including seafood, certain paper products, furniture, apparel, tools and motorcycles.
The heftiest fees of 50 per cent are being slapped on certain dairy products, cosmetics and some lumber products.
Steel and aluminum products were previously under a retaliatory tariff of 25 per cent, but that will increase to 50 per cent.
These countermeasures are set to go into force on Sept. 8.
Ford is back to quoting Ronald Reagan in his anti-tariff rhetoric. To an American reporter yesterday...
President Reagan didn't believe in tariffs. President Reagan believed in growing the economy on both sides of the border...
Not exactly the opinion I remember hearing from Canadian economic nationalists during Reagan's actual term. Though, of course, they were pushing FOR protectionism, whereas Ford is pushing against it.
On the American side, I'm thinking this might go down like criticizing some policy of Reagan's in 1986 by pointing out it contradicts the policies of Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Personal bias, I came of political age despising Reagan as the epitome of all that was evil, but after he left office it struck me just how easy it was to forget about him. I suspect that in the year 2026, memories of him are even more faded, even among Americans who would agree with his policies if they knew what they were.)
I liked Wab Kinew's comparison of Trump with an aging rock star trying to revive his "golden oldie" "Gulf of America" as "Lake Ontario" and then observing "It's not his best work."
Are the 50% tariffs in place already? I had assumed so, but I just saw an article in The Guardian that seemed to indicate they'd come into effect on Jan. 1st.
Clean sweep in the three by-elections last night. When does PP take his walk in the snow?
Maybe soon, but at this particular point, I doubt it matters much who the Conservative leader is. Canadians are in the closest thing they've ever been to a war posture over economic issues(*), and Carney's the man they trust for the leadership.
(*) Part of me does wonder if non-economic stuff like "Lake America" or Hegseth mocking cadets is more just what the kids call a terminally on-line obsession.
What the Conservatives need to do is find their own Marc Carney. This would not be a terrible time for PP to float the idea a Union Government a la WW I.
My apartment in Ottawa is a ten minute bike ride from work and I live around the corner from the supermarket and pharmacy. There is a bus that goes right to work that I use during the winter months that is cheaper than paying for parking at work.
I also live a bike ride away from church.
Don't knock a 15-minute city until you've tried it. It's actually great and I save a fortune on gas.
Gas prices increased prices by $0.25 per litre overnight. Thanks for the tax increase, Carney.
A layman reading your post might assume you mean that Carney implemented a tax increase that caused the price-hike. But if I'm reading the internet correctly, what's happening is that a gas-tax holiday is coming to a scheduled end in a few days. So your complaint would seem to be that the existing increase in gas-prices makes this an inopportune time to end the holiday.
What the Conservatives need to do is find their own Marc Carney. This would not be a terrible time for PP to float the idea a Union Government a la WW I.
Except that it would put him out of a job, not that that would be a bad thing.
I sometimes wonder whether competent technocratic government is still within the CPC’s skill set.
What the Conservatives need to do is find their own Marc Carney. This would not be a terrible time for PP to float the idea a Union Government a la WW I.
Except that it would put him out of a job, not that that would be a bad thing.
I sometimes wonder whether competent technocratic government is still within the CPC’s skill set.
Possibly. Stockwell Day's Alliance got smacked down for being a buncha fundamentalist yokels in the 2000 election, and shortly thereafter SD was revealed to have doubled-down on a publically funded court-case that any first year law-student coulda told him he was gonna lose.
By 2003, however, the conservatives had re-branded, 2006 Harper was PM(with the supposed dangerous fanatic Day managing public-safety), 2011 they had a majority. Granted, the BCP snitch-line might've been a bridge too far for most voters, but I don't recall that Vic Toews' "You're with us, or you're with the [named class of widely hated criminals]", in defense of expanding state censorship, bothered all that many people.
My perception of Harper was that he was smart but also extremely ideological, and inconsistent about making sure the latter didn’t overwhelm the former. The concern about the post-Harper CPC is that institutionally they seem to be allowing that to happen.
Which is not to say that competent and technocratic is the only measure of good government but arguably it’s the priority here and now.
Gas prices increased prices by $0.25 per litre overnight. Thanks for the tax increase, Carney.
A layman reading your post might assume you mean that Carney implemented a tax increase that caused the price-hike. But if I'm reading the internet correctly, what's happening is that a gas-tax holiday is coming to a scheduled end in a few days. So your complaint would seem to be that the existing increase in gas-prices makes this an inopportune time to end the holiday.
The gas-tax jubilee has been extended to January 1st.
The price of diesel varied by about 30¢ a litre around town this morning. I try not to get too bothered about these things, but that is surely bizarre. Showing my age, 30¢ per litrewas the price of diesel when I bought my first VW in 1991!
If Trump succeeds in barring Bombardier from selling in America, I wonder which parts of the USA, if any, would benefit from that. Apparently, Kansas REPUBLICANS aren't happy with Trump's declaration of war, because banning Bombardier from selling in the USA will threaten a few thousand jobs in Kansas.
Having apent three generations intertwining our economies, untangling them will be unpleasant.
Pratt & Whitney Canada is another example. Based on Longueuil, it manufactures geneal aviation jet engines. It's American paren, other, specializes in large engines for airliners. Tarrifs would imperil a profitable specialization.
Having apent three generations intertwining our economies, untangling them will be unpleasant.
Pratt & Whitney Canada is another example. Based on Longueuil, it manufactures geneal aviation jet engines. It's American paren, other, specializes in large engines for airliners. Tarrifs would imperil a profitable specialization.
And wreak havoc with many smaller US airlines that use P&W turbo-prop engines, not to mention emergency services. This is the economic equivalent of MAD - mutual assured destruction.
Saw some news reports on the protests against Carney's investment summit, with 1990s vintage rhetoric about how it's all just a big sellout to the billionaires.
Meanwhile, commentary on social media is nearly unanimous in hailing the summit as a big poke in the eye to MAGA USA, with Carney lauded as a great Canadian hero. I suspect this sorta soft-left nationalism will hold sway for a while yet, with the more principled socialism of the anti-capitalists sidelined even more than usual.
Ah, Stetson. The above post would have got you banished from Babble. ;^) (Inside Cdn left-wing discussion group joke.)
I HAVE been wondering how various personages on the Canadian left, on-line and off, would respond to this nationalist vs. socialist cleavage over Trump's tariffs. Right now, the general public stance(including most NDP and almost all Liberal voters) is probably that when our economy is threatened by something of this magnitude, worrying that our potential saviours might be evil billionaires is a luxury we cannot afford.
I woulda been interested to ask the protestors at Carney's summit if they think the threat posed to Canada by foreign, non-US investment is equal to that posed by Trump's protectionism.
I woulda been interested to ask the protestors at Carney's summit if they think the threat posed to Canada by foreign, non-US investment is equal to that posed by Trump's protectionism.
A number of comments on social-media accused the protesters of being funded by Trump. That's almost certainly false(*), though hampering Canada's trade with non-American nations would certainly work in favour of his agenda.
(*) Trump isn't machiavellian enough to have the idea to fund left-wing groups in order to undermine centrists, and anyway the anti-globalization movement is now such a minuscule force it wouldn't be worth the effort.
The NDP won a provincial byelection in Calgary, taking Calgary-Shaw from the UCP. The const. had only gone NDP once in 40 years, during the outlier year of 2015.
I don't know enough about what issues mighta been at play in Calgary-Shaw to push the NDP into the plurality at this point. Nenshi tried to frame the victory as somehow omenzing a separatist defeat in October.
The Globe headline on the NDP win is worthy of our Circus thread:
Alberta NDP net upset win in by-election
(Something about an upset NDP tennis net was my takeaway on attempted first reading…) Anyway, a bit of good news in a world where good news is at a premium these days.
I have been wondering lately about how much assumptions on all sides of the political spectrum in Canada over the last century have been based on the assumption of a mostly benign powerful neighbour offering access to a huge market and willing to do much of the heavy lifting on common defence and national security issues. The wake-up call from the current US administration is far nastier than we deserved but perhaps some reflection on our economic and geopolitical realities is in order.
The NDP victory was a pro-Canada, anti-referendum vote. They only won by 4% points albeit that was a net gain of 14% of the vote from the last election.
The NDP victory was a pro-Canada, anti-referendum vote. They only won by 4% points albeit that was a net gain of 14% of the vote from the last election.
Assuming the Liberal and Progressive Tory(old Alberta Party) voters were all pro-Canada as well, that's a little over 56% of the vote being anti-separatism.
But I don't know anything about Calgary-Shaw and how representative it is of the province as a whole. Going by the map on wikipedia, t's an urban constituency, but right on the outskirts.
The CBC report is quite persuasive. For years I have argued - perhaps not always very seriously - that this would be a good strategy and could work well. It is a bit trite to say that Canadian and the values of EU member states are similar, as Canada is perhaps even more diverse than the EU, but if finding a trustworthy ally is the issue, then it makes sense. The nation that is capable of going from Obama to trump in a single election is surely never to be trusted again; not in my lifetime, anyway.
Interesting to learn that Carney's grandfather was Irish, so he is entitled to Irish citizenship and would therefore be an EU citizen too.
The NDP victory was a pro-Canada, anti-referendum vote. They only won by 4% points albeit that was a net gain of 14% of the vote from the last election.
Assuming the Liberal and Progressive Tory(old Alberta Party) voters were all pro-Canada as well, that's a little over 56% of the vote being anti-separatism.
But I don't know anything about Calgary-Shaw and how representative it is of the province as a whole. Going by the map on wikipedia, t's an urban constituency, but right on the outskirts.
Apparently it went overwhelmingly UCP in 2019 and still solidly so in the last election. The numbers suggest poor turnout for the UCP probably gave the NDP their win this time. But still, I’ll take it.
Not really sure whether the EU association will be a viable thing when they reach the devil in the details. We shall see.
Not really sure whether the EU association will be a viable thing when they reach the devil in the details. We shall see.
I wonder how it goes over with Muslim voters in EU nations if white-majority and Christian-identified Canada gets offered a sweetheart deal that, AFAIK, was never offered to Turkey during the period when Turkey was trying to get in.
Comments
My theory on Trump has always been that he THINKS he can return the USA to that sorta supposedly grand era, BUT thinks he's found a way to legitimize it by using freely-entered(at least legally speaking) negotiations rather than military aggression.
As someone who believes that soft-power is an indispensable part of any long-term imperialist agenda, I will say that Trump REALLY doesn't know how to play that card at all. The closest I've seen to anyone in his admin demonstrating a feeling for local political culture in their annexationist rhetoric is Bessant saying something like "Albertans are a hard-working, entreprenurial people", which is totally boilerplate and doesn't actually address any precise issues that might be of concern to Albertans beyond the far-right fringe. And they have completely incinerated themselves with public sentiment everywhere else in Canada, with the PQ, an economically continentalist party previously jaunty about not letting the Trump bogeyman deter them from a referendum, now saying they won't hold one while Trump is in the White House.
Not that I think grabbing Quebec would be in Trump or the USA's interests at all, in fact, it's probably the LAST province they'd wanna try and assimilate. But if you're seriously interested in annexing some of the more absorbable provinces, anything that weakens the unity of the overall nation is probably a good thing.
Trump’s negotiators knew that the Canadians would never accept any such veto. It was a device the US government could use to show that the Canadians were being obstructive.
Only a moron would think that could be the case of course, but this is the world we are in.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-moose-that-roared?
So Canada's the "perverted" ex-girlfriend who went down on you in a theatre?
A rhetorical tactic of debatable wisdom, since I think that on both sides of the border, Rob Ford is remembered, if at all, largely as an unintentionally comedic buffoon. Given how little Doug publicizes his connection to Rob, we can probably conclude he rightly regards his late brother as an embarrassment, and thus a better line would be something like "He's even stupider than his white-trash cokehead brother!!"
The thing that worries me is that there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to this other than (as Krugman puts it) a dominance display. And obviously Trump doesn’t really care about harming American interests in the process, unless of course they happen to be his own interests….
It will be interesting to see what we come up with by way of retaliation. There was clearly a concern earlier that some measures might be counterproductive but maybe the risk-benefit calculus on that isn’t what it used to be.
It's basically asymmetrical warfare. They wanna threaten a shitloada jobs and company-towns in Canada? We threaten a smaller number of jobs in the USA, plus maybe hike up the price of gas for a bit, in the hopes that the damage on the American side will be sensed on a more, shall we say, visceral level.
Canada hitting back with counter-tariffs
Darren Major
As promised, the federal government is introducing counter-tariffs on a swath of U.S. goods. These new retaliatory tariffs will have a sliding scale of 15, 25 and 50 per cent.
The new levies will hit about $27.6 billion worth of U.S. goods, Ottawa said, including seafood, certain paper products, furniture, apparel, tools and motorcycles.
The heftiest fees of 50 per cent are being slapped on certain dairy products, cosmetics and some lumber products.
Steel and aluminum products were previously under a retaliatory tariff of 25 per cent, but that will increase to 50 per cent.
These countermeasures are set to go into force on Sept. 8.
Not exactly the opinion I remember hearing from Canadian economic nationalists during Reagan's actual term. Though, of course, they were pushing FOR protectionism, whereas Ford is pushing against it.
On the American side, I'm thinking this might go down like criticizing some policy of Reagan's in 1986 by pointing out it contradicts the policies of Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Personal bias, I came of political age despising Reagan as the epitome of all that was evil, but after he left office it struck me just how easy it was to forget about him. I suspect that in the year 2026, memories of him are even more faded, even among Americans who would agree with his policies if they knew what they were.)
Are the 50% tariffs in place already? I had assumed so, but I just saw an article in The Guardian that seemed to indicate they'd come into effect on Jan. 1st.
Maybe soon, but at this particular point, I doubt it matters much who the Conservative leader is. Canadians are in the closest thing they've ever been to a war posture over economic issues(*), and Carney's the man they trust for the leadership.
(*) Part of me does wonder if non-economic stuff like "Lake America" or Hegseth mocking cadets is more just what the kids call a terminally on-line obsession.
I also live a bike ride away from church.
Don't knock a 15-minute city until you've tried it. It's actually great and I save a fortune on gas.
A layman reading your post might assume you mean that Carney implemented a tax increase that caused the price-hike. But if I'm reading the internet correctly, what's happening is that a gas-tax holiday is coming to a scheduled end in a few days. So your complaint would seem to be that the existing increase in gas-prices makes this an inopportune time to end the holiday.
Except that it would put him out of a job, not that that would be a bad thing.
I sometimes wonder whether competent technocratic government is still within the CPC’s skill set.
Possibly. Stockwell Day's Alliance got smacked down for being a buncha fundamentalist yokels in the 2000 election, and shortly thereafter SD was revealed to have doubled-down on a publically funded court-case that any first year law-student coulda told him he was gonna lose.
By 2003, however, the conservatives had re-branded, 2006 Harper was PM(with the supposed dangerous fanatic Day managing public-safety), 2011 they had a majority. Granted, the BCP snitch-line might've been a bridge too far for most voters, but I don't recall that Vic Toews' "You're with us, or you're with the [named class of widely hated criminals]", in defense of expanding state censorship, bothered all that many people.
Which is not to say that competent and technocratic is the only measure of good government but arguably it’s the priority here and now.
The gas-tax jubilee has been extended to January 1st.
Pratt & Whitney Canada is another example. Based on Longueuil, it manufactures geneal aviation jet engines. It's American paren, other, specializes in large engines for airliners. Tarrifs would imperil a profitable specialization.
And wreak havoc with many smaller US airlines that use P&W turbo-prop engines, not to mention emergency services. This is the economic equivalent of MAD - mutual assured destruction.
Meanwhile, commentary on social media is nearly unanimous in hailing the summit as a big poke in the eye to MAGA USA, with Carney lauded as a great Canadian hero. I suspect this sorta soft-left nationalism will hold sway for a while yet, with the more principled socialism of the anti-capitalists sidelined even more than usual.
I HAVE been wondering how various personages on the Canadian left, on-line and off, would respond to this nationalist vs. socialist cleavage over Trump's tariffs. Right now, the general public stance(including most NDP and almost all Liberal voters) is probably that when our economy is threatened by something of this magnitude, worrying that our potential saviours might be evil billionaires is a luxury we cannot afford.
I woulda been interested to ask the protestors at Carney's summit if they think the threat posed to Canada by foreign, non-US investment is equal to that posed by Trump's protectionism.
A number of comments on social-media accused the protesters of being funded by Trump. That's almost certainly false(*), though hampering Canada's trade with non-American nations would certainly work in favour of his agenda.
(*) Trump isn't machiavellian enough to have the idea to fund left-wing groups in order to undermine centrists, and anyway the anti-globalization movement is now such a minuscule force it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I don't know enough about what issues mighta been at play in Calgary-Shaw to push the NDP into the plurality at this point. Nenshi tried to frame the victory as somehow omenzing a separatist defeat in October.
Alberta NDP net upset win in by-election
(Something about an upset NDP tennis net was my takeaway on attempted first reading…) Anyway, a bit of good news in a world where good news is at a premium these days.
I have been wondering lately about how much assumptions on all sides of the political spectrum in Canada over the last century have been based on the assumption of a mostly benign powerful neighbour offering access to a huge market and willing to do much of the heavy lifting on common defence and national security issues. The wake-up call from the current US administration is far nastier than we deserved but perhaps some reflection on our economic and geopolitical realities is in order.
Assuming the Liberal and Progressive Tory(old Alberta Party) voters were all pro-Canada as well, that's a little over 56% of the vote being anti-separatism.
But I don't know anything about Calgary-Shaw and how representative it is of the province as a whole. Going by the map on wikipedia, t's an urban constituency, but right on the outskirts.
ETA: This would prove very interesting at the Federal level. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-ready-for-bloc-style-federal-party-says-former-mla-9.7345429
Never bet against Canadians when we choose to be passive-aggressive.
Interesting to learn that Carney's grandfather was Irish, so he is entitled to Irish citizenship and would therefore be an EU citizen too.
Apparently it went overwhelmingly UCP in 2019 and still solidly so in the last election. The numbers suggest poor turnout for the UCP probably gave the NDP their win this time. But still, I’ll take it.
Not really sure whether the EU association will be a viable thing when they reach the devil in the details. We shall see.
I wonder how it goes over with Muslim voters in EU nations if white-majority and Christian-identified Canada gets offered a sweetheart deal that, AFAIK, was never offered to Turkey during the period when Turkey was trying to get in.