Importantly Canada has committed to matching every American tariff dollar for dollar, which the US already considers unfathomable. Greer repeatedly cites that only Canada and China retaliated, which is such a weird criticism. Is he intending to compliment us?
So expect Trump to start spiralling.
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.
Please have a look at the actual flow of trade between CAD and USA, and its components. The impact is nothing like what you suggest for the US. Canada can bend the knee to Trump, or it must gut its policies on natural resources and become an extractive economy similar to Russia pre-Ukraine war. There's no other option for Canadians and time is not on their side.
The direct impact of the Canadian economy on the US one is small, but thankfully for Canada the broader economic reality is that the US isn't picking a fight just with Canada. America is creating a lot of messes for itself around the world. The effects of any Canadian retaliation will not be felt in isolation.
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.
People here in Canada have not been sitting still. It is a truely fantastic oportunity, it's almost like 10% of the US market was suddenly transported to another country for free, and all we have to do is fill it.
Canada and EU tightening their relation, pretty sure there are a lot agreements in the making. Will be great for both and appreciated by the people living in EU (and surely Canada as well).
EU is already adopting. They are slow (that's a given anyway because of its size), but they are not stupid. It also opens up a lot of opportunities, everybody's right now loosening their bonds with the US.
The EU didn't really fold, they blew him off. It was just a bunch of "yeah sure Donny, here's a bunch of meaningless promises we have no ability or mechanism to actually enforce". For example they promised to buy a bunch of gas, but the EU has no mechanism to make companies or even member states buy gas.
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.
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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.
You mean how they fined Google for 890 million under the DMA on July 23, 2026? Or how the Dutch AP just fined Uber for 825 million a few days ago under the GDPR?
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.
To add into what you said. EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) already affects the United States, though its impact varies depending on the sector. CBAM is big permanent change, and that will be rolled in smoothly below all this.
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.
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 :(
That's the initial impact, it's exactly the incentive that over time will create native competitors.
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.
I think that consumers will try to avoid the pain, and use vpns and fake addresses to get around the tariffs etc.
The whole problem is that the EU is not providing an environment where software vendors can go as fast as the vendors in the US.
This is not just a matter of regulations. It's the whole mindset that is too conservative to go fast.
The whole 'throw 1000 things at the wall and see what sticks' is not something we europeans are used to.
> This is not just a matter of regulations. It's the whole mindset that is too conservative to go fast. The whole 'throw 1000 things at the wall and see what sticks' is not something we europeans are used to.
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.
I guess it has a little to do with your goals. Optimal trade economically or avoiding giving something that looks like a win to this type of politicians with the goal of avoiding re-electing trump. I don’t know what science say here.
Yanis Varoufakis - aside from being radically left and becoming the finance minister in Greece after their financial crisis hit - is a professor in game theory and economics.
He did a pretty good explanation of the difference between theory and practice in his Rest is Politics Leading podcast interview recently :).
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.
Tarriffs will hurt your existing industries, they will lose sales/revenue.
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.
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.
Import tariffs and export tariffs have approximately equal influence on your economy. That's known as Lerner Symmetry. (A very narrow version of this can be proven in a mathematical sense, but the empirical effect is broader.)
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.
> 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.
I'm saying that the retaliation imposes basically the same costs on you that you are trying to avoid by getting the other guy to lower their tariffs.
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.
Pointless, incredibly bad faith bothsideism. Zohran was the only one in the NYC mayoral race to believe in democracy. Cuomo's whole campaign was "elect me because the other guy is a muslim, and I won't do anything during my mandate, like the previous mayor". Zohran did actual campaigning, and so far has delivered on his promises.
It's crazy how bad media coverage is. All I can find are hitjobs by zionist rags and corporate news siding with Amazon over NY delivery subcontractors, that Mamdani is currently seeking to make into actual Amazon employees.
In short: he's balanced the city budget with a 2% tax on millionaires, matching New Jersey. He is moving to give every family free childcare. He's frozen rent for rent-controlled housing, and planning the construction of 200,000 more such apartments. He's fixing potholes (that went viral, for some reason). And more.
Each bloc is handling Trump in their own way according to their needs and circumstances. This isn't a pissing contest, and public perception of them "folding" or not is largely irrelevant (which is why we have actual experts handling this and not the public).
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."
Nice to see them putting up a fight. Though I assume this will cause pain for everyone.
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.
Actually its the opposite. The pain of "giving in" is limited to specific Canadian industries and powerful stakeholders with a LOT of political influence. In the broadest terms, Canada's economy grows rapidly if they give in.
Explain how “Canada’s economy grows rapidly” if we accept a bad deal from a stronger economy. The goal for Canada is a return to the free trade agreement covering ~98% of goods that existed before this chaos, which allowed for close integration and long term planning for businesses on both sides of the border. Rolling over and dying gets us further away from that goal.
Well, a lot of the things people lump into the bad deal category are things like allowing us competition in our protected oligopoly industries: banking, telecoms, airlines, dairy, poultry…
Ever seen the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life"? It's a tough situation when your opponent is an all-powerful preteen. No win scenario: perpetually give in to childish temper tantrums and everyone is worse off forever, or suffer the consequences of opposing the child.
Note that these new tariffs are on goods covered by CUSMA, making that treaty inoperative. Pity it’s one Trump signed…
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.
Oh, we’re feeling the pain. Anyone trying to actually build things in the USA relies on an increasingly unpredictable and expensive global supply chain.
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.
False. I'm in the trenches on the cross-border trade and issue in general every weekday. Investment, industrial production and migration of CAD businesses to the US is rapidly growing. Nothing Canada can do will reverse this, though several storms on the horizon unrelated to Canada could slow it.
Unfortunately, it became so impossible to do business in the USA for many companies (where there isn’t a monopoly and you have to compete globally) that we left.
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) and iterate at a competitive speed. It became like swimming in molasses to try to innovate in the USA, and 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.
Trump tries to betray Canadians here. When you make negotiations and then at the last second try to worsen the terms, you are not acting in good faith. This is a consistent theme with Trump: he wants to take advantage of you. This is a de-facto mafia system. The "art of the deal" is the mafia way. You can see this with Iran too - Trump negotiates, then attacks. Then fake-negotiates, attacks again (and loses anyway). The guy is a problem for the whole world.
That should read, Trump betrays Americans. The reality is that he is destroying American credibility on the international stage, which is going to have long term effects on their ability to make agreements with other countries in the future. Standing alone is not in the interest of any nation.
As for betraying Canadians, Trump is not responsible for representing Canadian interests. I wouldn't want him to either. (Speaking as a Canadian.)
It's ironic that the US might currently do better with a (constitutional monarchy) king, to serve as an ethical example of living and governance, and change the role of the president to more of a serving bureaucrat
Have you read John Steinbeck's "The Short Reign of Pippin IV?" [0] All political sides in France frustrated decide to create a constitutional monarchy. The Communists supported the idea because it would give everyone something to revolt against.
In the UK we've been lucky with our royalty recently, but with a different roll of the genetic dice we'd have Randy Andy as king instead of Charles.
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.
Parliamentary democracy has a far better track record than presidential systems. Basically all presidential democracies are shit have had had huge problems, except maybe the USA, which is of course no longer even really a western country any more.
Even if you don't make an exception for Germany. Nobody is claiming parliamentary systems are completely immune to instability or overthrow, or moral hazard, and the holocaust didn't occur under a parliamentary system. Presidential systems invest too much power in one person, and that's a severe risk of overconcentration.
Parliaments are democratically elected to represent the people, and every member of parliament is equal before it. The UK prime minister is answerable to the people via parliament at all times, must face questions from MPs regularly, and can lose power from a majority vote at any time. We can all see that the impeachment process in the USA is fatally flawed, it just can’t function as intended.
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?
I'd argue almost the opposite: America's governing system (and the political culture of rejecting hereditary rule) is a big part of why it became so successful.
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.
Look at all the presidential systems in the rest of the Americas, they're all mega fucked and third world. Of course the USA Empire is also currently collapsing.
Parliamentary democracy has a better track record, for sure.
Sure, it would be pretty easy to smuggle small, high-value items, but most of the trade volume is in large items like lumber, steel/aluminum, new vehicles, and potash, and it's pretty hard to sneak a dozen 18-wheelers across the border a day. Electricity and oil are also pretty common exports, but those are even harder to smuggle since they go across in fixed wires/pipelines.
I wonder what would happen if Canada taxed electricity exports to the US, and used the money to directly subsidize other exported goods the US applies tariffs to?
It might be good to tax exports and use the proceeds to subsidize Canadian consumers. This should snuff out the dependence on export to US pretty fast with little harm to Canadian companies.
The US would then just stop importing that electricity and funnel the power in from domestic sources. The electricity comes in from Canada because it’s cheap, not because the US can’t make electricity.
"However, last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal."
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.
Sure, but I am also not sure it's really that essential. People can grumble and either pay or not buy. Potash cannot really be not used in modern agriculture.
It would be the most effective way to hurt Americans.
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.
Amazing that in 2026 Canada, Iran, and US Circuit Courts have the same stance: the US federal government cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything. Fish really rots from the head.
This was totally the right move, if for no other reason than it's the only thing that this US admin will respect in the long run.
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.
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.
> This was totally the right move, if for no other reason than it's the only thing that this US admin will respect in the long run.
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.
Trump’s deals also are of indefinite terms. Ask the Saudis - their big nuclear deal fell apart within a day as Trump added new conditions out of thin air.
Is anyone else getting that feeling about hearing the world "deal" so much that it's losing any meaning whatsoever?
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.
I'm sure many Canadians are fine with a "bad no deal" if it means not negotiating with an unreliable partner that consistently engages in threatening Canada's national sovereignty.
You sure? Canada's economy is struggling as is. The healthcare system is holding on by a thread. You ready for unemployment to double? If there is a significant recession, tax reciepts go down and healthcare spending gets further cut.
I know that this is insanely complex with everybody protecting their own economies, but I think this is where middle powers working together more strongly could help. Imagine that Canada, the EU, and Britain worked together as an economic NATO, where a tariff attack on one is a tariff attack on all. It would hurt the US much more to bully one of these economies.
Canada and the EU already have a trade agreement since 2016. The UK economy is about 1/5th that of the EU, not enough to move the dial, and they kind of went off in the opposite direction around that same time...
You'd need n^2 "NATO"'s then, because EU has implemented many really shitty policies too and someone would want to fight back against that too. UK may do the same.
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"?
> 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.
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.
Religious zealots and the new barons want to go back to the Gilded age. If that means the house needs to burn down first, the house will burn down first. In the mean time, there is lots to gain from crises.
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.
There is no grand vision. Trump has an irrational love of tariffs. He just likes them, they feel right to him. It is entirely that we have a presidential system with an executive that is capable of too much unilateral action, and we elected someone to that office who is unfit for it.
When you are forbidden to expand taxation on the people with money, because "ideology" and your country is accruing debt at historic levels, tariffs are about the only revenue source that you have that won't make the oligarchs angry.
Does the admin’s affinity for tariffs have anything to do with Lutnick? His “former” firm bought tariff credits from companies for pennies on the dollar - huge upside if you knew what was coming.
I do think that Trump is irrationally attached to protectionism, but I also think that tariffs have at least 2 concrete benefits for him: 1) as a tool of economic coercion to achieve geopolitical ends, and 2) as a form of corruption to solicit de facto bribes in exchange for exemptions.
There is also the factor that Canada has been propping up unsustainable dead end industries on a massive scale for years, and that this will make any pain from such a situation, deal or no deal, that much worse.
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.
That will continue with only cars made in Canada not having Canadian tariffs. You make 100,000 cars in Canada everything above that amount is subject to tariffs.
The last ~60 years have been a process by which the North American auto industry has been so heavily integrated that there is no such thing as a car made entirely in one country or another, especially in the Detroit–Windsor corridor.
Canada has manufacturers that the US doesn't (and won't for at least 5 years) and vice-versa.
Autos are more obvious than the dairy industry, even though Trump claimed a couple of days ago that the reason there was an imminent deal is because Canada allegedly agreed to eliminate dairy tariffs? Trade negotiations have stalled almost certainly because Canada isn't actually willing to give up dairy tariffs.
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.
> 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.
The dairy cartel is very strong in Canada (similar to the maple syrup one). They are deeply embedded in the government.
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.
how is this guy downvoted? you have never been able to buy American milk in canada. and Canadian softwood lumber has been tariffed at a high rate for my entire lifetime.
these have been points of contention since at least the 80s.
> you have never been able to buy American milk in canada.
That’s not really true. The US has 5% of the quota, tarrif free. Which they don’t even fully use. But, to be sure, it does get used. You absolutely can buy American milk products in Canada.
The problem is that they have to go through the processors to satisfy the processors' own quotas so by and large the meager 5% isn’t worth the operational complexity vs just buying locally for the processors. The US wants to be able to go directly to the grocery stores.
It’s neat that you had to write two paragraphs to explain how complicated the import restrictions are when the reality is if you go to the grocery store there’s no American milk never has been never will be.
Besides dairy, one of the last major quota based protected industries in Canada was the taxi industry. It's interesting to compare and contrast the two. It used to be that if you could put together enough of a down payment to get a loan to pay $1M for a taxi license or for a quota allocation for 20 cows you'd be set for life, as long as you were willing to put in long hours. We had no qualms throwing the taxi drivers under the bus, but are willing to go to the mat for those dairy producers. Is it because taxi drivers were mostly brown skinned?
Which is why Canadians wanting a protected monopoly is especially interesting. Usually when something is considered important we want everyone to have access to it, not only the handful of elites who get legal control over it all.
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.
Without food sovereignty or at least multiple external sources of supply, we don’t have real sovereignty. While I may or may not support supply management, I don’t support any arrangement which could permit the USA to gradually undermine the Canadian industry and eventually become the dominant supplier of a key source of Canadian nutrition.
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?
> eventually become the dominant supplier of a key source of Canadian nutrition.
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.
> We now know that if we allow other countries to have undue leverage over us, they will eventually use it against us.
Certainly and that makes dairy an especially poor food to weather conflict as it is quite hard to keep from spoiling. Your case would 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 equally prone to spoilage.
I think you're right that this will be more painful for Canada, economically, but I'm not so sure about "way more". But politically, it will be much more painful for the US side of the negotiation than for the Canadian side. The Carney administration is on much firmer political ground than the Trump administration. Time is on Carney's side.
>The Carney administration is on much firmer political ground
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.
It's all relative. I'm sure you're right that Carney will lose some support because of this, but he'll also gain and solidify some other support. And he has lots of room to give. We haven't had leadership in the US as popular as the current Canadian leadership for over 15 years. Whereas the Trump administration's approval is so low that the only question is whether there is even any room lower to go.
I think you're mistaken about the effect that the Albertan premier's artificially manufactured "independence" campaign is having on the electorate.
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.
This sort of rhetoric leads me to believe you've been enmeshed in the online and more um.. "engaging", rhetoric on this which no doubt paints a very compelling narrative.
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 :)
To me, it seems like you have a myopic view of the situation that is overweighting the importance of a political movement that has high salience for you, but fairly low salience for most of the electorate.
Perhaps, but Canada will emerge stronger. The US doing to flip Congress by a margin of 2 and just lock in Trump insanity until something really bad pops.
The problem is they're also stifling trade with China. We still have quotas on Chinese cars so that they don't flood the market with affordable cars to preserve our (yours and ours) inferior car industry.
It's basically what Canada is doing to the US with dairy, except with Chinese cars.
What is going to happen is this lack of deal will accelerate the (inevitable) decline of the Canadian car industry, which will reduce objections to the Chinese imports leading to those quotas changing in an ever accelerating feedback loop.
From the US strategic perspective this is moving out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I didn’t see china calling to annex Canada. The bad relations between china and Canada were also principally caused by the US insisting that we detain Meng Wanzhou. We can see what thanks we got for that.
Why? China taking the goods we sell to the US seems like a good deal for us. They won’t copy our dairy or oil and if they want to assemble their EVs here and give us free AI, it’s a clear win win.
In my mind, the goal isn't to replace the US with China, but to lean into many countries, China being necessary due to being the only place to get many things. In the end, the goal isn't trade with China with as high a percentage as our trade is with the US but to use China to help us move away from the US which is currently more hostile than China, at least unless/until China becomes more hostile, but never allow any country to have more than perhaps 20% of our trade. Ultimately I would like to see Canada stay away from China as much as possible due to its lack of human rights, freedoms, democracy, etc. just as with all other countries with these issues, but we can't do it in only a few years.
I don't understand this and would like a clarification.
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?
The American, and other auto makers, only manufacturers in Canada because the Canadian and American auto markets have been integrated for over 80 years. Removing Canada's access to the American market basically makes Canadian auto manufacturing uncompetitive since Canada isn't a big enough market to sustain a domestic auto market.
I'm in the EU and my masters did hand over the car market to chinese cars and this was a very stupid move.
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.
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.
These two things (investment in green energy and coal) can be true at the same time.
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...
Did the parent say clean energy or cheap energy? Obviously yes, coal.
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.
I have close the zero faith that the EU would be able to make the cultural changes necessary to move to self dependance.
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.
you dont really need to get involved in the ai arms race though. a late comer will still benefit from better designed at higher volume lower energy chips, and good enough open weight models.
That seems like a gross simplification. Some percentage of manufacturing costs are energy; I've never before heard the claim that it's the primary reason Chinese manufacturing is cheaper.
There is a huge difference between breaking partnerships by fast uni-directional policies vs. slow uni-directional or bi-directional policies.
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.
Ask why does China have cheap energy. Indeed, why was China able to save Trumps ass by halving its oil imports and preventing a catastrophic meltdown of oil-driven economies?
Putin wanted the US military presence in the middle east to be severely crippled, which it is now.
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.
We have fewer weapons to sell to Ukraine since we have expended a huge amount and are pulling a carrier out of Asia due to the debacle. I'm pretty sure Putin/Xi are happy to see us enter yet another Middle East quagmire.
Biden gets Russia and Ukraine stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine, so Putin retaliates by getting the U.S. and Iran stuck in a quagmire in the Middle East. Wars are won by the countries that stay out of them. The Russia-Afghanistan war played a very significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.
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.
> Putin wanted Trump to decapitate the Iranian regime?
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.
The Iran war is good for Russia. Regime "decapitation" does not harm Russia, oil going up is good for then. America being weakened and stuck there is good for then too.
I don't think you need to be so specific about it. It's more about the overall goal: weakening the United States as much as possible. And if that means embroiling them in a pointless war and wearing down their stockpiles... Well, you can see how that would be advantageous.
Yes? The US is currently running out of oil. The strategic reserve has been drawn so low it is in danger of failing. The US economy is being propped up by an AI bubble, and the folks currently in charge of Iran are even more tied to Russia than the previous regime. And oh, by the way, when the US can’t draw down from the reserve any longer they’ll be forced to ease sanctions on Russian oil.
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.
My actual argument is that the theory that he's a puppet being pulled is not a serious one. Much like a chocolate for hunger, it's just an intellectually lazy explanation for people who look for intellectually lazy explanations.
Would Putin want Germany to cancel the shut down of its nuclear power plants on as Trump urged it to. [1]
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.
Trump and MAGA have destroyed the good relationships and trust that the US had built throughout the world. Canada's Prime Minister wrote [1]:
"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."
I would not call it good relationship, US just stopped pretending, that is all. They were always a global threat. I am happy US delusions finally forced everyone to stop pretending too, because the cost of it got too large. Splendid.
Being a global threat but "pretending" so well to be a good faith actor that people treat you and engage with you as a good faith actor, is literally the same as just being a good faith actor.
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.
Above all the US was a predictable actor. Sure, its terms of trade were designed to favour US companies and maybe it wasn't fair that you had to be an exceptional diplomat to stay on amicable terms with them if you were at least notionally a radical socialist whilst the brutal dictatorship next door got a free pass on its excesses because it had defeated the radical socialists or was open to US investment and fully committed to keeping the oil flowing but you knew what they wanted from you.
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
> All this is going to achieve is pushing Canada much closer to other countries
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 US admin is basically Trump. Saying Trump will respect Canadian strength shows you are making the same mistake other people keep making in thinking Trump is somehow like them or is consistent enough to predict. I don't think Trump is a rational actor. He is a collection of ephemeral positions lacking coherence accumulated from random sources.
I think the Trump admin is more complicated than just Trump, if only because he doesn't have enough marbles left to run the whole thing. That said, power, pain, and dominance are the one thing he does actually understand, and that's what Canada is showing him. It's as close as can get to a signal that will reach him and the varying grades of fool he surrounds himself with.
I would too argue it wouldn't be respect but he responds to lines when it's forced upon him for sake of making things difficult in the face him chasing easy wins. You need to prove to him that the reality and consequences you propose exist and are material. Does it guarantee better behaviour from him? No. Because he also has a vindictive side for those who get in his way if he sees a chance to be. But likely different approaches despite chasing similar ends.
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.
I’m interested to see if this spurs other countries to push back on this administration. Once you get a couple of countries to collectively stand firm is when things take a turn. Bullies can only push for so long
To be fair as a percentage of exports, Canada (and Mexico, in different ways) is at a completely different level of economic integration than pretty much any other country. We have no choice but to take a unique stand. That being said, we are so lucky to have Carney at this moment. Canada hasn’t exactly had flexible, informed, and eloquent leadership in a long time that has been willing to think and work for the long term.
You could also try a bowl of mashed potatoes on Donald’s head.
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
I think it's a prisoners dilemma & that democracy, with its short term incentives, leads to politicians taking the easy way out, even if it creates bad precedent for their countries.
obviously democracy is still better than the alternative though
Huh 30% of our lumber just got 50% more expensive. Good thing we don't have shortages of affordable housing that need new construction to solve. Brilliant stuff Donald. Truly some 4D chess moves.
The "make more money" rationale is way too logical vs how this guy's brain operates. It's better understood as being like Pro Wrestling. Except the "ring" is the world economy.
• 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)
It's worse than that. He is so completely off that he thinks this means US builders will chose to buy US lumber instead and that will work out positively for everyone in the US.
He doesn't give a shit about US lumber or US builders.
If he isn't stuffing his pockets, he's leveraging the populist playbook. In this case, likely '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.
If it was a coin flip, there'd be a 50% chance he did good things every day and we'd have a significantly better outcome than we do now. Its many times worse than a coin clip.
Indeed. Donald Trump is only the visible tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline it's a massive and all encompassing corruption, comprised of an organized multi-national cabal that touches every part of the globe and which has its roots in the world starting well before WWI. The goal of which appears has always been to enrich the people on the inside while sewing chaos. To these figures, war and peril have always been more profitable than making peace.
The business-as-usual multi-international neoliberal supply chain model wasn't benefiting a vast number of Americans with no solution other than "don't complain look at these metrics we made up, you're doing great, don't be upset we are making billions while you struggle to afford to fix your teeth or fix your car". Something had to break and break it did.
If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?
Here's what I don't get about this: Trump's main campaign promise was to raise prices for American consumers (via tariffs) and to harm the lowest wage earners the most (tariffs as sales taxes are regressive).
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.
That's thinking too short term. People recognized that the heavily-centralized-global-financial-instrument method of organization was starting to really pinch.
My read is that the general sentiment shift is the hope of decentralizing that power through dense regions of highly-technical, skilled manufacturing/industries. Effectively providing a way for economic gain (as measured by people's perception of it) in regions of the US that lost out on that trade 60 some odd years ago.
The mistake here is letting the word benefit do all the heavy lifting. You cannot define benefit in a superficial way and expect things to make sense. Notions like "let them eat cake", or trickle-down-economics, also abuse and distort the notion of benefit. "System X benefitted all Americans in a trivial way" smacks of that kind of false reasoning.
Imagine seeing American wealth increase dramatically over the past several decades, see tax burdens drastically reduced on the top 0.1%, and see almost all of that drastic increase in wealth go to that 1%, and not be able to come up with a solution other than “well, against all evidence I think trade is zero sum”.
And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.
This is a painfully "coastal elite" take, and totally misses why blue collar middle America fell over themselves to get Trump in office.
Trump is doing exactly the things the people who voted for him want him to do, however backwards that is on the whole or however backwards it appears to white collar well paid service industry workers (the richest class of Americans,richer than the 1%, FYI)
It's easy to be upset when you see the wealthiest class of Americans spend all their money on cheap Chinese versions of what you build. Not even because they cannot afford your products, but simply because they can save more money by going with China.
This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost.
The wealthiest Americans aren't buying shit from China, I have no clue where you managed to get that talking point from but they're buying boutique shit from Europe or elsewhere.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
Like I said in my earlier post, the richest group of Americans is not the 1%. It's middle/upper middle/upper class suburbia.
This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.
You're right, I'm sorry, it's the 60-95%* that are the richest.
The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.
The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.
You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.
I have looked at the stats. In the US the 1% own 31% of the wealth up from 23% in 1990. The 50-90% own 30% of the wealth down from 36% in 1990. The fact that their spending drives the economy is just more ammunition for better wealth redistribution.
It's crab bucket mentality. Poor Americans think if they just fuck over enough other people things will magically improve for them. But that's not how it works.
The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better.
Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering.
You cannot increase wages without the money to do so. The factories are broke too. Manufacturing has these fundamental deficits that make it very capital punishing compared to software or finance, or consulting.
Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world.
Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that.
The right says protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.
Have you even been to the UK? Or are you one of those terminally online experts on the "UK understanders" who just makes hyperbolic statements about the place? A bit like that guy Musk.
I'm not sure about the coastal elite view, but Trump was absolutely elected on the platform of I'll hurt the people who hurt you. You're correct about that.
His negotiating methods, if one can call them that, are like "single use weapons" that are relationship burning rather than building. If you are doing 100s of one-off deals with counterparties you will never talk to again, and who don't know each other.. it might actually work.
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.
Tell me you didn't read "The Prince" without telling me you didn't read it.
Machiavelli wasn't writing about self enrichment and general asshattery, he was writing about doing bad thing just because person in power has to do bad things and if you won't do those required bad things your rule will end up badly soon.
I do believe as a US president you still have to do bad things but not as bad as medieval prince.
Side note: "The Prince" is not that long you can find it easily online.
There is always someone out there trying to push on people just like you and the phrasing is not really that offensive and as one would say "tongue-in-cheek".
Do you enjoy finding weak people telling them "don't do this" when they barely step outside of "being utterly polite"?
Criticizing someone's mischaracterization of a book while acting like a meme isn't particularly interesting. If you're going to be smug, at least be creative about it.
Yes the average is currently 45%. But that’s been like that since Sept 2025, when Trump increased it 10% with section 232 tariffs. Here’s the executive order
> Canadian negotiators also hoped to achieve some relief on softwood lumber tariffs that go back decades and were augmented with additional tariffs from Mr. Trump.
I read the article, I don't take away from it that Canadian lumber is suddenly 50% more expensive. It explains that tariffs for some Canadian lumber products was set to 50 percent at some point (or maybe lowered again, and raised, it's hard to tell since the Trump administration has issued 50+ different tariff directives in the last year), and that Canada walked away from negotiations recently.
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.
I know you're being facetious, but his entire immigration policy is to deport a large part of the construction labor pool, so he was never had a chance to make housing more affordable.
Please be aware people reading don't know which country you are from, so using "our" is ambiguous. You could just as well have been Canadian, and it took extra deciphering to guess you're apparently from the US.
This comment seems exactly like the school room exercise where the teacher hands out a test with a paragraph of instructions that includes the text buried in it: "do not answer any questions below" and students rush through the test and fail because they didn't bother reading the entire comment before ripping off their own because "our" is ambiguous. There is plenty of context in the comment, even for non-North Americans, since its very unlikely "Donald" was referring to famed Canadian-actor Donald Sutherland.
Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?
Trump is and always has been a one-trick-pony: Shock and awe with a ridiculously over-the-top threat to shake his opponent and anchor the discussion high, then "accept" a deal that's better than any that could have been achieved with a calm opponent (pure bullying).
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.
Right it probably works in real estate if you aren’t dealing with the same trading partners often. It is a business where dirtbag behavior is the norm.
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.
Not sure if you're joking, but I remember noticing the same thing last time I spent time there (2017). Lumber yards tend to have a lot of lumber. It's kind of like when you drive by a feed lot and they have an implausible number of cows (the ones over in imperial valley amazed me). Also there's always tankers by my house in Manhattan Beach. These anecdotes are not economic indicators.
Price is set at the margin. If America is physically incapable of supplying 100% of its own lumber needs, then that Canadian lumber is the marginal good, and the price of 100% of lumber will go up, not just the Canadian stuff.
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%.
Or they'll raise prices by that ten percent and become the marginal supplier. No way they're going to accept a loss. (Many items shipped into the USA of late have tariff related fees.)
Just at the right time when China is looking to expand its exports. People said that Trump was Putin's stooge, but he might have been Xi's.
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.
Its nice to see some backbone, but the challenge for Canada is that it’s broadly in a weak negotiating position here. Generally speaking Canadian companies need access to the US market a lot more than US companies need access to the Canadian market.
>Canada is that it’s broadly in a weak negotiating position here.
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.
This is a useless hypothetical. Almost every country would regress in quality of life if it were suddenly cut off from the global economy. The options aren’t a bad deal from the US or complete isolation. Canada is making deals with reliable partners abroad.
By definition if you isolate a country from the world it would be more self sufficient that very moment than it is the moment before it is isolated. Isn't that obvious?
Agreed self-sufficiency isn't the best term.
But if I were to rephrase it, let say that self-sufficiency in terms of the quality of life - US would be in much better shape than Canada. Canada has much more to lose than the US.
Sure, but you don't need that hypothetical to explain that. The USA produces and consumes more goods than Canada. Overall people are resilient and able to survive such disruptions. I'd rather be sovereign and poorer than whatever kind of second-class "American" status the USA would grant us forcibly annexed Canadians. To me that's more to lose than every loonie in my bank account.
> I'd rather be sovereign and poorer than whatever kind of second-class "American" status the USA would grant us forcibly annexed Canadians
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.
True, I did watch the Americans keep their government in check when they did not attack Iraq in 2003 and when they did not attack Iran recently. They kept their government in check when they did not kill school girls in Iran. They kept their government in check when government agents did not kill US citizens protesting government overreach, not to mention all the times the American people prevented their government from killing, kidnapping, arresting, torturing and imprisoning undocumented people. I greet the bane to tyranny, these beautiful American souls, whose hearts are gladdened only by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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.
This is all true but the story is a bit more complicated because of the nature of the refinery configurations means that many of the refineries in the US are specifically geared for / dependent on the heavy crude that comes from Canada and are not set up for the light crude that comes from US domestic oil.
Major pipelines (e.g. Enbridge / Mainline / Line 5 etc system) also cross the border back and forth. Same for natural gas etc.
Like auto parts/auto manufacturing -- the whole system has been assumed in the past by economic decision makers to be a continent-wide system.
Try to break that apart now is just trying to jam toothpaste back in the tube.
It would be an incredible multi-year economic disruption if Canadian oil and gas were to be turned off tomorrow. The bullshit "we don't need anything" from Canada line is beyond insane.
Thanks for fleshing out another part of the situation. All of our energy production and processing capacity is dependent to some extent on products that are not domestically sourced. Our Gulf of Mexico refineries were originally built to use heavy Venezuelan crude. Citgo is basically the 100% state-owned Venezuelan oil company PDVSA. It is chartered in the US as a Delaware corp headquartered in Texas as PDV Holdings which owns 100% of Citgo Holdings shares. Even with instability in the region and strained relations, the Citgo operation was critical to US production of refined products. Canadian tar sands production began ramping up after 9/11 as in-situ production using steam injection became a big driver over open mining operations. There was consolidation in the industry during that period as the industry rebounded from low crude prices a few years earlier (as low as ~$11.50/bbl) In a few short years the prices had stabilized above $50/bbl so that it has remained economical to produce. Before that, the heavy crude, tar-like products almost all came from Lake Maracaibo.
Notably, none of the goods you just mentioned about (energy imports, uranium, potash, etc.) have had tariffs applied by the Trump regime because they know all this. And it would be political suicide to apply an export tax on them.
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 quietly honestly pro-Trump governments -- have only 2% of their exports currently affects by tariffs.
It's an attempt at regime change, masquerading as economic policy.
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.
Gross debt to GDP ratio in the US has fallen from 130% in 2021 to under 125% now. It'll likely tick back up closer to 130, but it's been relatively flat.
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.
> Gross debt to GDP ratio in the US has fallen from 130% in 2021 to under 125% now.
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.
The hard part here is that this is good for people in debt, and bad for the very wealthy, so it's not a bad way to redistribute wealth as long as real incomes are growing. During this period, real incomes have been growing, and faster than inflation. So the same outcome that would get you a $1000 burger would also get you the purchasing power for more burgers than you can afford today.
It's likely a really bad idea for either side to tariff the other but as I understand Canada feels a bit forced here. And is likely thinking this will only be a few years of pain.
> currently the debt is around $130k for every man, woman and child in the US.
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.
I think Trump is severely misreading his position in the world. It's not April 2025 anymore. There will be consequences for everyone, but I am not sure his own party will support him through this in an election year. Especially now as the last time he publicly stated he backed down because if rising bond yields, which is actually happening already before any trade war. Is he really going to start another one, already in deep trouble because of the mess he made in Iran.
I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.
I think they'll support him through the election. If the election goes as bad as it seems likely to, that might upset the apple cart. But it's also possible that it won't, and the Republican party will just be an empty discredited husk when Trump leaves the stage a couple years later.
This is the way. If the US imposes tariffs, impose tariffs on US goods.
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.
Agreeing with your larger point but on the other hand, Trump-voting districts with older industries probably have trade deficits, both with other American districts and especially internationally.
I agree it is the point, but it is not the end of the story. These districts will continue to vote for Trump-like candidates until their situation improves, I predict.
Why is this ironic? I see this point a lot but don’t understand the underlying reasoning for why it is a meaningful rebuttal?
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.
Expectation is that Canada should have a balanced trade with the USA. The reality is that Canada will always have a trade deficit because of oil exports to the USA, especially now when the USA needs it the most.
There’s not a lot of irony in trade politics, but more ignorance. It’s perfectly fine to have a trade deficit with individual countries. The layman’s example is that most of us have a trade surplus with our employers, and deficits with retail outlets. It all balances out.
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…
Exactly. If I buy a new jacket from a store and it's durable, fashionable and warm, I'm not complaining - I exchangedml my money for a valuable product!
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.
Europe/Canada should ban chatgpt/anthropic and say "ok we will use chinese models for our vibe coding I guess" and watch the stock market implode overnight. Remenber when they tried to ban non-US citizens from using Fable? best to remove that sword of damocles now regardless
Good luck with the Chinese models I’d say. Next they’ll be using Russian ones just because they hate Trump so much haha.
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.
the advantage US labs have is that we use them. If chinese labs got 1 years worth of usage from everyone else as their daily driver, they would catchup if not overtake the US based firms - assuming you even think that they're truly behind anyway.
Ok. Don’t use them and then we’ll just leverage China’s models too. What’s the problem? Why does the US need to lead in AI if Europe (and everyone else) prefers to partner with China? We can just partner with them too. They can have Taiwan. We can pull out of NATO and bring our troops home from overseas bases around the world. It’ll save us a lot of military spend and then we don’t have to play these games anymore.
Besides we can just distill Chinese modules and release open weights like they do now.
I mean this would be great haha, America voluntarily ceding its position as the supreme global power without bloodshed. Its the best we could hope for. Now watch the US show that this is the one course they will never take.
> If Europeans don’t care about democracy in Taiwan maybe we shouldn’t either.
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.
They would have to make a free chat interface that uses Chinese models. It isn't about the technical implementation, it's about the interface and the ease of use.
That might have been the case two years ago, but there is no shortage of decent open source solutions that meet or exceed most business use cases. I am sure some enterprising consulting firm will come along and offer integration of those + Canada located inference infra + OSS models (Chinese, or otherwise). I know that there is at least one Canadian inference provider, Augure, but I haven't tried them yet, as well as a few actual model developers in Canada.
I'm not a country, but on Monday I'll be enabling Kimi models for my company's GitHub Enterprise account, and encouraging our teams to use those for their coding tasks.
I think there's a notion that the imposition of tarifs will ultimately affect the amount the country imports. However that stick only kinda-sorta works.
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.
I think your handwaving away the impact isn't all that convincing and some don't make all that much sense.
> 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".
I don't think Canada loses the US market. The implication is that if the product gets more expensive then the US simply stops using it, or sources elsewhere.
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.
> About 30% (of that 25% above) is oil & gas etc. That's easilly sellable on the global market.
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.
( 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 )
You completely missed the point - these retaliatory tariffs are being rolled out strategically to protect vulnerable industries from one way tariffs not with the primary goal of hurting the us. You notice one is defensive and one is aggressive - different goals.
Trade deficits are good though. They are otherwise called capital surpluses. America gets to send worthless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, and in return we get real, physical goods with finite supply.
But now the circulation of dead president paper is all fucked up, people are mad about it and they're tackling it via this (which won't work but it looks like it does something anyway).
I have not been following the Canada thing but generally have been learning more about trade and Trump's approach seems less chaotic and random than is talked about.
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.
Canada doesn't have domestic auto companies, yet we manufacture auto parts and assemble automobiles destined for the US. From my understanding, this was negotiated as part of the trade deals. There is no good reason for them to desire cheap Canadian labour, weak Canadian unions, or weak Canadian environmental regulations. For one thing, Canada is known for none of those things. On the other hand, Canada had a lot of things the US wanted: access to the Canadian market and access to Canadian resources. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened when trade deals were manufactured with Mexico. While Mexico isn't on the same economic tier as the US, it isn't a third world nation that people like to paint it as.
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.
Your comment sounds like you are arguing with me but you are actually agreeing.
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"
I think it is a bit more complex than that, since how Asian those goods were varied a lot across time.
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.
But this was the neoliberal globalist agenda for the past thirty years. Lower trade barriers, export manufacturing to low wage workers with poorer conditions. The result is lower automobile costs for American consumers at the expense of blue collar jobs evaporating.
There's a gap there. The reason automaking is expensive in the US is labor and environmental laws whose intent is to keep Americans employed at high wage and to keep the planet green.
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.
> I have not been following the Canada thing but generally have been learning more about trade and Trump's approach seems less chaotic and random than is talked about.
Trump imposed tariffs on an island populated only by penguins.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] threadSo expect Trump to start spiralling.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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'm watching democracy fail across the world with short sighted policies that make for patriotic news but terrible for day 3 and beyond.
Populist demagogues from Trump to Zohran are getting elected. Today's candy is tomorrow's stomach ache.
Getting some Cleon and Alcibidies vibes.
That is quite the comparison. It also doesn't seem correct at all. What world are you living in where Zohran is a populist demagogue?
Pointless, incredibly bad faith bothsideism. Zohran was the only one in the NYC mayoral race to believe in democracy. Cuomo's whole campaign was "elect me because the other guy is a muslim, and I won't do anything during my mandate, like the previous mayor". Zohran did actual campaigning, and so far has delivered on his promises.
I don’t see news about what he has accomplished. Can you give a few examples?
In short: he's balanced the city budget with a 2% tax on millionaires, matching New Jersey. He is moving to give every family free childcare. He's frozen rent for rent-controlled housing, and planning the construction of 200,000 more such apartments. He's fixing potholes (that went viral, for some reason). And more.
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.
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, but the pain is likely unavoidable. The alternative is much more pain, but slightly later/more spread out, from repeatedly giving in.
Why won’t the same logic apply to Canadian tariffs?
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwymk20n0v7o
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.
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) and iterate at a competitive speed. It became like swimming in molasses to try to innovate in the USA, and 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.
As for betraying Canadians, Trump is not responsible for representing Canadian interests. I wouldn't want him to either. (Speaking as a Canadian.)
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
these have been points of contention since at least the 80s.
That’s not really true. The US has 5% of the quota, tarrif free. Which they don’t even fully use. But, to be sure, it does get used. You absolutely can buy American milk products in Canada.
The problem is that they have to go through the processors to satisfy the processors' own quotas so by and large the meager 5% isn’t worth the operational complexity vs just buying locally for the processors. The US wants to be able to go directly to the grocery stores.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
what changes is parts that arent so visible - milk powders, sugars, proteins, etc, that are inputs into ultraprocessed foods like a cheezit
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.
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.
> We now know that if we allow other countries to have undue leverage over us, they will eventually use it against us.
Certainly and that makes dairy an especially poor food to weather conflict as it is quite hard to keep from spoiling. Your case would 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 equally prone to spoilage.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/eKEycjREgPE
"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
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.
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.
Politicians tend to not want to do things that display them as directly responsible for eroding their support base’s quality of life.
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
I think it's motivated entirely by schemes to stuff his pockets with money.
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, likely '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?
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.
My read is that the general sentiment shift is the hope of decentralizing that power through dense regions of highly-technical, skilled manufacturing/industries. Effectively providing a way for economic gain (as measured by people's perception of it) in regions of the US that lost out on that trade 60 some odd years ago.
And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.
Trump is doing exactly the things the people who voted for him want him to do, however backwards that is on the whole or however backwards it appears to white collar well paid service industry workers (the richest class of Americans,richer than the 1%, FYI)
This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.
The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.
The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.
You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.
The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better.
Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering.
Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world.
Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that.
The right says protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.
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
Machiavelli wasn't writing about self enrichment and general asshattery, he was writing about doing bad thing just because person in power has to do bad things and if you won't do those required bad things your rule will end up badly soon.
I do believe as a US president you still have to do bad things but not as bad as medieval prince.
Side note: "The Prince" is not that long you can find it easily online.
Do you have to talk like this? How difficult is it to rewrite this as "I don't believe this is the message conveyed in The Prince."
There is always someone out there trying to push on people just like you and the phrasing is not really that offensive and as one would say "tongue-in-cheek".
Do you enjoy finding weak people telling them "don't do this" when they barely step outside of "being utterly polite"?
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...
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.
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%.
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.
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.
The average American is 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 it seems.
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.
Major pipelines (e.g. Enbridge / Mainline / Line 5 etc system) also cross the border back and forth. Same for natural gas etc.
Like auto parts/auto manufacturing -- the whole system has been assumed in the past by economic decision makers to be a continent-wide system.
Try to break that apart now is just trying to jam toothpaste back in the tube.
It would be an incredible multi-year economic disruption if Canadian oil and gas were to be turned off tomorrow. The bullshit "we don't need anything" from Canada line is beyond insane.
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 quietly honestly pro-Trump governments -- have only 2% of their exports currently affects by tariffs.
It's an attempt at regime change, masquerading as economic policy.
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.
It's likely a really bad idea for either side to tariff the other but as I understand Canada feels a bit forced here. And is likely thinking this will only be a few years of pain.
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.
I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.
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.
https://www.kimi.com/en
https://qwen.ai/home
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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 )
2.) The casual way that you talk about the collapse of my country is offensive. But we’ll be good - thanks for your concern.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8xlj0485o