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CAN-USA 2025 Tariff Strife (split from various pol threads)

You’re unintentionally advertising quite strongly for Carney over Poilievre here.

No I'm not. He was counted out when I mentioned the current marxist government. I see Carney as more of a financier than someone to negotiate trade. Poliviere has lots of options in this country to find a team of business negotiators without going to the Laurentien Elites. They certainly would be better than the journalist who negotiated the last disaster.
 
No I'm not. He was counted out when I mentioned the current marxist government. I see Carney as more of a financier than someone to negotiate trade. Poliviere has lots of options in this country to find a team of business negotiators without going to the Laurentien Elites. They certainly would be better than the journalist who negotiated the last disaster.
Marx would find the notion of our government being ‘Marxist’ laughable. You use the term with the same liberty that the DPRK uses the term “democratic”.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that one of Carney’s roles (after thirteen years at the notable bulwark of communism Goldman Sachs) was leading the federal government’s divestment of its stake in Petro Canada… Not exactly the predicted socialist seizing of the means of production by the proletariat, that. If he’s a Marxist, he’s about as good at it as I am at singing opera (or singing anything else).
 
Marx would find the notion of our government being ‘Marxist’ laughable. You use the term with the same liberty that the DPRK uses the term “democratic”.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that one of Carney’s roles (after thirteen years at the notable bulwark of communism Goldman Sachs) was leading the federal government’s divestment of its stake in Petro Canada… Not exactly the predicted socialist seizing of the means of production by the proletariat, that. If he’s a Marxist, he’s about as good at it as I am at singing opera (or singing anything else).

You seem to be the one pulling for Carney now.🤣😉

Meh, opinions.
 
You seem to be the one pulling for Carney now.🤣😉

Meh, opinions.
I’m not, actually- not sure how I feel yet, and I’m not eligible to vote in the leadership anyway. I do recognize his real life non-politics resume as considerably stronger between the two, though.

Still waiting to see the platforms, which we won’t get til a writ drops.
 
You seem to be the one pulling for Carney now.🤣😉

Meh, opinions.
Is he wrong though?

Look, Carney is a lot of things, but “Marxist” ain’t it.

I would say he’s a weird green croney-capitalist hybrid technocrat. He wants to use the regulatory power of the state to create winners and losers. That’s bad enough. But I’ll be surprised if he seizes the means of production for the proletariat and shuts down the banks.
 
I'm no international financier. I go with my gut and what I've witnessed over 70+ years on the planet. Think of me as the guy in the bar with a ball cap and dirt under my fingernails, that your having a casual conversation with over a beer. During my military time, I've had Canadian Professional Sales Association training and been responsible for one project of over $1 million, I was NPF manager for the BG in Bosnia responsible for stock and sales of over $1.5 million and directed and oversaw all CIMIC projects done on Athena Roto 0 to the tune of well over $2 million. That's the extent of my financial and sales experience. It doesn't make me an expert in international trade. It does give me some small insight into Trumps sales strategy.

I'll leave the numbers and minutiae to the experts here to argue the finer points.
I’m nowhere near that smart, FJ - that’s why I can only go by what they say & do :)
 
Is he wrong though?

Look, Carney is a lot of things, but “Marxist” ain’t it.

I would say he’s a weird green croney-capitalist hybrid technocrat. He wants to use the regulatory power of the state to create winners and losers. That’s bad enough. But I’ll be surprised if he seizes the means of production for the proletariat and shuts down the banks.

He'd be more like to seize the banks and shut down the proletariat.

I remain convinced that he and his tribe are the heirs of the corporatists that lost WW2 but survived and reclaimed their positions.

Club of Rome.
 

A 25-per-cent U.S. tariff is, however undesirable, very much survivable.


As I have been arguing --- Canada pre-freetrade, worked.
And if GDP did drop it could be recovered by exporting more, and by attracting the investments necessary to get those exports to market.

Would Trump tariffs ‘kill the Canadian economy completely’? Not even close​

Tony Keller
Tony Keller
Published 15 hours ago Updated 14 hours ago


In 1867, the year of Confederation, the United States had tariffs on most imports from Canada and the rest of the world. The average tariff rate: 47 per cent. In 1899, under president William McKinley, protectionist hero of the current occupant of the White House, the rate was 52 per cent. And during the Great Depression, the Hawley-Smoot tariff boosted the average U.S. import tax to 59 per cent.

For a century and a half, from the early 1800s until the late 1940s, U.S. tariffs were generally high and widely applied. Except for three years at the end of the First World War, the average tariff was higher than the 25-per-cent toll President Donald Trump has been threatening to slap on Canadian exports.

It wasn’t so long ago that a tariff wall on our southern border was a permanent feature of the economic landscape. And running parallel to it was Canada’s own tariff rampart, known as the National Policy. For decades, it was Canadian policy to make U.S. imports more expensive, and less able to compete with Canadian-made goods.

Canada likely would have been more prosperous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries if the two countries had lowered the walls and traded more freely. I’m not here to argue in favour of Mr. Trump’s love for taxes on imports.

Ottawa planning pandemic-level relief for workers, businesses if Trump imposes tariffs

But it’s important to remember that the prefree trade Canadian economy, despite being circumvallated by tariff walls, did not collapse. We had periods of boom and bust, but the overall direction of travel was consistently upward. In the early 20th century, though we were less prosperous than the Americans, we nevertheless had one of the planet’s highest standards of living.

If Mr. Trump decides to take the economic future back to the protectionist past, Canada will be hit hard. A 25-per-cent tariff would put hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of work, downsize businesses and deliver a sharp recession. Many industries would suffer through a painful transition, notably the auto sector. Its continentally integrated supply chains would be completely disintegrated by tariffs, returning us to the world before the 1965 Canada-U.S. Auto Pact.

The Bank of Canada estimated in 2019 that a blanket 25-per-cent U.S. tariff, with other countries retaliating in kind, would lead to a 6-per-cent drop in Canada’s gross domestic product. That’s a deeper downturn than the recessions of the early 1980s or 2008-2009.

U.S. tariffs, and equivalent Canadian retaliation, would make our business sector less efficient and productive, by depriving it of lower-cost imports from the U.S. and the economies of scale from exporting there. That would also tend to discourage foreign investment, further reducing productivity. All of the above would put downward pressure on Canadian wages and living standards.

But in the long run, after the painful shakeup of a sharp and deep tariff-war recession, the Canadian economy would find its footing. We’d arrive at a new – albeit lower – equilibrium.

Under tariffs, the Canada of a decade from now would still be a relatively highly developed, productive and high-income economy – but less of all of the above than with continued free trade. We’d still have a functioning economy, just one with fewer things imported from the States, more produced here, somewhat higher prices all around, and lower average incomes.


It wasn’t so long ago that clothes worn by Canadians often carried a “Made in Canada” label. When I started working at The Globe and Mail, the building next to our old Toronto office was a sock factory. As a teenager in Montreal, I got my first suit when my parents took me shopping (never pay retail, kid) in what was then the country’s biggest garment district, on Chabanel Street.

That’s how things were in a world with less free trade and more protection for Canadian industries such as textiles.

Even if we got into a global trade war bigger than what Mr. Trump is threatening, and Canada for some reason decided to build a tariff wall against imported clothes, Canadians would not be left without clothing. Some companies would continue to import clothing, with the tariff passed on to consumers through higher prices. Other companies would build factories here, to take advantage of those tariff-enforced higher prices.

We’d end up with more Canadians working in textiles, fewer in more productive industries, less imported clothes, more domestically manufactured shirts and pants, and higher clothing costs all around.

Canadians would still have clothes and Canadians would still have jobs. But things would be more expensive, there’d be less competition, the average Canadian job would pay somewhat less, and our economy would be a bit less productive and prosperous.

Fox News claims that at their Mar-a-Lago meeting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Mr. Trump that tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy completely.” Wrong.

There’s no question that American tariffs would hurt the Canadian economy. But the injury would be far from fatal. Just look at our economic conditions prior to the era of trade liberalization.

We won’t welcome the U.S. building a wall against our exports, and we need to be smart about choosing forms of retaliation that do the least harm to Canada. But a 25-per-cent U.S. tariff is, however undesirable, very much survivable.


Nor will the jobs suddenly disappear on Saturday.
 
Possibly a new Forum on Quebec/Alberta separation???

GIESBRECHT: What if Alberta really said goodbye to Canada?

'Seriously, if Alberta did become the 51st state, what would happen to the Canada that remained?'

Brian Giesbrecht - 28 Jan 25 - Western Standard


Trudeau: “They should also put their country first, as every single premier — except Danielle Smith — did.”

Smith: “His Dad crushed the lives of thousands in our province…we won’t let his son do it to our people again. Never.”


What if the unthinkable occurs, and Alberta leaves? What then?

Trudeau and his new friends are calling for a trade war with Trump’s America. They want to use Alberta as the sacrificial lamb. Premier Smith basically says, “Fool me once”.

We are headed for the cliff. Maybe we should think this through.

The idea of Alberta and western separation has been around for a long time. It began to be publicly discussed in the 1970s when Pierre Trudeau started playing fast and loose with Alberta’s gas and oil, but turned into a raging fire when Pierre was re-elected in 1980, and brought in his infamous National Energy Program (NEP.) Those of us of a certain age well remember Elmer Knutson, and the even more passionate Doug Christie.

But western alienation also comes from the fact that Albertans have long struggled against a Laurentian elite that seemingly uses them as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

This doesn’t mean that Albertans are less attached to Canada than others. It does mean that they understand what it means to be disrespected by their eastern overlords. In short, there could be a tipping point for Albertans.

If Trudeau, playing his Captain Canada role, insisted on sacrificing Alberta to — not “save Canada”, but “save the Liberals” — that point might come sooner, rather than later.

But, back to history. The NEP finally became history when Brian Mulroney put an end to it. During the time of both Preston Manning and Stephen Harper western separatism just simmered quietly. But the 2015 election of Pierre’s son, Justin, brought it back to a rolling boil. Justin not only showed the same contempt for Alberta that his father did, but he also had what seems to be a visceral hatred for anything coming out of the ground that wasn’t a vegetable. Increasingly, since 2015, the topic of Alberta and western separation has been on many an Albertan’s mind.

So it should not surprise anyone that when Justin Trudeau seems to be performing his last dramatic role before finally exiting the stage — the savaging of Alberta’s gas and oil industries — that the forces of separation are now white-hot, although politicians are doing their best to deny it.

We have no idea how this will play out. Perhaps it can all be talked out, and we can go back to watching the hockey game, and discussing the weather.

But if things go south, perhaps those of us left behind waving goodbye to Alberta should give some thought to what such a departure would mean for the rest of the country.

The consensus is that Canada will not become the 51st state, as Trump has mischievously suggested. This wouldn’t work for many reasons, including the fact that Americans wouldn’t want what we have become — namely, a rather poor, self-absorbed, socialist wokeaucracy.

But is it conceivable that America would want Alberta as a 51st state? You bet. Albertans are hard working, prosperous, and not so woke — and their province is a virtual piggy bank full of natural resources.

And is it conceivable that Albertans would accept an offer to become the 51st state? Although the first response might be a patriotic “No thanks,” once the reality that every Canadian dollar Albertans earned and owned might instantly become an American dollar, the answer would more likely become “Give me a minute here.”

Suddenly, the cost of a trip to Florida would be cut almost in half. A loaded F-150 would cost $60,000, instead of $100,000, no carbon tax, less income tax. Now, you are interested.

American citizenship would also mean that American universities and careers in California and New York would be available for one’s children.

And on and on. So, while some might still refuse the offer, many would accept.

This is all hypothetical, and we don’t know if the offer would be made or if made, would be accepted. But, play along with me here, if Alberta did become the 51st state, what would happen to the Canada that remained?

Quebec, for instance. Just as western separatism has been simmering since at least the 1970s, it has been in Quebec for even longer. There is no need in this short piece to go through that history in any detail — just to add that two factors might cause Quebecers to finally pull the plug.

First, in the next federal election — probably May of this year — there is a distinct possibility that the Bloc Québécois will become the official opposition. With a separatist party on full display in Ottawa helping a separatist provincial party, their “favourable conditions” referendum test might have arrived.

But, at least as important, if Alberta chose to leave Canada, would what remained even be of interest to Quebec? After all, Quebec’s “attachment” to English Canada has always been mainly about the money.

Quebecers, generally, have a commitment to Canada that differs from the one most non-Quebecers feel. Ours is largely emotional. Theirs isn’t. Their loyalty is to Quebec. They have remained in Canada primarily because most Quebecers believe — so far — that staying is in their best economic interests. But if more Quebecers stop believing that, and believe that they could separate with their distinct culture intact, they might do so. And it appears that is exactly what might be happening.

Oddly, Quebec is one of the reasons why Alberta might go. The “Fossil Fobia” that controls Quebecers’ minds — that peculiar Quebec mindset that hydro, wind, solar are “clean” while Alberta’s oil and gas are “dirty” — has prevented the building of pipelines to eastern domestic and oversea markets, and that causes much of the angst in Alberta. It is not lost on Alberta that the eastern politicians are the very people who are wanting Albertans to be the sacrificial lambs in the “trade war” they eagerly foment to save their own political skins.

And it is mainly Quebec that benefits from equalization payments that are largely paid by Alberta taxpayers — a fact that drives at least some of the western unhappiness with the status quo.

Will the Trump factor be the tipping point that causes both Alberta and Quebec to leave?

If it leaves, Quebec could certainly not become a state. Its culture and language laws would not withstand a U.S. constitutional challenge. But perhaps some special status, like that of Puerto Rico, might be carved out for it. Or perhaps it could stand alone as a small nation, if it was able to develop strong economic ties with United States, and whatever was left of Canada.

Would Saskatchewan leave with Alberta? Or perhaps parts of British Columbia as well? I suppose that would depend, in part, on whether America wanted them.

It’s hard to see them wanting my province, Manitoba. We depend on equalization money to get by. And even then, some people die in emergency rooms, or in their own homes, waiting for health care. We have abundant natural resources, but any developer knows that any project will immediately be swarmed by indigenous chiefs wanting their “duty to consult” Danegeld.

That, plus excessive environmental regulation, and stifling bureaucracy leaves us in semi-invalid status. Northern Ontario and northern Quebec aren’t much better. (If Quebec separates, there is no guarantee that its northern indigenous occupied areas — or even Montreal, will leave with it.)

And, unless they begin developing their natural resources, the Atlantic remain little more than a picturesque retirement community, dependent on subsidies from the “have” provinces.

Can Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver survive with what is left, if Alberta and Quebec go? Would what is left even be worth preserving as a separate and sovereign country?

The answer, of course, is “Who knows?” This is all speculation that will hopefully become irrelevant if calmer heads prevail.

But right now, Danielle Smith seems to be the only “calmer head” around. She appears to have thought through some of the deeper questions when she argues for a reasoned approach, against the all-out war that Trudeau and some of the premiers seem to be lusting for. She also reminds us that we are in the mess we are today because Trudeau and his anti-fossil fuel zealots refused to let Alberta build the east and west pipelines that would have given it options, instead of just having the United States as a customer. Cory Morgan explains this in detail here.
READ MORE
Triggered with Cory Morgan. Self-defeating policies of envy are killing us.

It was Trudeau himself who insisted that there was “no business case” for developing our huge LNG potential, and cultivating the eager Germans and Japanese as customers. It was Trudeau and his acolytes who have put every roadblock they could think of in the way of Alberta’s efforts to develop and market its enormous natural resource potential.

So, let’s talk with Trump, as Smith advises, while Trudeau and his new friends go dashing “madly off in all directions.” And let’s not be fooled by Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, who is clearly exploiting the issue to consolidate his own power.

Talking with Trump and his people, not flag waving, is the way to go on this file. Lower the temperature. In truth, Canada is probably far down on the list of the many important things Trump is thinking about right now. Poking the beast with our little spears is the last thing we should be doing.

Let’s calm down and listen to Danielle Smith. She is the adult in the room on this one. Beefing up our border security and military, and properly defending our north — Trump’s biggest demands — are things we should have done long ago anyway.

And Smith appears to be convincing at least two other premiers that her policy of non-belligerence is the correct one. Both Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, and Quebec Premier Francois Legault, appear to be moving over to her side.

So, let’s keep our heads, while others all around us are losing theirs. And let’s convince both Alberta and Quebec that staying in Canada is in everyone’s best interest.

Because Canada is worth saving.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired Manitoba judge, and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.


 
The National Energy Program is to Alberta what Conscription is to Quebec. A central government policy enforced against the will of the local population, politicians and polity.

Ottawa did it to Quebec twice.
Are they going to do it to Alberta twice?
 
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