except Trudeau told them to bugger off
CAN-USA Tariff Strife (split from various pol threads)
- Thread starter Remius
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For those who have lost the plot and are trying to bury this problem in the pages of an economics textbook, here’s Trump’s latest as of this morning:
I will keep saying this: this is not a conventional problem of economics between rational actors. This is a facade sitting in front of the ‘will to power’ psychology of an 1800s style robber baron who unfortunately leads the most powerful country in the world and who would see it as a feather in his cap if he were to succesfully annex us during his time in power.
Are people getting it yet?
I will keep saying this: this is not a conventional problem of economics between rational actors. This is a facade sitting in front of the ‘will to power’ psychology of an 1800s style robber baron who unfortunately leads the most powerful country in the world and who would see it as a feather in his cap if he were to succesfully annex us during his time in power.
Are people getting it yet?
if Glenora were distilled on Islay it would be called Scotch, or so I have heardGlenora Inn & Distillery - Single Malt Whisky Distillery, Cape Breton
Home of Canada's Oldest Single Malt Whisky, Glen Breton Rarewww.glenoradistillery.com
Bourbon vs Tennessee Whiskey. A lot of their liquor laws are more internally protected than ours.
Now that's good stuff (a friend lives in The Valley). I prefer the Night Owl Coffee.
OldSolduer
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Teddy Roosevelt on steroids.
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Is that what they call terroir in your part of the world?
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"Rational" is doing a lot of heavy lifting...
Brad Sallows
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Annexation isn't a serious concern. People talking about it are wasting their time and unnecessarily aggravating their blood pressure.
If we do almost nothing right now and take the forecasted recession ("2% of GDP") on the chin, we'll still be OK. If one aspect that seems to be overlooked here - that Trump might increase tariff rates, and "Red States" might add their own in response to Canadian state-targeted tariffs/embargoes - transpires, the recessionary hit will be larger, but we'll still be OK.
If we avoid antagonizing irrational people into even worse (for us) actions and instead take other pro-growth measures to offset the anticipated recession, our outcome is better than either the CoAs "do nothing" or "escalate and antagonize". Meanwhile, the impact of tariffs on US consumers will work in our favour. On that last, a point of economics:
"To better understand the full extent of a tariff’s cost, we need to realize that it leads competing US producers to raise their own prices. As the quantity demanded for the domestic product increases, its price is bid up by consumers until the domestic price reaches the taxed price of the foreign good. Imports will have decreased, domestic production increased, and domestic purchasers will be paying the same price for both the imported good and its domestically produced equivalent - for example, two cars of the same brand or quality produced in Germany and in the United States. This is what “protection” means: Domestic producers are protected from the lower prices of foreign competitors; the tariff is a discriminatory tax that allows them - and even pushes them - to increase their own prices to the level of the now-tariffed imported goods." (Article here)
US consumers will feel pain without us doing anything which adds harm to both countries. Eventually they will act on that pain. All we need to do is empower political leadership that isn't reflexively anti-American in its party roots, can keep calm in the face of adversity, is economically rational, and isn't ideologically committed to maintaining irrational policies in Canada to favour small selected interest groups over the general interests of Canadian entrepreneurs and consumers.
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For those who hold these things of import near and dear to our hearts:
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I honestly think it's an ego thing with Trudeau, where he felt showed up by him at one of the G7s where Trump tried to do his stupid power move handshake and got outmuscled. And then with the memes going around of Ivanka thirsting for Trudeau it probably didn't help, as he has a way too weird relationship with her.
Who knows though, he could have maybe tried building one of his ugly ass buildings here in the 80s and wasn't able to just bulldoze an old growth forest or something and still holds a grudge.
He's a man child and a narcissist, who is also acting like he has early dimensia, so could just be he doesn't like red and white together or thinks we're going to take over Alaska or something. Even Southpark gave up trying to satirize him as he was stupider than they could ever be.
Annexation as a result isn’t a serious concern because Canadians will utterly reject it. But, Trump’s explicit and repeatedly expressed desire for annexation is a serious concern becuse it tells us why he‘a actually doing this, and why playing the role of Neville Chamberlain with an orange stain on his chin isn’t going to make this go away. There are already a modest number of shameless Canadians lining up to do that.
Trump is a belligerent bully who sees something through the shop window that he wants but can’t have. He’s used to being able to bully and buy what he wants. He wants but cannot buy or have Canada, but he will not take that gracefully. We’re already seeing the tantrum.
This is not in isolation! Thisnis happening as he levies tariffs at the world. It’s happening as he shifts towards mercantilism and isolationism. It’s happening as he is purging not only the senior ranks but the government executive across all levels to cement his power. It’s happening as a group of hard right manifestations destiny types asrmble around him, and they will live and wield influence much longer than he will.
He wants a more isolationist America that he has more personal control over. He looks at a map and sees a big island called “North America”, 60% of which isn’t the same name or colour as his chunk. He’s eyeballing that map with all the subtelty of a kid on his computer playing Civilization.
This is not a nice neat acedemic economics problem pulled off a shelf in an ivory tower and placed in some frictionless vacuum. This is Canada facing four years of a very belligerent president to the south, and we have to stand up for ourselves. We need to set an example for other counties to do the same because we REALLY need other friendly nations and trading blocs to have our backs on this.
Trump thinks he can economically coerce us to join his country. He thinks he can do that by killing Canadian jobs, by reducing Canadian incomes, by collapsing Canadian businesses. He cares about his image and his legacy. He cares about what people think of him and he ties that to inflation and the cost of gas and eggs.
Well fuck that and fuck him. Hit back in ways that cause the most harm to American business for the least harm to Canadian consumers, and let constituencies he’s politically dependent on feel pain from it. Let his pet congressmen and senators hear from constituents who lost their job and no longer have healthcare or prescription coverage for their sick wife or kid. Let them hear from the guy living paycheck to paycheck whose car just broke and now it’s gonna cost him a lot more for replacement parts so he can drive to work and feed his family. Let them hear from people who’be scraped to pay for a house but now the cost for a new build has gone up. Let him hear from assemblers, distillers, and manufacturers who have to cancel shifts or close planes because their export customers are drying up. Some of this he’s going to do to them himself, and some of it we can give a good hard nudge to with proportionate and reasonable trade measures. Show them that it won’t work so that the pressure from within forces a policy change. Remember that we’re less than two years from the midterms.
Yeah, we’ll have to take some of it on the chin. I’d rather our chin be bruised by an economic punch than moistened from Donald Trump’s ball sweat. We make a lot of noise on this website about needing to assert our sovereignty. Well let’s assert our sovereignty. It will hurt, but appeasing him and letting him think he can absorb Canada this way would hurt a lot more.
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I’d actually be content to pay some more taxes to support a deficit that compensated BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec businesses and enact a 30-day shutdown of ALL energy to the US….oil, gas, electricity…so how fragile the U.S. really is. They simply couldn’t pivot their west Texas intermediate up into idled northern and mid-west refineries fast enough…and eastern seaboard US cities would have rolling blackouts…
Haggis
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True, to a point. Export checks are a thing. If we know a particular commodity is regulated we can impose export controls on it under the Export and Import Permits Act. But that only works if it's being legally exported. Otherwise, it's smuggling.
People are different. It's up to the USCBP to determine if a person is admissible to the US or not, not Canada. CBSA does not have a list of who POTUS47 has named as "undesirable" or "unwelcome" by name or nationality.
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For the record, the "List of products from the United States subject to 25 per cent tariffs effective February 4, 2025"
www.canada.ca
Also archived here and attached (229 pages).
List of products from the United States subject to 25 per cent tariffs effective February 4, 2025 - Canada.ca
Effective February 4, 2025, the government is imposing 25 per cent tariffs on $30 billion in goods imported from the United States (U.S.).
That would be spicy, but would need all premiers on board and a federal centre tough enough to 1) herd said premiers, and 2) grit their teeth and do it.
My concern with this is that would be an exceptionally grave provocation that would credibly threaten their national interests in a way that they wouldn’t hear us out on. It’s fun to think of shutting down all energy exports and cutting off electricity on Super Bowl Sunday, or making gas more expensive for nascar races and such.
But It wouldn’t play like that. Republicans would phrase it as a ‘blockade’, would emphasize losing critical and safety-sensitive services. We don’t want them to see that as a national security vulnerability and to respond accordingly. We don’t want to put wind in the sails of actually using force. It would also have a massive cost to Canadians and would exacerbate existing divides we have. Albertans don’t want a government cheque, they want a paycheque that says ‘Cenovus’ on it. And that’s totally reasonable.
I’m all for hurting them back, but in ways that don’t provide a single evening news focal point where they can play the victim of a disproportionate ‘attack’. Add cost, pressure and friction to their economy in ways and places that will hurt Trump’s image and will hurt him politically. Coordinate with allied trading blocs on this. Amplify to Americans the cost of the “Trump tax”. Take his rhetoric about cost of living and force it back down his throat.
As I think back to every bullshit neighbour dispute file I’ve attended, at the end of all this once it simmers down we’re still gonna be neighbours. We still want the door open to barrier free interconnected trade. That’s still best for Canadians and for Americans. Start by closing the doors we can most easily reopen.
Brad Sallows
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As I've written, we need calm people calling the shots. Canada's sovereignty isn't in imminent danger - we choose how to respond. The US isn't in imminent danger of becoming some authoritarian playground. People who didn't and don't support Trump don't deserve to be dragged into this, and that's a large number of people even in states whose EC votes went to Trump. Nor does everyone who voted for Trump necessarily support this particular thing right now - it's unavoidably part of the package they voted for because they could only choose between two packages, but that doesn't mean that their support in favour of us on this issue has to be yielded unfought due to ham-fisted emotionally-driven lackwit unimaginative economically ruinous self-destructive responses by people who can't hear Trump talk nonsense about 51st states without their hind brains taking over and who think that a prospective recession on par with recessions we've previously endured is suddenly an existential crisis. I can see our future US licence plate : Canada, the Chicken Little State.
Everyone lining up for "trade war" reminds me of every other stupid foolish imbecilic person who joined in a rush to conflict somewhere, sometime, because their patriotic sensibilities and feelings were hurt, and also the litany of self-serving ridiculous mostly abstract excuses they offered to justify their belligerent rush to seek the worst possible outcomes.
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Wiki's summary of the Scotch Whisky Regulations:
"Scotch whisky" as whisky that:
- Is produced at a distillery in Scotland from water and malted barley (to which only whole grains of other cereals may be added) all of which have been:
- Processed at that distillery into a mash
- Converted at that distillery to a fermentable substrate only by endogenous enzyme systems
- Fermented at that distillery only by adding yeast
- Has been distilled at an alcoholic strength by volume of less than 94.8% (190 US proof)
- Is wholly matured in an excise warehouse in Scotland in oak casks of a capacity not exceeding 700 litres (185 US gal; 154 imp gal) for at least three years
- Retains the colour, aroma, and taste of the raw materials used in, and the method of, its production and maturation
- Contains no added substances, other than water and plain (E150A) caramel colouring
- Has a minimum alcoholic strength by volume of 40% (80 US proof)
