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.
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.)
indeed. i'm sure he's surrounded by some lumber moguls stateside that are going to get very rich from this. very russia coded.
i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.
You should try programming language X vs language Y, cloud vs on-prem, Framework A vs Framework B, OOP vs Composition etc., etc. HN is as partisan as it gets.
• 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)
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.
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.
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.
There was significant talk about market manipulation - he knows what he's going to tariff and how that'll affect the stock market, so he can buy low and sell high without any risk, because he is effectively the dominant market force right now
I don't cutting down our forests either but the stated goal of the whole exercise is to improve the US's businesses and self reliance on local industry...
Why would anyone, even one of hoods supporters, care about the stated goal? The man has decades of pursuing goals other than his stated goals. You'd have to be profoundly naive.
> Why would anyone, even one of hoods supporters, care about the stated goal?
Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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?
Americans are upset about not having any money while being the richest and most powerful country in the world. They are throwing a temper tantrum about a world order they created and are the main beneficiary of.
There's a class of americans that didn't benefit from that world order. However, they elected someone who pretended he was going to help them, and actually is making it even worse for them and better for those who were already benefiting.
You gotta think long term. This is going to cause all those lumber companies to plant more forests and 40 years from now when they’re big enough boom, 3 new jobs servicing the autonomous tree harvesters.
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.
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.
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.
These are preexisting trade issues that were being negotiated. The new 50% tariffs are on other industries. Lumber trade issues predate this administration, and aren’t involved in the new 50% that’s put on $20B on other industries.
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.
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.
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
I'll throw in China, which might want whats best for Chinese influence even more than it wants to sell you cheap consumer goods, but it's also very, very predictable in what it wants from any sort of international agreement with you and these days has an abundance of capital and the ability to sell you most things the US can sell you for less...
> 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.
> I will say with conviction no matter who is in office by then will not rebuild trust around the world in their tenure. Too much damage is done to the US's reputation.
The only way that the US can start rebuilding this trust is that the incoming Democratic President and Congress (assuming we are so lucky) immediately starts by prosecuting Trump and his family (and results in actual jail time, not just fines or small stays), zero out their government contracts, fire most of the people installed in government since 2025, expand the Supreme Court, and remove the fillibuster. I know people think ideas like that are extreme, but really, what else is going to convince the rest of the world that the US has cleaned up their act? It has to start at home first.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Putin wanted Trump to decapitate the Iranian regime?
Let's be serious, that has nothing to do with the Canadian situation, which has more than enough going on without needing to imagine things.
Edit to add: the extent to which many of you will apparently blame anything and everything on Putin is extraordinary. Just because the sun shines on Putin as well does not mean he made it do so.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They stand for Project 2025 and the Maralago Accord, and the ideology behind them. So far they followed both projects quite closely. Trump is a tool they have to manage to reach their goals
Also, of course, extracting as much money from the state as possible
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The guy still has like ~35% approval ratings according to every poll there is, and that’s after weekly displays of outright corruption from him and his family, and “winning” the same war dozens of times already with no end in sight. The number hardly even budged YTD.
You’re telling me that this country is capable of learning?
If you wanted a Russian puppet in the oval office, it would do exactly what Epstein's BFF Donald is doing. There are zero reasons to support anything Putin is doing (read: daily war crimes), however, the destruction from within in the US and EU is executed amazingly well.
It is lowest in history in this point of presidency apart from Nixon, who resigned at this point. That 30-35% is the floor, which won’t budge, likely because the hard core Maga Republicans have nowhere to go in US two-party system - which would be not just a surrender of long-held political beliefs, but a complete social death as well. This does not mean that the core Maga is very happy either, but they hope the movement continues after Trump so they can finally get the full Christian Nationalist Fascism they so desire.
I doubt that is going to happen. Trump is going keep the strings behind the party, fucking everybody hard, until finally he dies or otherwise implodes. What is left of American democracy when that happens is a whole another thing.
The 65 percent approval rating from GOP voters right now says no, they are happy with immigration, culture war nonsense and trade chaos. Red states and rural areas would need to be targeted specifically and even then all interviews indicate those voters won’t consider choosing the other side, most of that GOP opposition will at best just not vote.
That’s good news to hear but the analysis in that article points out that many of these are people who supported Trump the third time(possibly in a row), after the rape trial finished and all the evidence of the first Trump term - maybe can’t put them all in the same bin but independent voters in the USA are not into long term thinking from all appearances, a slight decrease in gas prices would sway them the other way.
> It’s the people that are the problem. These policies and politics will outcast Trump because middle Anerica and The South are filled with morons.
What a sad and tired take. Trump won both the electoral and popular vote. Discounting the opinions of over half the country as morons is exactly the type of behavior that got him elected.
Trump believes everything on this planet is zero sum, and the only way you can benefit is if the other party hurts. His entire history on this planet betrays this, where he is an unreliable scumbag to everyone he has ever dealt with, to the point where the guy couldn't find vendors or a bank outside of Russia to deal with him. And then Americans said "this is the guy we should put in charge".
It is a particularly interesting position when the US is trying to counter China. The only hope the US had was an alliances with other Western-style nations, but instead it has been nothing but attacks and diminishing.
> It is a particularly interesting position when the US is trying to counter China.
The US put countering China way behind on its priority list, below "owning the libs" and settling old scores. I am convinced that if the Iran decapitation had worked like Venezuela, which seems to have been what they expected, then Cuba would have been next.
I am surprised the USA has not attacked Cuba yet. I am guessing the rundown on missile stocks has eliminated the possibility of a 100 percent air/navy campaign like they failed at in Iran.
Exactly. Cuba is a pain in the US politics since generations now. If Trump would solve it, that would boost him. But if it fails, with declared victory but significant partisan warfare afterwards - not so much.
Attacking one of Russia's few allies and weapon suppliers is counterproductive to such a goal, even if higher oil prices also help the Russian state finances.
This ill-conceived, Kegsbreath-run operation depleted weapons stocks, gave enormous levels of intel on its systems (which both Russia and China are loving), burned through hundreds of billions in spend, and made Ameirca look like an impotent pathetic joke.
Yes, the Iran operation 100% served Russia and China. It could not have gone better for them.
And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.
You're not going to get free trade if it's unilateral, because you've then created an incentive for the other side to protect their own industries knowing you're not going to retaliate, while reaping the benefits of access to your market.
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.
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.
If the Europeans really want to, they could produce a lot more by converting over to 'war mode'. Certainly they need to do more with current geopolitics, but there is no need to crank it to 11.
>if the Europeans really want to, they could produce a lot more by converting over to 'war mode'
As an Italian there's definitely been a perceptible shift due to the increase in defense spending. Leonardo now makes TV ads (something I had never seen before), they advertise on newspapers (...)
Of course, because Russia spends 7+% of its GDP on its military, and Italy 1.6%. It does say something about the relative capacity though. Russia probably cannot sustain this level of spending forever, and European countries could (continue) raising it if needed.
> Note that GDP does not directly translate into a number of tanks and missiles produced. I doubt Italy has more weapon than Russia.
Not wrong, but GDP is a rough metric of economic and industrial capacity. So if Italy wanted to, it could convert its economy to produce tanks and missiles at a similar rate as Russia is doing. And Italy is just one member of NATO:
You are not very informed on the EU's artillery shell production capabilities.
If anything, the major gap is the EU's lack of cheap drone manufacturing, but even that is starting to make progress with help and integration from Ukraine.
> You are not very informed on the EU's artillery shell production capabilities.
> In 2025, Russia produced an estimated 7 million artillery shells,
vs.
> Germany has rapidly scaled up artillery ammunition production, led by defense giant Rheinmetall. Output targets have surged from roughly 70,000 shells per year prior to 2022 to a projected 1.1 million to 1.5 million rounds annually by 2027–2030,
so now vs. "projected" and Russia still heavily outnumbers the former Nazis.
Which is to say give me a fricking break, I live in the closest EU and NATO capital city to Southern Ukraine, I know my shit.
Rheinmetall's current output is 1.1 million per year, aiming to hit 1.5 by 2027 and continue to scale up from there. That is just one company in one country in the EU, though they are the largest one.
The EU also simply has way more capacity to scale up shell production than Russia does, and the EU is building up stockpiles while Russia uses up everything they make.
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.
The EU has no real reliance on US military might. Russia has been shown to be a paper tiger and the EU can use Ukraine as a proxy to cripple Russia while keeping their hands relatively clean.
I wish you were right, but look at Ukraine's desperate requests for Patriot missiles and Switzerland letting the US screw them repeatedly to get F-35 and Patriot.
Patriots are a big issue now, but they are also for the US after the Iran war. You now also see European countries starting to European alternatives as a result (e.g. SAMP/T and IRIS-T). While these are also still low(er) volume, the EU controls its own destiny by switching to alternatives to US systems.
Russia went into the war with armed forces that turned out as you say (possibly except the nukes, hard to tell unless they attempt to use one); the war forced them to develop substantial drone and anti-drone capabilities that the EU nations are not yet in a position to counter.
Yes and no. A lot of the drones are developed by Ukraine in cooperation with companies in EU countries and production facilities are being opened quite rapidly in European countries (e.g. VDL in NL, Innokas in Finland). The EU is pumping a lot of money into Ukraine and we learn a lot from Ukraine.
The EU would strongly prefer to have US military support, but does not fundamentally need it. In the miltiary domain, but also lots of other domains, the EU is using these fake promises they made to Trump as a mechanism to buy time while they quietly work on removing US dependencies, and reducing US leverage.
I suspect that if my country gave Putin what we give to the US - military bases where they can do whatever they please no questions asked, real-time intelligence access, unofficial favored supplier status for anything that might be control-relevant, quiet veto power over any national policy decision deemed "strategic" - then we wouldn't have to worry about invasion - from Russia anyway. Why invade what you already own?
I think that price is a little too steep, though. Not to mention that the US would then be at least as willing to topple governments/invade as Russia currently is.
Regarding the retaliation, I’m unsure who would be hurt more. There are very few ready alternatives to the MS office suite, and none with the close integrations like AD. Most corps run on Microsoft. If those contracts get slapped with tariffs they would become unmanageable to buy.
Then, because it isn’t on-premise anymore where you could just continue running without paying for the service contract you lose direct access to the product. So that might even mean whole companies going under.
The US sells software to the EU. To me is constantly amazing that US citizens and US gov thinks it can just pull the plug without consequence to itself.
You pull the plug the money stops rolling in. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something vs buying something but buying is a ALOT easier than selling.
You can easily choose where to buy but choosing to sell is a lot trickier. Pull the plug on AI and the EU will switch to Chinese models. Trade negotiations and relations are very fragile and difficult to curate and maintain. Very easy to rip up.
You seem to ignore the fact that changes take time.
There are entire governments in the EU with workflows built around Microsoft products that have no real 1:1 alternatives. If a governmental procedure stipulates that a ministry uses Windows w/ Office365, it uses Windows w/ Office365, no room for an argument. If anybody pulls a plug here, the consequences will be unimaginable.
It's nice that a single German state has switched to LibreOffice, but the rest of Germany, or the remaining 26 countries might take years, if not decades, to certify and permit someone else's solution.
If the plug is fully pulled, the EU could confiscate some European Azure/Office365 servers and 'put the software on the market'. Windows is even easier, I'm sure in such a situation the EU would be happy to limit the restrictions on reverse engineering to block license verification. I'm sure that there are some hard drives on European territory with the full Windows source code as well.
There are so many things that can happen. Since tariffs are percentual, Microsoft could lower prices to avoid that companies will migrate to European alternatives.
In an all-out economic war, anything could happen. The source code of Microsoft products probably exists somewhere in Europe (since they have European offices) and definitely binaries, since it's run on European servers. Once nobody plays by the rules anymore, all bets are off.
That said, a trade war would hurt both badly and it would be an epic fail on the side of the US administration. (Since the EU would not start such a trade war by itself.)
If Europe does't buy gas from Russia then that leaves Qatar and the US. Qatar does sell a lot to Europe (hence you'll notice how "friendly" Europe is towards Qatar) but is vulnerable to instability in the straight of Ormuz.
The US are making a fortune on gas at the expense of Europe an it's not that the promise to buy gas is meaningless because unenforceable within Europe, it's that it was already happening in practice. And that makes Europe even more dependent on the US (while the complaint was that we could't buy gas from Russia and depend on them).
There is plenty of gas in the EU; we decided that it was undesirable to extract. Honestly pathetic; strategic autonomy and energy security is much more important.
Yes, the EU does rely on buying US gas as an important part of its energy mix. But that is true independent of whatever deal the EU struck with Trump. The EU simply does not have control of who its gas importers buy from (other than sanctions)
But this is also why the EU is aggressively pursuing and building up alternatives, including investments in Canada's ability to export LNG, but also buildouts of solar, wind, and batteries.
Solar and batteries come with their own dependencies on China, but at least those are a different sort of dependency than fossil fuels. If China stops exporting solar / batteries, the ones we have will still keep functioning for decades while alternatives are built up.
The EU is heavily investing in renewables, but mainly to phase out coal rather than gas, and it's absolutely not electrifying its economy.
You can see this in the EU Emissions Trading System. It covers about 40% of all emissions, but leaves out buildings (dominated by gas) and transportation (dominated by oil). Since electricity is covered, it actually encourages oil and gas over electricity.
Furthermore, member states like Germany are resistant to taxing gas higher than electricity:
Despite the wars in Ukraine and Iran, gas is still encouraged over electricity in many European countries.
China and some other Asian countries have adopted the opposite approach. They aim to replace oil and gas by all possible means, including coal (although it's not the preferred choice).
While I agree I wish this would happen faster, it certainly is happening, and it's happening pretty quickly. Saying it "couldn't be further from the truth" is just silly hyperbole.
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?
Capitalist progressives unfortunately do view anything toward the left as (false) populism. Steven Pinker and the like. Even the main Democrat party does too, look at what they framed Bernie as. They manufacture such truths. As elites.
N.b. if you look up 'populism' on Wikipedia a huge portion of the page explains the contested term is sociologically vague and did not have the negative connotation it does in mainstream discourse. Most people are not aware of this.
Pointless, incredibly bad faith bothsideism. Zohran was the only one in the NYC mayoral race to believe in actual 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 on issues the electorate cared about, and so far has delivered on his promises.
It's crazy how bad media coverage is. All I can find are naked 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 has balanced the city budget with a 2% tax increase on millionaires, matching New Jersey. He's moving to give every family free childcare. He has frozen rent for rent-controlled housing, and planning the construction of 200,000 more such apartments. He's fixing potholes (that part went viral, for some reason). And more.
Support is up in every demographics, including Jewish New Yorkers, that corpo dems were insisting would be threatened under Mamdani, in a cynical attempt at instrumenting islamophobia to win the election for their do-nothing candidate instead. Crime is down.
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 :).
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.
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.
You also add tarriffs on items that have alternatives, like alcohool.
Maybe add tarriffs on items with elastic prices, say 100% tarriff on digital services. Software services will have to adjust prices so they end up the same after tarriffs since few people will accept youtube or netflix doubling in price.
This hurts both countries but will get a result - either free trade or no trade.
In the meanwhile, Trump's entourage has derivative bets on this and take massive proffits shorting everyone. For them, this is all massively profitable.
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.
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
Pushing back against a US that is at this point economically and militarily dominant does nothing. It might push for cooperations outside the US-sphere.
Are they still dominant? They can't even win their war against Iran. And everyone is slowly moving away from the dollar. The US as world hegemon is counting its days.
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.
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.
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.
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 is easy to tax exports, but this makes the export less profitable (for the entity making that export). Unless you mean the producer raises prices to cover the new tax - in which case, the export is now more expensive, and less of it gets exported.
It doesn't really help with the tariff situation much in any case - a political problem requires a political solution (such as reciprocal tariffs). Both sides hurt, and there's no good outcome.
Oil and potash are made in provinces that have had their voter bases successfully propagandized by US Republican interests. They refused to get on-side at a political level.
Yeah, but export taxes are a federal responsibility. The fact that these provinces are irrelevant for the Liberals politically is those provinces' exact liability here.
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. Canada would shoot itself in the foot with this move.
The average American suffers being hated for this government and I say this currently sitting in a town filled with fly in rich American tourists to keep it alive. IMO the only retaliatory pain point for Americans to start to care will be taxing discounted oil, electricity, fertilizer, and transits of everything to Alaska. But they’ll just blame rather than support Canada. I don’t like Doug Ford or his policies but hopefully he brings up the electricity thing again as leverage because it won’t happen in the other sectors given AB separatism and SK being, well, SK.
Motor vehicles is funny - tariff the vehicles owned by American companies (GM, Ford, Stellantis). I wonder how the CEOs of those companies react or communicate with the White House their feelings on this.
Canada needs to create an "Economic Reparations Fund" to help those workers and companies harmed by trump's tariffs. Its initial funding should come from selling $10B of US bonds (Canada is ~5th largest holder) and a 5% surcharge on oil exported to the US. US already extracts a 12-22% discount off world oil prices from Canada (who's taking advantage of who?) so 5% shouldn't be an issue. As needed to cover damages, more bonds could be sold and the oil surcharge could be raised.
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.
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.
And Canada has also been passing up an absolutely enormous opportunity for industrial growth by spending generations supporting American industry by remaining a primary resources economy.
>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?
Won’t work out well for either side, namely citizens and leadership aside.
Wearing my forecasting hat…
Canada holding $200 billion in USA treasuries, one of the largest exporters of oil into the USA, and integrated supply chains for everyday goods. A fast and painful price shock is coming for every average American.
Canada has and will continue to be very dependent on the USA. No amount of new trade partners can change the fact that the largest economy in the world is a 2-hour trip down the road while everyone else is an ocean apart. This has a risk for long-term price pain for decades.
For some perspective about what’s being negotiated:
“What’s at stake in the Canada-U.S. trade deal? How looming tariffs could cost Canada 90,000 jobs”. Trevor Tombe, professor of economics at the University of Calgary
I've always said that the only way Trump would "Make America Great" would be to show the world how completely hollowed out by kleptocrats we've become.
These moves increase other countries independence of us, lessening our power and forcing us into a more post America world.
If Trump isn't a double agent then he missed his calling. It feels like every decision they are making is intentionally the "wrong" one.
Reciprocal tariffs alone don’t make much sense, it’s just making things for Canadians more expensive with an adversary that’s larger and can sustain them longer (although how long remains to be seen with guilt yields rising.)
If they really want to hurt them start making it legal to circumvent DRM on American products and allow build meaningful replacements.
Well it's 73 days till the midterm elections so we'll see what happens. Signing a bad deal when the political landscape could dramatically change in a few weeks never made sense.
If this was even close to true, why did basicly this exact same move work when china did it and when EU threatend to do the same before.
And from a different angle: “giving fines to firms makes no sense since they firm can only get money from customers so it’s just going to make it more expensive for the customer”.
Not an identical situatio, but to say it’s the only consequence, that it becomes more expensive for Canadian, is just not right.
You’d have to tariff fruits and vegetables like crazy to make the American varieties more expensive than oceanic shipped produce. That seems a fairly steep price for the Canadian consumer.
Which highlights the problems with tariffs, they are self harming. You have to be willing to give up better alternatives for some other reason, and food is a hard one.
> You’d have to tariff fruits and vegetables like crazy to make the American varieties more expensive than oceanic shipped produce.
Bullshit. I already see in the supermarket (Canadian Superstore) oranges from South Africa, lemons from Morocco, broccoli from Mexico, mangoes from Malaysia, fish from the Philippines, coconut from Vietnam, kiwis from Italy, etc.
Yes, oceanic shipping adds to the cost. But most of those countries already have cheaper labor, and that partially offsets the extra cost.
Can the US even afford a trade war, they are beginning to find borrowing more money increasingly difficult… currently the debt is around $130k for every man, woman and child in the US.
More difficult is a relative term. More difficult but still easier than other countries so the US remains in a stronger position here. The US can sustain the mess a lot longer than most countries can survive it.
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.
I get it, but tariffs will only make things more expensive for Canadians, too.
I've got a better idea.
1) Repeal all DMCA-like laws. Make it explicitly legal to break a digital lock to repair a device, run custom code, install third-party parts, or just tinker and hack with your own devices and software.
2) Ban parts-pairing. Prohibit manufacturers (looking at you Apple & John Deere,) from using cryptographic serialization to block independent mechanics and technicians from swapping parts.
That's it. This would make things cheaper and better for Canadians. Lutnick and Trump would seethe eternally, but it would be downright excellent for Canada and a shining beacon unto the world.
I'd be happy to see the solution to consumer pain And economic productivity to pass permanently pro productivity and pro consumer policies.
Anti monopoly stuff. Maybe a growth policy like land value tax.
I'd need to hear from some experts to know which specific policies would be best though. Ideally you choose some policies that are not perceived as going nuclear, or which leave open counters, or which you would want to remove after a deal is made.
In general, going heavier into consumer/data protection laws and proceeding to prosecute both the Canadian and American monopolies would be amazing though.
> In general, going heavier into consumer/data protection laws and proceeding to prosecute both the Canadian and American monopolies would be amazing though.
IMO you don't want lawfare -- but rather you want to remove bad laws like the DMCA (and related), and the life-plus-70 copyright term, and thus foster more innovation and growth.
It's easiest to repeal anti-consumer/anti-commons laws.
I'd love this too, but it is impossible. If you believe it's possible then you fundamentally misunderstand how greatly coupled our countries are.
A rather large amount of Canadian industry is benefiting from these regulations. Adopting policies like these would be tremendously disruptive and cause a lot of short term issues, upsetting manufacturers, foreign owned subsidiaries (who employ a lot of people), unions and retailers.
> but tariffs will only make things more expensive for Canadians, too.
Yes, there is no war without pain. But I am willing to face the pain.
However, in the long run, the pain might bring good. It might help products from other countries to enter the Canadian market. I hope to see more food, cars and appliances from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa in the Canadian market.
"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.
> It seems like if the other side agrees to a deal too easily then Trump doesn't think the deal is good enough.
That's a great observation. So basically everybody should be saying no to him all the time to limit the damage because as long as there's one yes the stupidity will only grow.
I'm so glad there wasn't a single yes, when Greenland popped up.
Carney had to take a stand, the last few moves he pulled angered a lot of people. For example he started talking about asking the provinces to put US booze back on the shelves which for us who boycotted prior to the govt saying it was a good idea, is giving up our leverage before any demands were acquiesced. He's playing the same song with the digital media tax and even with the case that made Meta forego all Canadian news outlets.
Basically he was elected to stand up to Trump and as an economist, come up with a strategy. He initially appeared to do that, but given that it largely hasn't swayed Trump, he is now backing off most of it. You could argue it's a strategy worth trying since to buck-for-buck hasn't worked, but you could also make the point that the electorate, without being told what the plan is (duh), feels he is weakening our position.
A lot of the strategy has been to wait it out and expect uproar from the US people which... largely hasn't come.. yet?
If a bear is rampaging around your campsite do you think you have to "take a stand"?
This isn't some sort of status game. Well, maybe it is for Trump, but not for anyone who's not an idiot. Unfortunately, Carney is an idiot, and is in it for himself and his friends, not Canada.
The way to deal with the bear to the south is to first get rid of all the stupid stuff that is bad for Canadians regardless of Trump, like provincial liquor monopolies and dairy supply management. Don't ask for anything in return - Trump's word is no good anyway - but it may help with public opinion in the US. It will also help with better trade relations with other countries. After getting these other countries to open up as much as they're inclined, unilaterally eliminate tariffs on all countries (including the US). It's what's best for Canadians, apart from a few who profit off the lack of competition from other countries.
For bonus points, get rid of sales taxes, so there is zero friction importing things to Canada. That's great for consumers, and also great for any business that wants to continue or establish itself in Canada.
I don't understand your point about public opinion in the US. Public opinion here is already strongly against Trump and his foolish tariff policy. Most people here do not want to see Canada acquiesce to "the bear". It only prolongs the madness.
Public opinion is not a binary. It could certainly move further against Trump, and just as significantly, it could move in the direction of free trade, whose opponents include plenty of people other than Trump.
What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".
That is not why the Carney administration made this choice. You are more focused on the immediate term situation, whereas they are more focused on the future steady state. They are taking an immediate term hit, with the belief that it will lead to a better steady state later.
The future is unknowable, so that might be the wrong bet. But in my view, it is the right one, in no small part because the political situation is on their (that is, the Carney administration's) side. Political support is what determines the ability to withstand pain. In Canada there is currently far more solidarity with the administration's stance on standing up to US bullying than there is in the US for the Trump administration's (many) price-increasing policies.
If the political situation were reversed, this would probably be a bad idea for Canada! But it isn't, so it isn't.
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.
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.
It's like Americans are on a train and some of them are being rowdy, rude, aggressive. They find a few passengers to harass. One they lock in a lavatory. Another they throw off the train for not being the right kind of American. Some have opened windows and are actively throwing their feces at whoever they're passing by. And the strongest response mustered by the other passengers is to avoid catching attention, and a meek self-soothing utterance of, "a station is coming up soon and we can vote to kick them off." Except this is the fourth two-year cycle that they've just gotten back on, broken up only by a four-year period underscored by a loud and somewhat violent insistence that their right to throw feces from the train shall not be abridged.
I don't find analogies like this helpful for thinking about this, because they don't illuminate anything about what is being suggested. In your analogy, I could come up with some ideas about what the "passengers" could do prior to reaching the next stop, but that wouldn't tell us anything about what we should do in the real situation.
What John Lewis tried to suggest to you all. Good trouble. Necessary trouble. If you in good faith need someone else to tell you what other options you have, ho buddy have you guys lost the trail. My original point is that Americans won't do this until they hit a tipping point of discomfort. And for Americans, that tipping point is a very high mark. They will tolerate an enormous amount of fecal frenzy so long as they can just look the other way and plug their nose.
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.
The craziest thing is, that in spite of the obvious, balatant corruption and supreme incompetence of the US govt, Trump still has around 35% approval rating.
That means the hardcore MAGA base is a third of the US population. I genuinely don't know how to reconcile that with the long term future of the United States.
As a constitutionalist American, I really wish I had an answer for you. The best I have is that two-thirds of the country thinks he's off-base. But I can only agree that's an alarming figure.
It seems like a lot of the governmental structure of this country is predicated on the idea that the People will not elect someone who puts their own interests over those of the nation. And when we do, the whole thing starts to unravel.
Americans love to single out Trump, but he’s just a symptom of an epidemic of civic unfitness that is hollowing out the country. It underscores why the only correct move for the world is de-Americanization. Make them economically and militarily unnecessary and they might even be forced to once again behave correctly, even if out of necessity.
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.
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.
Scarcity is not really the problem—it is price competitiveness. Many, possibly most, maple syrup producers in New England do not sell to national grocery store chains. You go to the sugar house and buy a jug which is typically much more expensive than what you’d find in a grocery store. But you also have more choices, since you can buy from a person who sells different grades. I rarely see more than one grade for sale in a US grocery store. I don’t mind paying a little extra for something I use in such small quantities to support a neighbor.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
A lot of it has been half-hearted. Basically "wait out this loser and everything will go back to the way it was". A lot of Americans are leaning on this as well.
Like over the last year we (Canada) should have utterly obliterated the US from any element of the Canadian supply chain. Instead everyone just keeps expecting things to return to normal so no one makes the necessary investments to stop it at the border.
Americans voted for Trump, a child-rapist stunningly stupid criminal, twice. It should never return to the way it was.
In 2016, an anonymous woman filed a federal lawsuit alleging that he raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old. The lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn that same year, before the allegations were adjudicated. No court found that he committed the alleged assault.
I guess just ignore some certain files not fully being released, his name being purged for them and all that drama. But hey, let's keep this discussion on topic, this guy is the commerce secretary and was directly involved in tanking the trade talks:
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.
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.
These tariffs will be struck down as unconstitutional just like the ones Trump attempted under the IEEPA were. Any company who paid in the meanwhile will be compensated while consumers will get the short end, so it will be a nice payday for northern importers.
It's Congress who has the power to tax. If Trump wants tariffs he needs to propose a bill that creates them or gives him clear powers. The legal scholars in his cabinet know this, so why has he not proposed a bill?
Regardless of our different readings of the SCOTUS’s recent opinion, statutes are a poor process for imposing tariffs. The legislative process is intentionally slow and difficult. It’s suited to permanent laws, not diplomacy and negotiations.
There is no reason for tariff policy to be made quickly. Indeed, it would be much more effective if it could change only very slowly, because any positive effects tariffs may have rely on businesses having certainty when making decisions with multi year horizons. Only a fool would make a decision about where to build a new factory based on the Trump era of whim based tariff policy.
If the democrats don't manage to control both houses on the midterms and IMMEDIATELLY start the impeachment procedure against trump, I will start selling my portfolio and buying gold as fast as I can.
If Trump and his cabal is left unchecked we will be running fast towards something that will make 1929 like child's play.
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.)
now imagine the next level of his destructive crime-spree August 2027
because this is nothing compared to when he starts to feel his loss of power
btw there are reports he's going to use ICE to do actions NEXT to voting centers to get around "no armed agents in voting centers" to force the voting to shutdown
electrocution gloves and all
we're in the US authoritarian era, Supreme Court and Congress let it happen and now there's no undo button
Sounds like the right move. I can only hope that the rest of us lap dogs see the (common) sense.
The USA is increasingly the source of economic and military destabliisation in the world and it's getting real hard to justify being the best little doggy for them.
I'm not suggesting any action more drastic than calling a shit deal shit, and frankly it's pathetic and embarrassing that this is such a rare occurence.
And yeah, maybe some miracle corrective action will begin with a new president but the thing is, that will necessarily include restoring our "special relationship". You're better off refusing a bad deal outright, rather than trying to reneg later.
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.
Canada CAN survive without its historical trade volume with the US. It CANNOT survive with its current economy, debt load and environmental policies intact. Whichever way this goes, the US comes out ahead.
Why is the exposure is asymmetric?
~70% of Canadian exports go to the US - the reverse dependency isn't close to symmetric. Unemployment, business investment, and the CAD are all deteriorating far more deeply and rapidly than any impact on the USA. Canadians are carrying the highest household debt burden in the country's history now; and its natural resources can't plug the gap unless Canada is willing to kill net zero and other environmental rules.
These new tariffs are actually a retention play. Canadian businesses have been relocating to the US since the trade war started, and the countervailing tariffs are aimed at making that move less attractive. But the move is undermined by its target. Canada's household debt and wealth destruction are shrinking the value of the Canadian market itself, so the incentive to stay keeps eroding regardless of what the tariffs do.
The situation is so lopsided one has to assume this is a coordinated bid by certain forces in Canada and the US to shatter the Liberal party and its coalition with New Dems and Greens. Ask yourself how bad it has to get for Canadians before they lower their elbows and vote differently?
Is this some sort of weird AI slop? Like, what even is this nonsense?
"~70% of Canadian exports go to the US"
If you remove oil[1], Canada has a trade deficit with the US. And strangely the US has never said an iota about tariffing or restricting oil, and on the contrary keeps trying to increase it. Like Trump's big celebration was about hoping to revive a pipeline.
The vast majority of Canada's economy is internal, and rapidly non-US. We replace what we buy from the US. Somehow lots of countries on this planet don't rely upon being a subjugated feeder to the US.
>Unemployment, business investment, and the CAD are all deteriorating far more deeply and rapidly than any impact on the USA
Canada has fielded better employment numbers than the US. Business investments are at an all time high (lol, slop purveyor now claims that actually no, that's bad too!). The CAD has been gaining over the past few weeks.
Stop writing hilariously stupid slop on here.
[1] The US actually makes hundreds of billions of dollars processing and exporting Canadian oil, and it was yet another foolish decision of Canada not to process in country. But don't worry, exports to other destinations are rapidly increasing.
Why would you remove oil? And, Canada is emphatically NOT a internal economy. First, it imports most of its cars, industrial machinery and hardware. Second, its experiencing an FDI flood due to M&A activity that has key business being acquired and then relocated or repositioned to supply the US market.
It is more than time for Canada to learn the lesson that Navajos, Comanches, Apache and Cherokees learned too late: Americans lie, cheat, betray and steal. We shouldn't be cozy with them.
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.
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. Also expect lots of astroturfing about how desperate Canada is and that it has no choice (one of those hilarious slop purveyors appeared below).
Canada should begin the process of withdrawing from USMCA, and the truth is that NAFTA cum USMCA has worsened Canada's lot over the past four decades compared to peers. Trade agreements with the US are worthless, and even negotiating with that Epstein pedo cabal of grifters is useless. It sounds like the Canadian team were foolishly going to give in to many things (any concession of any form always comes back to hurt you), but at the last minute Howard "Epstein Island" Nutlick swooped in and tried to extract even more, undoing it all. Which...thank you Nutlick, you disgusting greaseball. You did us a great favour.
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.
Ya know, there's not a damned thing I can do about any of this, other than TRY to get citizenship elsewhere and leave this shithole.
And fascism is taking hold lots of other places as well. Canada's a laugh, with Alberta seperatism. And they also had trump trucker caravans.
EU? They're boiling in their own juices with the fact they now need air conditioning due to climate devastation... And many countries make it illegal without health reasons.
Japan and SK are both doing very poorly. China has some of the harshest immigration.
South America is still being fucked with by the CIA and destabilization idiocy.
I understand the tune-out check-out hippie response. There's fuck-all I can do, other than watch.
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.
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 think it's motivated entirely by schemes to stuff his pockets with money.
i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893397/trump-again-shr...
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-...)
Love the see-how-ignorant-I-am type of comments.
Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/2275fbf2d96f518e54c2b72edf163f8...
Canada also participates in trade, is located in the same geographic continent, and is also suffering housing issues.
I too struggled to identify which “our” the comment referred to
Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?
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.
Even positive reporting of the man makes him out to have a massively fragile ego.
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)
If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?
Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that
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.
Lumber is a different long standing trade dispute going back to the 80s unrelated to the industries targeted by the 50% tariffs.
Trump created a 10% Lumber tariff in Sept 2025, but it was already tariffed before that. Canadian lumber today isn’t suddenly 50% more expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
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.
Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy as the largest industries.
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...
According to your own article lumber is included already You’re wrong. It was already 45%!
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/202...
The new 50% tariffs don’t suddenly make Canadian lumber more expensive. It was already expensive.
This was all being negotiated together between Canada and US, but it’s not part of the new tariffs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/world/canada/trump-tariff...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
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.
"We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market."
[1] _ https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement...
The US was a good faith actor, especially relative to its power. Now it is not. It is not good for the world's most powerful military and economy to stop "pretending" to be a good faith actor, and it is not something you should find any joy in.
I mean, in a way Trump's tendency to back out of everything, good or bad and base his entire foreign policy relationship with your country based on who he last spoke to is predictable, but predictable in a way the only winning move with US relationships is not to play
I'll throw in China, which might want whats best for Chinese influence even more than it wants to sell you cheap consumer goods, but it's also very, very predictable in what it wants from any sort of international agreement with you and these days has an abundance of capital and the ability to sell you most things the US can sell you for less...
The world is watching this story just like the world watched Davos.
Last night will encourage further decoupling of the US for nations other than Canada.
idk if Trump 2028 will happen or not. I will say with conviction no matter who is in office by then will not rebuild trust around the world in their tenure. Too much damage is done to the US's reputation.
The only way that the US can start rebuilding this trust is that the incoming Democratic President and Congress (assuming we are so lucky) immediately starts by prosecuting Trump and his family (and results in actual jail time, not just fines or small stays), zero out their government contracts, fire most of the people installed in government since 2025, expand the Supreme Court, and remove the fillibuster. I know people think ideas like that are extreme, but really, what else is going to convince the rest of the world that the US has cleaned up their act? It has to start at home first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, people who don't have self-respect don't respect others.
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.
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.
Every baffling, self destructive move Trump makes, basically always aligns to a long stated goal of Russia.
Let's be serious, that has nothing to do with the Canadian situation, which has more than enough going on without needing to imagine things.
Edit to add: the extent to which many of you will apparently blame anything and everything on Putin is extraordinary. Just because the sun shines on Putin as well does not mean he made it do so.
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 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.
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 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
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.
Also, of course, extracting as much money from the state as possible
Wow, a global Great Depression II really does look like it is in the cards.
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?
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.
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.
To be fair, German cars aren’t anywhere near the quality that German cars used to be, either.
Nice Jedi Hand Wave there.
That's the issue.
China invested in producing cheap energy. Most of the rest of the world did not.
At root, economics is about turning energy into goods and services. If the root industrial input of your competitor is cheaper than the cost of that same root industrial input to you, you're gonna need some incredible efficiencies elsewhere in that production pipeline to pull even.
At this point, the EU should be all about keeping the other major powers at arm's length, (economically and militarily), while pursuing renewable electrification with all deliberate speed.
That should be everyone else' strategy going forward as well by the way. Without cheap energy in the next global economic phase, your nation or bloc is dead in the water.
You mean coal[1][2]?
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
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.
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...
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.
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.
Remove that the trade is fairly balanced.
You’re telling me that this country is capable of learning?
A lot of extrapolations are made out of the 10 people who responded.
I doubt that is going to happen. Trump is going keep the strings behind the party, fucking everybody hard, until finally he dies or otherwise implodes. What is left of American democracy when that happens is a whole another thing.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
Its the people that are the problem. These policies and politics will outcast Trump because middle Anerica and The South are filled with morons.
Leadership matters.
A different leader could take the country in a different direction - with the same voting base.
Eg an actual policy of isolationism instead of instigating multiple foreign conflicts.
What a sad and tired take. Trump won both the electoral and popular vote. Discounting the opinions of over half the country as morons is exactly the type of behavior that got him elected.
That's not even close to an accurate number now. There are many sources e.g. (1)
It's a shame that people mostly learn the hard way, and forget easily. But that's not the support now.
1)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-falls-33-low...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3fRIleMK-8
that wasn't even accurate on the day he got elected, considering a third of the country did not vote at all.
It is a particularly interesting position when the US is trying to counter China. The only hope the US had was an alliances with other Western-style nations, but instead it has been nothing but attacks and diminishing.
The US put countering China way behind on its priority list, below "owning the libs" and settling old scores. I am convinced that if the Iran decapitation had worked like Venezuela, which seems to have been what they expected, then Cuba would have been next.
Cuba is completely insignificant beyond some ideological value.
To get an easy win compared to Iran just before the midterms? Of course, it could end up in a mess, but it's a mess already anyway.
The point is to prop up Putin.
Attacking one of Russia's few allies and weapon suppliers is counterproductive to such a goal, even if higher oil prices also help the Russian state finances.
Yes, the Iran operation 100% served Russia and China. It could not have gone better for them.
And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.
China yes, Russia no.
> And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.
For this to be intentional, the USA would have needed to intend Hormuz to be closed, rather than surprised and upset by it.
(Not that it matters much, but estimates I see say about $50bn, which is closer to the destruction of Wildberries than it is to $100bn).
Maybe Trump bets on his great relations with Putin and Kim instead.
The EU should abolish their tariffs and let the clowns in the US do whatever they feel like.
The only real concession the EU made was just allowing Trump to tariff them at a certain rate, and not counter-tariffing back (with various escape clauses).
While the EU response certainly wasn't a feel-good display of chest thumping, I think it was somewhat effective. He was able to strut around and feel big, and they were able to move on.
The only reason the EU would really want to apply counter tariffs against the USA would be to either make a point, or because they are actually afraid that exports from the USA could outcompete EU products unless tariffed, but this just isn't really the case right now.
___________________
The only form of retailiation I think the EU should actually be pursuing is the equivalent of tariffs on US software. This is the area that the USA is a highly competitive 'exporter', and putting up barriers agaisnt these software services would be a good way to hurt the USA, and protect / stimulate domestic alternatives.
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.
Germany (by itself) is apparently out-producing the US artillery shell production.
* https://www.newsweek.com/germany-overtakes-us-in-ammunition-...
Russia's GDP is below that of Italy (and barely above Canada, who is in NATO):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
If the Europeans really want to, they could produce a lot more by converting over to 'war mode'. Certainly they need to do more with current geopolitics, but there is no need to crank it to 11.
As an Italian there's definitely been a perceptible shift due to the increase in defense spending. Leonardo now makes TV ads (something I had never seen before), they advertise on newspapers (...)
Off topic, but it's funny to me how the Leonardo TV ads basically skips over the defense part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXytSNOt_0I
Not wrong, but GDP is a rough metric of economic and industrial capacity. So if Italy wanted to, it could convert its economy to produce tanks and missiles at a similar rate as Russia is doing. And Italy is just one member of NATO:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO
If anything, the major gap is the EU's lack of cheap drone manufacturing, but even that is starting to make progress with help and integration from Ukraine.
> In 2025, Russia produced an estimated 7 million artillery shells,
vs.
> Germany has rapidly scaled up artillery ammunition production, led by defense giant Rheinmetall. Output targets have surged from roughly 70,000 shells per year prior to 2022 to a projected 1.1 million to 1.5 million rounds annually by 2027–2030,
so now vs. "projected" and Russia still heavily outnumbers the former Nazis.
Which is to say give me a fricking break, I live in the closest EU and NATO capital city to Southern Ukraine, I know my shit.
The EU also simply has way more capacity to scale up shell production than Russia does, and the EU is building up stockpiles while Russia uses up everything they make.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...
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.
Russia went into the war with armed forces that turned out as you say (possibly except the nukes, hard to tell unless they attempt to use one); the war forced them to develop substantial drone and anti-drone capabilities that the EU nations are not yet in a position to counter.
I suspect that if my country gave Putin what we give to the US - military bases where they can do whatever they please no questions asked, real-time intelligence access, unofficial favored supplier status for anything that might be control-relevant, quiet veto power over any national policy decision deemed "strategic" - then we wouldn't have to worry about invasion - from Russia anyway. Why invade what you already own?
I think that price is a little too steep, though. Not to mention that the US would then be at least as willing to topple governments/invade as Russia currently is.
Then, because it isn’t on-premise anymore where you could just continue running without paying for the service contract you lose direct access to the product. So that might even mean whole companies going under.
You pull the plug the money stops rolling in. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something vs buying something but buying is a ALOT easier than selling.
You can easily choose where to buy but choosing to sell is a lot trickier. Pull the plug on AI and the EU will switch to Chinese models. Trade negotiations and relations are very fragile and difficult to curate and maintain. Very easy to rip up.
There are entire governments in the EU with workflows built around Microsoft products that have no real 1:1 alternatives. If a governmental procedure stipulates that a ministry uses Windows w/ Office365, it uses Windows w/ Office365, no room for an argument. If anybody pulls a plug here, the consequences will be unimaginable.
It's nice that a single German state has switched to LibreOffice, but the rest of Germany, or the remaining 26 countries might take years, if not decades, to certify and permit someone else's solution.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
In an all-out economic war, anything could happen. The source code of Microsoft products probably exists somewhere in Europe (since they have European offices) and definitely binaries, since it's run on European servers. Once nobody plays by the rules anymore, all bets are off.
That said, a trade war would hurt both badly and it would be an epic fail on the side of the US administration. (Since the EU would not start such a trade war by itself.)
The US are making a fortune on gas at the expense of Europe an it's not that the promise to buy gas is meaningless because unenforceable within Europe, it's that it was already happening in practice. And that makes Europe even more dependent on the US (while the complaint was that we could't buy gas from Russia and depend on them).
But this is also why the EU is aggressively pursuing and building up alternatives, including investments in Canada's ability to export LNG, but also buildouts of solar, wind, and batteries.
Solar and batteries come with their own dependencies on China, but at least those are a different sort of dependency than fossil fuels. If China stops exporting solar / batteries, the ones we have will still keep functioning for decades while alternatives are built up.
Unfortunately, this couldn't be further from the truth:
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/12/head-of-iea-roasts-euro...
Here are some specific numbers:
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/many-building-r...
The EU is heavily investing in renewables, but mainly to phase out coal rather than gas, and it's absolutely not electrifying its economy.
You can see this in the EU Emissions Trading System. It covers about 40% of all emissions, but leaves out buildings (dominated by gas) and transportation (dominated by oil). Since electricity is covered, it actually encourages oil and gas over electricity.
Furthermore, member states like Germany are resistant to taxing gas higher than electricity:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/17/germany-warns-...
Despite the wars in Ukraine and Iran, gas is still encouraged over electricity in many European countries.
China and some other Asian countries have adopted the opposite approach. They aim to replace oil and gas by all possible means, including coal (although it's not the preferred choice).
No. Van der Leyen also promised EU investments into the USA. This is betrayal as well; that money should go into EU countries. Or Canada.
The EU has no mechanism to make those investments in the USA, and no mechanism to force any member state or company to make investments.
They literally just made up a number and said "oh yes, we'll make a bunch of investments" with zero intention of doing anything to make it happen.
Don't assume EU is stupid.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/08/18/voka-invoerheffingen...
I can't understand why there isn't a single country that did that.
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?
N.b. if you look up 'populism' on Wikipedia a huge portion of the page explains the contested term is sociologically vague and did not have the negative connotation it does in mainstream discourse. Most people are not aware of this.
Pointless, incredibly bad faith bothsideism. Zohran was the only one in the NYC mayoral race to believe in actual 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 on issues the electorate cared about, 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 has balanced the city budget with a 2% tax increase on millionaires, matching New Jersey. He's moving to give every family free childcare. He has frozen rent for rent-controlled housing, and planning the construction of 200,000 more such apartments. He's fixing potholes (that part went viral, for some reason). And more.
Support is up in every demographics, including Jewish New Yorkers, that corpo dems were insisting would be threatened under Mamdani, in a cynical attempt at instrumenting islamophobia to win the election for their do-nothing candidate instead. Crime is down.
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.
Since you are getting hurt you play tit-for-tat to get the other to knock it off.
So you add export taxes to items they care about (oil/fertilizer/...) and compensate the losses incurred by existing industries.
You also add tarriffs on items that have alternatives, like alcohool.
Maybe add tarriffs on items with elastic prices, say 100% tarriff on digital services. Software services will have to adjust prices so they end up the same after tarriffs since few people will accept youtube or netflix doubling in price.
This hurts both countries but will get a result - either free trade or no trade.
In the meanwhile, Trump's entourage has derivative bets on this and take massive proffits shorting everyone. For them, this is all massively profitable.
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.
Ganging up on the US isn't likely to work well.
We'll go trade with other countries and stop giving the troll the attention it craves.
Is out of ammo.
Cannot win against Russia in the proxy war with Ukraine.
Cannot match China with their long term energy plans.
Has debt that explodes
Has a president that sells early access to his tweets for 100k$ a year ; insider trading in the open.
The USA are not in a good posture right now.
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.
Yes, I had the thought that it sounded a lot like speech.
Thanks.
it is easy to tax exports, but this makes the export less profitable (for the entity making that export). Unless you mean the producer raises prices to cover the new tax - in which case, the export is now more expensive, and less of it gets exported.
It doesn't really help with the tariff situation much in any case - a political problem requires a political solution (such as reciprocal tariffs). Both sides hurt, and there's no good outcome.
Depends whether demand is flexible or not.
Politicians tend to not want to do things that display them as directly responsible for eroding their support base’s quality of life.
Uranium and potash from SK are huge bargaining chips.
AB separatism is meaningless and it's emphasis and influence is propped up by Canada's adversaries.
Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy per
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...
I’m trying to encourage people to understand the facts in a forum dedicated to intellectual discussion.
- 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.
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.
Plus when one side is an unreliable negotiator (the US) there’s not much rational behind continuing.
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.
Wearing my forecasting hat…
Canada holding $200 billion in USA treasuries, one of the largest exporters of oil into the USA, and integrated supply chains for everyday goods. A fast and painful price shock is coming for every average American.
Canada has and will continue to be very dependent on the USA. No amount of new trade partners can change the fact that the largest economy in the world is a 2-hour trip down the road while everyone else is an ocean apart. This has a risk for long-term price pain for decades.
“What’s at stake in the Canada-U.S. trade deal? How looming tariffs could cost Canada 90,000 jobs”. Trevor Tombe, professor of economics at the University of Calgary
https://thehub.ca/2026/08/20/whats-at-stake-in-the-canada-u-...
These moves increase other countries independence of us, lessening our power and forcing us into a more post America world.
If Trump isn't a double agent then he missed his calling. It feels like every decision they are making is intentionally the "wrong" one.
If they really want to hurt them start making it legal to circumvent DRM on American products and allow build meaningful replacements.
And from a different angle: “giving fines to firms makes no sense since they firm can only get money from customers so it’s just going to make it more expensive for the customer”.
Not an identical situatio, but to say it’s the only consequence, that it becomes more expensive for Canadian, is just not right.
In the short run, yes. In the long run we can start replacing American imports with other countries' imports.
I want to see more fruits and vegetables from Mexico, Africa and South America in supermarkets. Give me less "Made in America" on shelves.
Which highlights the problems with tariffs, they are self harming. You have to be willing to give up better alternatives for some other reason, and food is a hard one.
Bullshit. I already see in the supermarket (Canadian Superstore) oranges from South Africa, lemons from Morocco, broccoli from Mexico, mangoes from Malaysia, fish from the Philippines, coconut from Vietnam, kiwis from Italy, etc.
Yes, oceanic shipping adds to the cost. But most of those countries already have cheaper labor, and that partially offsets the extra cost.
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.
I've got a better idea.
1) Repeal all DMCA-like laws. Make it explicitly legal to break a digital lock to repair a device, run custom code, install third-party parts, or just tinker and hack with your own devices and software.
2) Ban parts-pairing. Prohibit manufacturers (looking at you Apple & John Deere,) from using cryptographic serialization to block independent mechanics and technicians from swapping parts.
3) Legalize "Adversarial Interoperability" (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...)
4) Copyright reform.
That's it. This would make things cheaper and better for Canadians. Lutnick and Trump would seethe eternally, but it would be downright excellent for Canada and a shining beacon unto the world.
I'd be happy to see the solution to consumer pain And economic productivity to pass permanently pro productivity and pro consumer policies.
Anti monopoly stuff. Maybe a growth policy like land value tax.
I'd need to hear from some experts to know which specific policies would be best though. Ideally you choose some policies that are not perceived as going nuclear, or which leave open counters, or which you would want to remove after a deal is made.
In general, going heavier into consumer/data protection laws and proceeding to prosecute both the Canadian and American monopolies would be amazing though.
IMO you don't want lawfare -- but rather you want to remove bad laws like the DMCA (and related), and the life-plus-70 copyright term, and thus foster more innovation and growth.
It's easiest to repeal anti-consumer/anti-commons laws.
A rather large amount of Canadian industry is benefiting from these regulations. Adopting policies like these would be tremendously disruptive and cause a lot of short term issues, upsetting manufacturers, foreign owned subsidiaries (who employ a lot of people), unions and retailers.
I'd love to see copyright reform though.
Yes, there is no war without pain. But I am willing to face the pain.
However, in the long run, the pain might bring good. It might help products from other countries to enter the Canadian market. I hope to see more food, cars and appliances from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa in the Canadian market.
Elbows up, at last.
It seems like if the other side agrees to a deal too easily then Trump doesn't think the deal is good enough. He only likes deals where the other side is getting screwed and has to be coerced into signing.
That's a great observation. So basically everybody should be saying no to him all the time to limit the damage because as long as there's one yes the stupidity will only grow.
I'm so glad there wasn't a single yes, when Greenland popped up.
Basically he was elected to stand up to Trump and as an economist, come up with a strategy. He initially appeared to do that, but given that it largely hasn't swayed Trump, he is now backing off most of it. You could argue it's a strategy worth trying since to buck-for-buck hasn't worked, but you could also make the point that the electorate, without being told what the plan is (duh), feels he is weakening our position.
A lot of the strategy has been to wait it out and expect uproar from the US people which... largely hasn't come.. yet?
This isn't some sort of status game. Well, maybe it is for Trump, but not for anyone who's not an idiot. Unfortunately, Carney is an idiot, and is in it for himself and his friends, not Canada.
The way to deal with the bear to the south is to first get rid of all the stupid stuff that is bad for Canadians regardless of Trump, like provincial liquor monopolies and dairy supply management. Don't ask for anything in return - Trump's word is no good anyway - but it may help with public opinion in the US. It will also help with better trade relations with other countries. After getting these other countries to open up as much as they're inclined, unilaterally eliminate tariffs on all countries (including the US). It's what's best for Canadians, apart from a few who profit off the lack of competition from other countries.
For bonus points, get rid of sales taxes, so there is zero friction importing things to Canada. That's great for consumers, and also great for any business that wants to continue or establish itself in Canada.
What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".
The future is unknowable, so that might be the wrong bet. But in my view, it is the right one, in no small part because the political situation is on their (that is, the Carney administration's) side. Political support is what determines the ability to withstand pain. In Canada there is currently far more solidarity with the administration's stance on standing up to US bullying than there is in the US for the Trump administration's (many) price-increasing policies.
If the political situation were reversed, this would probably be a bad idea for Canada! But it isn't, so it isn't.
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.
Our system progresses in two year increments, by design.
So I ask again, what would you propose?
That means the hardcore MAGA base is a third of the US population. I genuinely don't know how to reconcile that with the long term future of the United States.
It seems like a lot of the governmental structure of this country is predicated on the idea that the People will not elect someone who puts their own interests over those of the nation. And when we do, the whole thing starts to unravel.
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.
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.
> Canada supplies the overwhelming majority of U.S. maple-syrup imports.
Canadians are way too nice to do this, but it would be sensational.
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.
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Reign_of_Pippin_IV
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.
Like over the last year we (Canada) should have utterly obliterated the US from any element of the Canadian supply chain. Instead everyone just keeps expecting things to return to normal so no one makes the necessary investments to stop it at the border.
Americans voted for Trump, a child-rapist stunningly stupid criminal, twice. It should never return to the way it was.
In 2016, an anonymous woman filed a federal lawsuit alleging that he raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old. The lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn that same year, before the allegations were adjudicated. No court found that he committed the alleged assault.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/howard-lutnick-comm...
I wonder if he tanked those discussions on purpose, his sons now at his former company, profited wildly from the last round of tariffs:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-quiet-winners-supreme-co...
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.
It's Congress who has the power to tax. If Trump wants tariffs he needs to propose a bill that creates them or gives him clear powers. The legal scholars in his cabinet know this, so why has he not proposed a bill?
The U.S. was already buying considerably more Canadian goods than Canada bought from it.
If Trump and his cabal is left unchecked we will be running fast towards something that will make 1929 like child's play.
And no, I am not a liberal. Far from it.
As for betraying Canadians, Trump is not responsible for representing Canadian interests. I wouldn't want him to either. (Speaking as a Canadian.)
because this is nothing compared to when he starts to feel his loss of power
btw there are reports he's going to use ICE to do actions NEXT to voting centers to get around "no armed agents in voting centers" to force the voting to shutdown
electrocution gloves and all
we're in the US authoritarian era, Supreme Court and Congress let it happen and now there's no undo button
The USA is increasingly the source of economic and military destabliisation in the world and it's getting real hard to justify being the best little doggy for them. I'm not suggesting any action more drastic than calling a shit deal shit, and frankly it's pathetic and embarrassing that this is such a rare occurence.
And yeah, maybe some miracle corrective action will begin with a new president but the thing is, that will necessarily include restoring our "special relationship". You're better off refusing a bad deal outright, rather than trying to reneg later.
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.
Why is the exposure is asymmetric? ~70% of Canadian exports go to the US - the reverse dependency isn't close to symmetric. Unemployment, business investment, and the CAD are all deteriorating far more deeply and rapidly than any impact on the USA. Canadians are carrying the highest household debt burden in the country's history now; and its natural resources can't plug the gap unless Canada is willing to kill net zero and other environmental rules.
These new tariffs are actually a retention play. Canadian businesses have been relocating to the US since the trade war started, and the countervailing tariffs are aimed at making that move less attractive. But the move is undermined by its target. Canada's household debt and wealth destruction are shrinking the value of the Canadian market itself, so the incentive to stay keeps eroding regardless of what the tariffs do.
The situation is so lopsided one has to assume this is a coordinated bid by certain forces in Canada and the US to shatter the Liberal party and its coalition with New Dems and Greens. Ask yourself how bad it has to get for Canadians before they lower their elbows and vote differently?
That is where this is headed.
"~70% of Canadian exports go to the US"
If you remove oil[1], Canada has a trade deficit with the US. And strangely the US has never said an iota about tariffing or restricting oil, and on the contrary keeps trying to increase it. Like Trump's big celebration was about hoping to revive a pipeline.
The vast majority of Canada's economy is internal, and rapidly non-US. We replace what we buy from the US. Somehow lots of countries on this planet don't rely upon being a subjugated feeder to the US.
>Unemployment, business investment, and the CAD are all deteriorating far more deeply and rapidly than any impact on the USA
Canada has fielded better employment numbers than the US. Business investments are at an all time high (lol, slop purveyor now claims that actually no, that's bad too!). The CAD has been gaining over the past few weeks.
Stop writing hilariously stupid slop on here.
[1] The US actually makes hundreds of billions of dollars processing and exporting Canadian oil, and it was yet another foolish decision of Canada not to process in country. But don't worry, exports to other destinations are rapidly increasing.
Elbows up, finally!
This is will be painful. But it is what we need.
It is more than time for Canada to learn the lesson that Navajos, Comanches, Apache and Cherokees learned too late: Americans lie, cheat, betray and steal. We shouldn't be cozy with them.
I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.
And specifically any deal made with the U.S under Trump has no credibility, just ask Iran.
So expect Trump to start spiralling. Also expect lots of astroturfing about how desperate Canada is and that it has no choice (one of those hilarious slop purveyors appeared below).
Canada should begin the process of withdrawing from USMCA, and the truth is that NAFTA cum USMCA has worsened Canada's lot over the past four decades compared to peers. Trade agreements with the US are worthless, and even negotiating with that Epstein pedo cabal of grifters is useless. It sounds like the Canadian team were foolishly going to give in to many things (any concession of any form always comes back to hurt you), but at the last minute Howard "Epstein Island" Nutlick swooped in and tried to extract even more, undoing it all. Which...thank you Nutlick, you disgusting greaseball. You did us a great favour.
Carney internally is playing to a domestic crowd that is actually more hardline on US trade policy than he has projected.
The issue with "bending the knee" so to speak is that the hardship is just as bad as the no deal situation, except with the worse outcome that Canada's future prospects for diversification are diminished.
There is hardship down both paths for Canada, but only one of those paths has a long-term future.
You're right that it likely involves a heavier investment in our own resource extraction, but that seems to be precisely what Carney is moving towards.
As for the amusing side-quip about Russia, chances are Canadians will likely look to emulate some other resource-extractive based economies, like the nordics. The issue is less the extraction and more how the wealth from that extraction gets hoarded. And there too, it would manifest as the need to move away from the American/Russian model of a small set of simple-minded, deranged oligarchs siphoning all the wealth in the economy towards themselves.
And fascism is taking hold lots of other places as well. Canada's a laugh, with Alberta seperatism. And they also had trump trucker caravans.
EU? They're boiling in their own juices with the fact they now need air conditioning due to climate devastation... And many countries make it illegal without health reasons.
Japan and SK are both doing very poorly. China has some of the harshest immigration.
South America is still being fucked with by the CIA and destabilization idiocy.
I understand the tune-out check-out hippie response. There's fuck-all I can do, other than watch.