I think this will go down in history as Trudeau's best speech -- warm but resolute, articulate, clear, telling America they are wrong without blaming them, reassuring Canadians they will be treated fairly without minimizing the pain, detailed without being pendantic, calm yet inspiring message of "true patriot love...we stand on guard for thee".
Here are some of the best comments I read tonight:
Evan Scrimshaw / Scrimshaw Unscripted
The New York Times also has excellent coverage of the tariffs issues tonight - here's a gift link .Trudeau giving the best speech of his life right now. And I’m someone that has wanted him gone for years. Amazing job - Canada is important and we all need to stand together.
— Morgan Cameron Ross (@Morgan_C_Ross) February 2, 2025
Trudeau cites how “Canadians fought and died” beside you. Cites Iranian hostage crisis. Hurricane Katrina. La fires. 911. “We were always there”. He is not wrong to cite these key moments. The sense of betrayal is palpable.
— Evan Solomon (@EvanLSolomon) February 2, 2025
View on Threads
Tariffs For The AskingOn Going All In To Fight Them...But let’s be clear here - Canada not having a perfect hand isn’t the same thing as saying we have no leverage. We have plenty of it, and it comes from a single fact - Donald Trump doesn’t have the stomach for a real trade war. He is, at his core, a wannabe business tycoon who wants Wall Street and rich people to love him. Going back to the 90s, he’s always craved their respect. Now, he seems to have it, or at least he can lie to himself and say he does.But, the thing is, those people don’t want this. The Dow Jones is likely to close down, what, a thousand points Monday if this goes through, maybe 1500? What happens when it’s week 3 of this thing and hundreds of billions of dollars are wiped out because Trump won’t back down? You think all these CEOs currently sucking up to Trump are going to continue doing it?...
Conservatives in Canada praising Justin Trudeau. That's how badly Trump effed up.
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) February 2, 2025
7 comments:
Good speech from Trudeau. When asked about the hockey fans booing the American anthem at a Senators game, there was a little smirk and no criticism. Good response. Now when do we shut down Facebook, Instagram and X like the US congress and courts did to TikTok? When do we see punitive tariffs on Teslas? The US is an oligarchy sliding rapidly towards dictatorship and I'd like to see us hit the techbros who are really running the show in the wallet.
The Canadian media living in alternative universe getting all chippy with Trudeau because he hasn’t talked with Trump since the inauguration. Where have they been for 10 years, for 2 weeks? The American media understands , he is not normal. You can’t judge based on what he says or does. All lies and ego mania.J W.
One thing that gets me is what the trade situation actually is. I mean, Trump STARTED by claiming the problem was that Canada was letting drugs and illegal immigrants through the border. It was an obvious lie and many people pointed it out. He never backs off on lies, but he started talking about something else--how the Canadian trade surplus with the United States is somehow us stealing from them by selling stuff to them.
OK, fine, let's talk about that trade surplus. That trade surplus is from the sale of crude oil, and diluted bitumen from the tar sands; without the oil we'd have a trade deficit. So what's happening there? Well, AMERICAN OWNED companies are digging up our fossil fuels and shipping them south, "selling" them to themselves, without refining them, so the refinery jobs, $$ from selling the refined products, and other economic benefits from doing the value added can all go to the US. Then, being American owned, they're shipping the profits from the crude south. Except for a bit they keep in Canada to spend on lobbying, propaganda and generally corrupting our politics and trying to ruin our democracy. One result of this is all these Canadian Magats, another is Alberta having some of the lowest royalties in the world and in effect not charging the American oil companies for cleanup.
So they're ripping off our oil, giving us nothing for it, with a side of screwing us over, and they have the almighty GALL to COMPLAIN about this? Sod off! We should nationalize the damn companies and build the refineries here--then they wouldn't have to complain about our trade surplus.
A note about making deals with Trump: There is no point. Let's imagine we decided to fold in some way--figure out something he wanted from all this, grovel and give it to him. We'd make a new agreement with him where we gave him the moon and he would generously not hit us with arbitrary tariffs.
Then, six months later, he'd invent some other grievance and do it again until we knuckled under and gave him something else. He doesn't believe in keeping deals, he breaks them whenever it's convenient, and if the other side is easily bullied it's ALWAYS convenient. After all, his tariff crap RIGHT NOW is in violation of the free trade deal HE negotiated with us after he violated the PREVIOUS free trade deal.
So there's no point in giving this fucker your lunch money; he'll just want your jacket next. Stand up and fight.
Trump said now that his goal is to annex Canada. So there is no way he is ever going to reduce those tariffs regardless of what anyone else says - except maybe Musk.
Cathy, I get to you daily via Progressive Bloggers. Maple Monarchists also post there. Perhaps a lesser issue at the moment but what is the point of us having our head of state in England and playing golf at regular Commonwealth meetings if these countries don't step up to assist us as we are under attack by a criminal psychopath? If we are left to twist in our own, isn't it finally time to dump the King! So far, I've heard crickets.
So, first of all, tactically I think trying to start a constitutional crisis in Canada JUST MIGHT not be the smartest thing to do when we're in the middle of a huge fight. We want unity, so let's start a major division! So like, please don't keep talking about this, it's utterly counterproductive.
Second, I don't think you understand what the monarch is in Canada and Great Britain. They're NOT supposed to talk about politics (and whenever they do, everyone gets mad about it). They reign but do not rule. They allow the concept of the Loyal Opposition, in which the parliamentary opposition can oppose the government of the day, but not be stinking traitors because they are loyal to the CROWN. What is useful to us is not MONARCHS, whose job is to hang around being as close to a pure symbol as possible, but THE MONARCHY, which allows us to structure our actual politics in a slightly better way than we could without it. The actual specific people in the job are placeholders; we need them because someone has to hold the place and because all the ceremonial work they do all the time is actually kind of handy, but they're not supposed to go around acting like they're in politics.
I personally give Charles a pass to talk about climate change because he was talking about it before it was cool and because it could kill us all and because it shouldn't even BE political. But this? This is real politics, the king isn't supposed to have an opinion and would get pilloried if he expressed one.
Post a Comment