Today's News: Carney says "We are masters in our own home" and Poilievre gets a "killer" endorsement

On Thursday, Carney gave a major speech about the US tariffs and it was great:

"We must respond with both purpose and force," he said. "We are a free, sovereign and ambitious country. We are masters in our own home. We will fight to bring these tariffs to an end." Ottawa "will do everything in our power" to protect workers, including with financial assistance, Carney said, while promising to direct all tariff funds raised by taxing American goods toward helping employees affected by what could be a very tumultuous time ahead. 

Carney also said in the shorter run, while the US economy is likely going to fall into a recession, Canada can do better than the US if we put support and investment measures in place. In the longer run, he said, if the United States no longer wants to lead in the world economy, Canada will,

Carney: Canada must be looking elsewhere to expand our trade, to build our economy, and to protect our sovereignty. Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of likeminded countries who share our values… If the US no longer wants to lead, Canada will

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 11:38 AM

His speech today moved me. It made me so proud to be Canadian! Mr. Carney, today was a historic moment for you and for Canada. Elbows up! #carney2025 #elbowsup #proudcanadian #canadastrong

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— Pebz 🇨🇦 (@pebz79.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 9:24 PM

During his speech today, Mark Carney said he doesn't want to give Canadians "false hope" that Trump will reverse direction soon. He said he believes Trump eventually will, but only when the economic pain on American families "becomes impossible to ignore." Full quote:

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— Brian Platt (@brianplatt.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 10:13 AM

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Here's an interesting thread - I wonder how many other stories like this we will see:

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In the United States, reaction to Trump's "Liberation Day" was basically horrified. All the networks had stock tickers on their screens as the DOW dropped 1,700 points.

U.S. Stock Market plummets as Trump’s tariffs wipe out trillions in value U.S. companies lost trillions of dollars in market value on Thursday after President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, triggering the biggest one-day drop in financial markets since the COVID-19 crash…

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— Amnewsworld (@amnewsworld.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 12:08 AM

a Silver Lining...

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— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 10:29 PM

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The one thing business needs is consistency. But now America doesn't know whether Trump is waiting for bribes or not:

8:10 am: “You better negotiate.” 3:44 pm: “There’s no negotiate.” 🤡

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 2:07 PM

Prediction: Trump will soon start making up reasons to remove tariffs on countries. “Just had a great call with XYZ and they’ve agreed to do some great stuff so stating tomorrow they have no tariffs” he’s gonna walk this back with smoke and mirrors…

— Sam Blakeman (@samblakeman.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 12:06 AM

Many in the White House were relieved that the president granted an exemption on tariffs for imported cocaine.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 6:57 PM

Great column here: 

Bruce Arthur / Toronto Star

Opinion | Donald Trump has pushed America into a golden age of stupid. Now’s Canada’s chance to be smart
You ever tried to reason with a dog? It’s not easy. You can explain that the dog is doing the wrong thing; you can show the dog charts and graphs. Odds are, the dog will just keep on being a dumb ol’ dog.
In related news, on Wednesday Donald Trump tried to crash the global economy with tariffs. It is hard to grasp just how historically, world-alteringly stupid this is.
“There has certainly been no piece of trade policy in my lifetime that is at this level of stupidity, right?” said Rob Gillezeau, an assistant professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto. “It’s not grounded in anything intelligent. Like, they’re kind of just like ignoring economics altogether.”
“I think I can obviously come up with things that have happened in other countries (that are dumber),” says Joseph Steinberg, an assistant professor of economics at the U of T who specializes in international economics, including trade. “I mean, you know, the policy trajectory that North Korea chose after the Korean War.” He also mentioned Argentina’s self-inflicted economic crisis in the late 1800s that caused that nation to stagnate for more than 100 years.
“I struggle to think of anything worse,” says Kevin Milligan, the director of the school of economics at the University of British Columbia.
Oh, it’s read-the-entrails dumb, but let’s try to spell it out: The White House announced tariffs because Trump thinks a trade deficit is a subsidy, which is like saying that if you buy a wheelbarrow from Home Hardware, you are subsidizing Home Hardware....
“We have lots of bad economic policy in the world, but we’ve never seen anything this amateur or purposely destructive at the national level from a G7 economy,” says Gillezeau. “I think that there are pretty reasonable odds they cast themselves into another Great Depression, right?” ...
Some prominent Canadians seemed to think that since Canada wasn’t given additional tariffs Wednesday, the tariff threat has passed and the talk of annexation is over. This is remarkably vapid naiveté. Canada’s position remains terribly precarious, jammed between Russia and this version of the United States.
What these tariffs do show is the blunt-force stupidity and madness of Trump and MAGA could help Canada. It’s also what makes matters so precarious, of course: Trump could send the military into Canada on a whim, for instance, without an appropriate fear of international condemnation, or of the Canadian resistance involved.
But Trump’s sheer backwards overreach offers an opening. Tariffs against the world — with the exception of Russia, North Korea, Cuba and Belarus — give other nations added incentive to build trade networks with non-American markets, Canada hopefully included. The popular resistance to the effects of this black hole of gawping idiocy should also slow Trump: as Milligan notes, one byproduct of tariffs on Southeastern Asian countries will be higher prices for clothing and shoes, which will especially impact lower-income Americans. If Trump stays the course, a blinkered American public might actually realize what’s happening.
“After the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were enacted, the political parties that were in power and implemented those changes essentially lost power in the United States for an entire generation afterwards,” says Steinberg. “It does present an opportunity for the rest of the world to do something different.”
That’s what Canada needs, all right. The United States is in its golden age of stupid. Now’s our chance to be smart.

Whatever Trump does, whether the tariffs stay or go now, no country will ever trust him again:

I think this is a key thing, there isn’t a way to fix the thing Trump just broke, which was confidence in US stability. That just no longer exists, the country is forever weaker because a senile racist got obsessed with tariffs and the subnormals and lunatics who comprise the GOP can’t/won’t say no

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— Vituperative Erb (@vituperativeerb.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 3:42 PM

Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements

— Ian Boudreau (@ianboudreau.com) April 3, 2025 at 8:11 AM

They told me if I voted for Kamala the market would crash, and then we’d probably have a recession. They were right.

— Bill Kristol (@billkristolbulwark.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 3:42 PM

The rest of the world was horrified too:

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Moving on, I just want to share a couple of election comments:

Dale Smith / Routine Proceedings 

Roundup: A faux keynote to sanewash Trump

...Pierre Poilievre was in Toronto to give a “keynote speech” to an invited audience meant to resemble a Chamber of Commerce speech on the response to Trump, and it was...middling, because he seems to think that Trump is actually interested in renegotiating the New NAFTA, or that the tariffs are for legitimate reasons rather than the ludicrous belief that they can be used as income to replace taxes that billionaires pay. And he made some particularly odd promises, like using the tax windfall from increased trade to fund the military, or that the Americans actually care about stopping their guns from crossing our border. And a lot of it was falling back on his same economically illiterate beliefs that the Liberals killed the resource extraction sector (which is only operating at record production levels) and that more oil and gas will solve all of our problems (it most assuredly won’t).

Tonight's At Issue panel seemed to think that Poilievre had found his footing and is getting better today at defending Canada. But they also pointed out how the basic question of the campaign is which leader can best deal with the Trump tariff crisis, and Poilievre has burned his bridges with the NDP and the Bloc, so his leadership won't be getting any endorsement from the other parties.

And this is funny:

Pierre Poilievre gets a killer endorsement ...

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— Mark Carney For PM (@markcarneyforpm.bsky.social) April 1, 2025 at 12:25 PM