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I'm Canadian. As far as the new tariffs from the US cunt go, I don't give a fuck. If you are a Canadian business and are still depending on US customers, get busy. Lot's of choices now. If you are a US business being hurt by these tariffs, Fuck Off back to the US!
— Paul L. (@paul9876.bsky.social) July 20, 2026 at 7:08 PM
Paul Krugman says the tariffs show "how to lose friends and influence nothing"
... these latest actions confirm what most people around the world, from the European Commission to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, have already figured out: a deal with Donald Trump lasts only until he feels like breaking it.
The immediate economic impact of these tariffs will be limited. As far as I can tell, the highly integrated North American auto industry, which sprawls across both our northern and southern borders, won’t be directly affected. But the auto industry, like business in general, has been put on notice that the huge flows of goods and services that cross those borders every day may be cut off whenever Trump has a temper tantrum.
And this really is a temper tantrum, in the sense that there’s no strategy here. The new tariffs will hurt American consumers, and nobody expects them to extract any concessions from Canadians who are only getting more outraged at the United States.
Canada should be, and used to be, America’s greatest friend in the world. We share essential political and moral values with our northern neighbor. For the most part we even share a common language, eh? And Canadians viewed us very favorably until Trump began his tariffs and threats. Now we’re viewed less favorably than China...
In his substack on Tuesday, Dean Blundell suggests three reasons for the sudden tariff decision:
...So why now? Three reasons, and none of them are about dairy.
First, distraction. American service members are coming home in flag-draped coffins from Jordan and the Gulf.... It is a grinding, unwinnable mess of Trump’s own escalation, and nothing changes the channel like a good old-fashioned social brawl with Canada. We’re the shiny object. We’re the “look over there.”
Second, division. Ambassador Hoekstra spent this week dangling Alberta and Saskatchewan as America’s “preferred energy partners” — a transparent attempt to pit provinces against each other, to crack the coast-to-coast unity Carney described. It won’t work. If eighteen months of this has taught Trump anything, it should be that threatening Canada is the single greatest national unity project in our history. Alberta oil workers and Quebec dairy farmers and Ontario auto workers all know exactly who the problem is, and it isn’t each other.
Third, it’s a warning shot. Canada has spent a year and a half doing the rational thing: diversifying. Twenty-plus new partnerships. New markets, new friends, new leverage of our own. That terrifies this administration, because their entire playbook depends on us having nowhere else to go. These tariffs are a message: stay in your lane, keep selling to us on our terms, and don’t you dare build a future that doesn’t run through Washington. To which the only appropriate Canadian response is: watch us.
Here’s what Trump and his people still don’t understand, because they’ve never understood anything about this country: the boycott was never a government program. It was never a Carney thing. It’s a Canada thing. Ordinary people turning bottles around in the liquor store to check the label. Grocery carts full of anything-but-American. Cancelled Florida vacations. Provinces pulling U.S. booze off shelves entirely. That was the response to the last round of tariffs and the “51st state” garbage. This round? Canadians are going to double down so hard that American exporters will be begging Congress to make it stop. Elbows up isn’t a slogan anymore. It’s muscle memory.
Here’s the punchline, and you already know it: these tariffs don’t take effect for 30 days.
Thirty days. The standard Trump escalation window. The exact runway he always builds himself so he can strut, threaten, watch the markets gag, watch American consumers scream about prices, watch the lawsuits pile up — Section 338 is going to get shredded in court, just like the Supreme Court already shredded his emergency tariffs in February — and then “graciously” announce a pause, a deal, a framework, a beautiful letter from Mark. Trump Always Chickens Out...
In The Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne just throws his hands up in the air and says "whatever!"
...[Carney] has tried making concessions before, [gift link] like eliminating the digital services tax, or the recent revisions to the Gordie Howe Bridge agreement. And he has tried taking a harder line, like the 25-per-cent retaliatory tariff he imposed on U.S. cars. The response from the Trump administration is always the same. More tariffs. More demands. No concessions.Now Americans seem to be shocked SHOCKED! that Canada is fed up and doesn't like them anymore
The combination of approaches exposes Mark Carney to conflicting criticisms. When he’s tough he’s derided as confrontational. When he’s conciliatory he’s dismissed as weak. And when the Trump administration responds in the same belligerent way to either approach, he’s called a failure.
There’s a reason neither strategy has worked. It’s because nothing can. There is no appeasing Mr. Trump, and there is no deterring him. Appeasement and deterrence each depend on the same premise, that we are dealing with a rational actor on the other side: one with a predictable or at least understandable set of responses to any given action. But Mr. Trump does not behave according to any rational calculus.
It isn’t just that he has no understanding of policy, nor any knowledge of history to guide him; or that he conforms to none of the norms of custom, morality or law. It is that, even understood as a wholly self-involved, self-serving bundle of id, one whose only motive is self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, Mr. Trump is incomprehensible. His actions make no sense even in terms of rational self-interest. It’s all just random impulses, fleeting grudges, synaptic burps, based on who spoke to him last, what he saw on TV or what he had for breakfast, for all I know.
But there’s an upside to all this. If there’s nothing we can do – if we lose no matter what – then we might as well do what we want. When nothing you can do will improve your fortunes, when the outcome is the same regardless of which option you choose, the stakes converge on zero.
The President will do what he will do. Nothing we can do will change that. So we might as well not try. There’s liberation in that.
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I'm thinking Michigan officials will be upset at this decision, but at some point Americans will need to realize Canada isn't going to give them individual hall passes anymore
Canada will celebrate the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge this week, the federal minister of infrastructure's office said Tuesday — but there will not be a celebration with the United States. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
— JeffTrnka (@jefftrnka.bsky.social) July 21, 2026 at 6:28 PM
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As for that 51st State stuff
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And why does it take so damned long for all off us to start singing from the same hymnal?
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Today's Wildfire Update
These leaders are right
First Nations Leaders in Northwestern Ontario are calling for an immediate public inquiry into the province’s emergency response and handling of the wildfires that have destroyed Collins First Nation and Whitewater First Nation over the course of a week. www.aptnnews.ca?p=291878
— APTN News (@aptnnews.bsky.social) July 21, 2026 at 5:16 PM
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