It has been a wild couple of weeks, hasn't it.
And Canadians are getting feisty:
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Well said #cdnpoli #Canada
— Scott Tribe -A proud "Ketchup Chip Nationalist" member (@stribeprogblog.bsky.social) September 2, 2026 at 6:29 PM
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Even Carney is getting a little testy sometimesIf the deal Carney backed out of with the Trump admin was so favourable to Canada, as Greer says, and the US needs nothing from us, as Trump says, why is it the Americans are so angry and the Canadians don't seem to give a shit?
— Andrew potter (@jandrewpotter.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 2:20 PM
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And Canada isn't impressed with how Trump is managing the G20 coming up, eitherPrime Minister Carney on how he's personally doing while facing all the hostility from the US "You focus on what you can control...We have the support of Canadians, we have the positive attitude of Canadians, it's a country that takes care of one another...I'm doing just fine" 🎥 Credit CPAC Live
— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 9:21 AM
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In Bug-eyed and Shameless, journalist Justin Ling writes The Game Theory of a Trade War How do you win a trade war? Let’s find out
...trade wars are not really a function of economics. They are information wars."There is no fucking bottom with these people."
Today, nations find themselves fighting a trade war with the world’s largest economy. The United States and Donald Trump are imposing tariffs on the world, using a shifting set of justifications and laws to do so, trying both to reap the short-term and illusory benefits of protectionism whilst shaking down concessions from its trading partners. It is trying to prove the idea that big countries win trade wars and to prove David Ricardo wrong, all at the same time. The rest of the world knows how truly stupid this is, yet seems paralyzed in fear of what would happen if they fight back.
Canada, now led by that egghead Mark Carney, is fighting back.
And I think Canada can win....
Today, sensible nations should abandon the prospect of a real trade deal with America. Unless sovereign states are prepared to bake in American tariffs, to surrender some sovereignty in how they craft their own laws, and to offer up a raft of concessions — sacrificing part of their more-efficient industries to Trumpland, buying more American military hardware, or accepting planeloads of abductees — they should get ready to fight back.
But fighting back is not just a function of raising tariffs higher or targeting the exact right American goods. Fighting back means figuring out how to get your factories, processing plants, and consumers opting for non-American inputs — and reducing inefficiencies as much as possible. It also means convincing citizens to accept those inefficiencies, through less diversity of goods or higher prices, as a necessary cost of fighting. That isn’t something that can be done through act of legislation or by government edict. That needs to be a whole-of-society response, encouraged by propaganda but enacted by individuals making different choices.
Earlier this month, Le Journal de Montréal visited markets around Quebec to ask shoppers how they’re reacting to the trade war. What they heard was a collection of people who were finding new ways to make their demand for American goods far more elastic.
They met Paola de Vasconcelos at Jean-Talon market in Montreal’s Little Italy, who said she was absolutely motivated to seek out Canadian-grown produce instead of the (often cheaper) American-alternatives. “These last few times, I was a bit soft on that front,” she told the paper. “This time, I’m not going soft.” It was “liberating,” she said, to not bend over backwards to placate Trump. So now she was doing her part by ignoring American goods.
“If I want raisins, I’ll buy them from South Africa,” another shopper told the paper. Others said their community organizations were trying to opt for more Canadian-grown goods, even if it took some doing to make the math work.
One fruit vendor remarked since the start of the trade war, “about 50% of my clients put the goods back on the shelf if I tell them it’s American.” (That is backed up by survey data from early this year, which show more than half of Quebecers were actively boycotting American goods.)
It’s not the only part of the strategy, of course. Canada is also obsessively finding new trading partners the world over — something a pariah America can’t properly do. It is building big new things and finding new countries to build them with. It is trying to make domestic production more efficient, to stock the shelves and factory floors with goods made more efficiently than American imports.
That’s part of the story behind a new fleet of icebreakers Canada is building. “Right now, if you want an icebreaker, Davie is the first call you’ll make,” Marcel Poulin, vice president of public affairs for Davie Shipbuilding, told me.
Davie uses plenty of Canadian-made steel, but the plain fact is that America remains the go-to supplier for advanced steel — but, perhaps, not for long.
“If you need steel for icebreakers, you need EH36,” Poulin says, referring to a specific grade of shipbuilding steel. It’s this grade of steel that lets you cut through the heavy Arctic ice.
While Canada tends to rely on American steelmakers for that grade of steel, Poulin points out: “It’s basically the same steel that you use on bridge, but it does not have the same classification. But it’s very similar recipes. So we are working to say: Okay, can we use the same steel that they’re using on bridges on icebreakers?”
The answer to that question, which is being studied by the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, has some pretty big implications. If the answer is “yes,” then it could mean that Algoma Steel — in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario — is supplying those new icebreakers, not American producers.
For all this to work, you need both a popular, grassroots effort and a coordinated central response. And Canada, right now, has both.
You need no better proof that such a strategy is working than to hear the executives of the major banks brush off the prospect of a trade war and sing the praises of a glorious Canadian future.
We can thank Donald Trump for both this solidarity and the amount of fiscal firepower Canada has to back up its efforts. His constant Canada-bashing — exemplified by, amongst other things, his attempts to rename bodies of water — coupled with surging oil prices brought on by his flailing war in Iran has meant that Canadians are angry and richer because of him.
Americans themselves, meanwhile, are bewildered as to why Trump is fighting a trade war amidst a cost-of-living crisis. While there may be a high elasticity of demand for Canadian-made goods, Americans can’t exactly quit all imports cold turkey. Tariffs, per the Tax Foundation, now hit more than half of all goods imports to the United States.
Continued success for Canada — and whichever other nations opt to fight instead of surrender — is by no means a given. But we can and should count on disunity in the American ranks....
In The Line, Jen Gerson writes Jen Gerson: (this is real)
...The post itself really does have a $16 Orange Juice quality to it. The thing could be seared with heat into a Canadian Heritage minute. To watch the U.S. Secretary of War’s attempt to humiliate women in a military-led youth program on Twitter is such a shameful fall from the competence and ideals America once claimed to espouse, that it’s impossible to ignore the reality of it anymore.In his substack, broker Kevin Boucher writes This Is Not What Winning Looks Like The favour desk is open, the tariff gun is empty, and the Prime Minister keeps yawning...!
America is too far gone.
Even if the country were to pull back from the brink today, it would take a generation to rebuild the norms and trust required for the United States to function, even imperfectly, as it once did.
The 51st state stuff, the sinister memes, the cartographical imperialism, the basic economic illiteracy, the military incompetence, the grifting, the pathetic and ceaseless goddamn whining — all of it has lost its edge. We’ve normalized and overlooked shit behaviour for years not out of fear, but because we’ve hoped that America could, one day, pull itself back to some kind of normal.
But it’s impossible to look at Hegseth’s tweet and fail to understand — at an instinctual level — how much of America’s decline is now on open display. There is no fucking bottom with these people.
I think we’ve reached the end of a real bilateral relationship with the United States. Friendship is over. Even a transactional alliance is pretty damn close to the brink. Trust has broken on both sides.
...Earlier this week, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he wouldn’t return to the negotiating table until the U.S. administration got serious.
“Stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough,” he said. Predictably, pro-meme Americans had an absolute riot with this quote, without really hearing it, or understanding it.
I’ve noted before that Canadians and Americans have very different communications styles, despite sounding the same. When Americans heard Carney, they understood: “We’re not negotiating until you stop doing memes.”
What the Canadian was actually saying was: “We are not returning to the table because we know very well that you can’t stop doing memes.”
So, strap in, kids. We’re trade warring. We’re in it until either the Americans create the conditions required to offer something that is politically sellable in Ontario; or until Carney’s personal approval ratings begin to crack.
And with a Loyal Opposition that looks as serious and credible as the current Trump administration, that crack ain’t coming soon....
...The media keeps calling this a trade negotiation. Robert Pape — the University of Chicago political scientist who literally wrote the book on coercion, Bombing to Win — says we should stop.And on a side note,
His analysis, published last week: Trump has a strategy, and the strategy is punishment. The tariffs aren’t rooted in trade economics. They’re rooted in MAGA payback politics — the belief that Canada’s success in autos and manufacturing came at American workers’ expense. In Pape’s words: “They want payback.”
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Listen to what they’re actually saying.
JD Vance, standing in Maine, referred to Canada as a state — then laughed it off as a Freudian slip.
Howard Lutnick says Canada will change its tune after the October elections.
Trump says the bridge stays closed until Canada shows respect. And this week, on the Glenn Beck Program, he said it plainest of all: it’s time to teach Canada you can’t do this any more.
A state. Change their tune. Respect. Teach Canada a lesson.
That’s not trade language. That’s punishment language. Trade negotiations are about tariff schedules and market access. This is about obedience. They’re not trying to build a partnership. They’re trying to break one.
And here’s Pape’s most important finding: punishment fails. It fails far more often than it succeeds between countries — because a target that gives in today has no guarantee against a bigger demand tomorrow. Capitulation doesn’t end the confrontation. It funds the next one.
Look at the record. Iran absorbed everything America threw at it and came out imposing strategic costs on the world’s strongest military. China stood up and fired back. Canada stood up and posted the best growth in the G7. The countries that bent the knee — Germany, Japan — got 0.2% and 0.3% growth and no protection from the next demand.
The ones who stood up won. It’s called seeing the tell and calling the bluff. Washington just hasn’t caught up with reality yet.
Seventy years of American soft power — the alliances, the trust, the country others wanted to stand with — traded away for a punishment strategy that doesn’t work.
Bang goes the tariff gun. Bang. Bang.
And the Prime Minister of Canada yawns, boards a plane, and gets back to work.
...Here’s the thing about gaslighting: it’s a confession. The loudest claims of victory come from the side that’s losing. The hardest spin comes from the side that knows the numbers don’t back the story. And the punishment — as the man who wrote the book on coercion just reminded us — is a strategy that fails, deployed by people who have nothing else left...
When the media thinks of itself as the Voice of God
I'm seeing a lot of criticism about political media lately, because too many journalists blandly accept right-wing framing behind their stories. Like this:
I do not understand why the American media is accepting "voter fraud" framing, rather than calling it what it is: Republicans desperately trying to manufacture an excuse for losing.
— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) September 2, 2026 at 4:10 PM
In The Editorial Board, John Stoehr publishes a podcast transcript that sums up the issue: Beware those speaking with the voice of God
...The [New York] Times and others, but especially the Times, behave as if they speak with the voice of God when in fact they are making human choices in the service of a "narrative" that they want to tell, for their own reasons, often in conspicuous contradiction to the very facts they report, with the added consequence being that they cannot be held responsible for those choices, as they were not choices, but acts of God.
It makes something that’s not true into something true, and then there are political consequences as a result....
there really is a consensus within the rarified circles of a political journalism in Washington and in New York among political reporters where they actually agree that the Democrats..can’t be too extreme....
Alex: And what do they agree on? They agree that America is a center-right nation. Me: Yeah that’s what they agree on. I mean what are really agreeing on, and they won’t say this, is that the true center of power in America is whiteness, and the true consensus is white supremacy. That’s what they’re really saying, but they’re not gonna say that, because that would be a gauche. That would be impolite or some other word that a snob might use. But that’s what they’re really saying, though. And by the way, that's why the press looks at the Democrats as slightly illegitimate, because the Democrats are a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious party, whereas the Republicans are white, white and white, all the way through. They therefore represent to the media, politically, historically and culturally, an automatic natural legitimacy. That I wish more people would really understand. That is the double standard that animates all of political journalism....
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