If I were a Canadian, I’d be right fucking pissed (politely of course) that our 100+ year friend is doing this. And quite frankly, I’d be right.
I genuinely hope we cease all trade with you entirely. You as a nation can no longer be trusted, no matter what happens over the next few years. The fact this happened in the first place is an inexcusable failure on the part of every American.
You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever’s TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.
The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn’t red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the ‘us vs them’ divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don’t research the reality of what’s going on and just say ‘yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!’)
The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.
So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they’ve done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I’d be shocked if you get 1%.
Until that changes I’m sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don’t assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.
Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I’d just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month’s tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.
Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada’s favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it’s automatically gone in 30 days.
I genuinely hope we cease all trade with you entirely. You as a nation can no longer be trusted, no matter what happens over the next few years. The fact this happened in the first place is an inexcusable failure on the part of every American.
I don’t blame you.
You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever’s TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.
The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn’t red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the ‘us vs them’ divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don’t research the reality of what’s going on and just say ‘yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!’)
The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.
So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they’ve done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I’d be shocked if you get 1%.
Until that changes I’m sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don’t assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.
Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I’d just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month’s tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.
Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada’s favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it’s automatically gone in 30 days.
Our empire is collapsing.