News / trade
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1 min read
Nobody Leaves the Table
Read more . . . →Donald Trump signed an order yesterday to strip all Canadian-origin goods from federal procurement, $280 billion in contracts, because Canada had the nerve to launch a Buy Canadian policy after he tariffed them. The same day, he told reporters that if the European Union goes ahead with its plan to make Canada an associate member, he’d consider it a “hostile act” and hit Europe with tariffs too. Read that again. He’s kicking Canada off his shelves and threatening to punish anyone who puts them on theirs. This is the trade-policy version of the guy who dumps you and then shows...
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1 min read
Wounded and Confused Is Not a Foreign Policy
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre went to New York last week to go on CNBC and tell Americans that Canadians feel “wounded” and “confused” by Trump’s tariffs. That’s the pitch. That’s the whole strategy from the man who wants to run the country. Fly to the city where the guy tariffing you keeps a gold tower, get on his favourite channel, and describe your entire population as hurt and bewildered. I’ve seen better negotiating posture from a kid who got his lunch money taken and went back to say “that really stung, man, could you maybe not?” Meanwhile Carney is in Strasbourg pitching...
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1 min read
You Built the Bridge and Paid the Toll
Read more . . . →Canada spent $6.4 billion building the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Then agreed to share the toll revenue with the United States for fifteen years. Then scrapped the digital services tax. Then killed the Netflix tax. Then pulled its own retaliatory tariffs off the table. A reporter asked Carney what Canada got back for all of that. He couldn’t name one thing. Not a reduced rate, not a delayed deadline, not a handshake agreement scribbled on a napkin. Six and a half billion dollars and a stack of policy surrenders bought exactly zero goodwill from a man who doesn’t sell it....
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1 min read
The Big China Deal Is That You Keep Paying
Read more . . . →Trump announced a “trade deal” with China today. Here’s the deal: the 20% fentanyl tariff stays, the 10% reciprocal tariff stays, the effective rate on Chinese goods sits near 30% — the highest on any country on earth — and the bigger tariffs he threatened get paused for sixty days. That’s the whole agreement. He held a press conference to tell you nothing changed and that this is a tremendous win. A tariff is a tax, and you’re the one who pays it. The Tax Foundation put a number on it: this trade war is the largest tax hike as...
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1 min read
Two Courts Down, Still Searching for a Legal Tariff
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court said Trump’s tariffs were illegal. Then a trade court struck down the replacement tariffs too. Now the administration is launching “forced labor” investigations into 58 countries — the EU, Canada, Brazil, basically anyone who trades with America — as the next legal vehicle to reimpose the same tariffs under a different statute. This is not economic policy. It’s a man running out of courtrooms. While the lawyers scramble, 98,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished since the tariff push started. The factories are not roaring back. The towns built around those jobs are not roaring back. What is roaring...
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