I really hope that Canadians (and truly, all people around the planet) recognize that at least half of the population of the United States is horrified and broken-hearted by what is happening.
Thank you Marc. I think Americans are in for a real shock when the implications of this hit home. Frank McKenna told the Globe and Mail:
Experts have repeatedly warned a North American trade war would raise consumer prices across the continent, though Frank McKenna believes Canadians can outlast Americans in that environment.
“Our pain threshold is way higher than America’s because we know what we’re fighting for and we’re united on that,” said Mr. McKenna, deputy chair of TD Securities and a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. as well as premier of New Brunswick and a member of the Brookfield Corp. board of directors.
“In America, I think the pain threshold is extremely low, because the country is deeply divided and they have no idea why they’re in this mess.”
"...It’s happened- the US president has thrown up a tariff wall, 25 per cent on all Canadian products."
And all of the tariffs that Canada places on inbound US products? Like dairy around 250% or so? I put up that list on another comment on one of your other posts.
So which is larger, 25% or 250%? And the aluminum tariffs were reciprocal (both at 25%).
You have a massive industrialized dairy and egg system; we have supply management and protect family farms. Historically we have paid more for milk and eggs and people complain, let’s just open the doors to American hormone contaminated milk and salmonella encrusted eggs. Meanwhile right now you barely have eggs because of Avian flu and we have lots of little producers all over the place so it doesn’t spread.
I suspect our system will crash under US pressure and the hard right wing here (people party) but it will be a sad day for quality and for the family farms.
Lloyd if you think your system will crash knowing about the difference between the US and Canada's eggs and milk, are you sure your people know the difference? Or is it just like everywhere else, price has priority?
I thought you read stuff and didn’t just repeat lies like the 250% tariffs on dairy. It only kicks in after a significant amount of American dairy is imported, and has never been charged because the US exports never hit the limit. The US does the same to us. It is in the free trade agreement that Trump signed. We buy a tonne of cheddar cheese but nobody wants your growth hormone contaminated milk.
As an engineer, I was always tasked, when brought in to fix "a mess", to find the root problem. And then employ a number of tools to either fix that root problem or make it irrelevant.
So what is the root problem in this problem domain between two countries?
You keep thinking that this is all over tariffs and a trade war - I will tell you that unequivocally, it's not. Read the transcript (a quick read) between Margaret Brennan of CBS and US Homeland Sec Kristi Noem.
I should have also added - the Canadian tariffs were long extant before Trump resumed his office. The present Canadian ones were not as a result of his second term of office.
An act I would love to see Justin Trudeau lead before the October election is for Canada to submit an application to join the European Union. The EU is ahead on so many building products and standards, plus an interesting way to stand up and push back on the orange shitgibbon in the US (put the EU on the US border) and the UK. In this dream my Washington state is extended an offer from Canada, along with Oregon and California. Marc and Massachusetts, David and Vermont, Daniel in New York are welcome too. I think we may have some friends in Maine who might want to get in on this as well. Don't wake me, I'm enjoying this thought too much.
Lets go with that thought, how many companies do you think will leave Washington State and all the others? What are you going to do when all the military bases close and all the equipment, including all the National Guards, is relocated to the United States bases? And then any products imported to the US will have tariffs. So when all this is said and done, the US and Mexico will have the illegal immigration taken care of and the illegal drugs curtailed, and the US will get it food from Mexico. Just think, shutting off the water to California, is Washington going to finally allow them some of theirs?
Good to have you have put this up. Too many people ignore the basic Law of Thermodynamics (for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction). Except when it is expressed in human/country relations, there are opposing reactions but RARELY equal in quantity and intensity.
IF Congress lets them leave (and that's not a certainty), you are right in that others that will make reactions that best fit THEIR self-interest.
NOTHING in politics (or hardly ever) is simple, calm, reasonable, or knowable in advance. One can wish for certain things ("Please, Canada! Take us!") but rarely do they work out they way one thought.
You'd have an easier time emigrating yourself instead of within an entire State. Can't say it won't happen, but heck, there are eastern parts of WA that leave and form "the Liberty State" - and WA won't let them. It doesn't get easier the bigger the move.
I've often asked my Canadian friends to invade the US, but they are too nice to think along those lines. Yet I echo Marc's comment: can NY join Canada? Apparently my family fled a tsar before the US Civil War, and look where we are today. One bright spot: I bought my passive house windows from a Canadian firm. PS: I'm sorry about your family's loss in WWII.
After listening to Justin Trudeau yesterday, I wouldn't mind being Canadian. No politician is perfect because no human is. Our president is just plain bad and your Prime Minister shines in comparison. All that aside, localizing (and to a degree nationalizing) our economies makes energetic and ecological sense. It will involve economic upheaval, and our orange menace is doing it in the most chaotic and damaging way possible, but this is needed. The present global economy is destructive of ecosystems and people. Survival depends on degrowth that switches our emphasis to improving the local biological community, becoming a partner with nature and not simply an extractor. Let us think of the pending economic depression as an opportunity for change, not just a collapse. Build those mass timber houses from Canadian lumber, and replant the forests using the recommendations of another Canadian, Suzanne Simard. Keep well.
Thankyou for the expansion on my thoughts. Go easy on the mass lumber though. Nature based insulated panellised construction with osb offers more efficient use of timber. We need as many trees as possible stood up supplying their ecosystem services. We have no time to waste.
Australians suddenly learned during the Second World War they were part of Asia, not the British empire, as England told them in effect, "Goodbye and good luck." Now Canada is getting the same treatment. Starmer should be ashamed by his blatant sucking up to a tyrant. The US will come to regret alienating Canada, which must now learn how to step out of the shadow of its neighbor to the south and achieve its own manifest destiny. The best way to deal with a bully is to punch him in the nose, something the Mafioso of Mar-A-Loco richly deserves.
I chose that term deliberately because it is freighted with many emotional triggers, both positive and negative. On the plus side, it promotes national pride, which could be useful as Canada seeks to redefine its place in the world now that Tramp has made it abundantly clear the US and Canada may be neighbors but are not necessarily friends. On the other hand, there are the negative aspects of a country that runs roughshod over the rights of others, especially Indigenous peoples.
It was intended to provoke a response, so from that perspective, it was successful. Thanks for your comment.
Inadvertently Trump is pushing nation states to look inwards to economies anchored within their nations bioregions. It’s a strategy that could backfire for him with a net result of being good for the world.
How does this backfire in the US? If China puts tariffs on apples from the US, then we as a nation eat more apples grown in the US. This is the same game plan that Lloyd is saying for Canada. We are not the only nation that grow apples.
As I just wrote over at Lloyd's "Ontario Election Edition: Throw Doug Ford out before he kills us all" post:
>>"The good news is that the weapons of economic warfare are, by their nature, mutually punitive. Mr. Trump’s tariffs may hurt our exporters, but they will hurt American consumers, workers and businesses just as much."
>>Er, no. As I pointed out before, Canada's GDP is only $3.4 Trillion USD. Even California's is larger at $3.9T. The US GDP is $28-29T. Which means we have FAR more choices in a given consumer sector as consumers and at wider price points
>>Thus, I believe that Mr. Coyne is wrong in asserting it would hurt American consumers just as much as it would Canadians.
Excellent information, ideas etc. as usual. Thank you. Apparently one point Canada had some of the world's most advanced research, design and production for windows - largely in response to the energy crisis, our climate and support from public money invested in the sector. It ended with the Mulroney era and our slip slide into NAFTA. Disappointing about UK PM Keir Starmer-read up on his help for Julian Assange and Jeremy Corbyn - your abandonment instinct seems correct.
Old people in the superinsulated solar building field (c'est moi par example) learned a lot from Canadian pioneers like Harold Orr and Rob Dumont. We were all doing this quite a bit before the German Passivhaus bunch :-)
Certainly a lot of double stud walls filled with cellulose :-) Although I did a lot of double walls with fiberglass batts. 3-1/2" batts in the 2x4 walls, and 6" unfaced batts laid sideways between the two walls in the 4-3/4" cavity. Very easy for DIYers, and cheap.
I'm sorry our prime minister is behaving like a coward when it comes to supporting Canada. I just wanted to let you know that many of us here do support Canada. Maybe you could do a post about what people in the UK and the rest of Europe can do to support Canada at the moment?
Yes, please! Although, speaking for myself, I’ve got a lot going on trying to take care of my family and community. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help Canada too, at least a little….
Good column, as is often the case. Now that the re-elected Ontario Premier is back from Florida & has put his Canada-Man hat back on, perhaps if he is serious he could abandon some of his more fool hardy Trump inspired ideas & take-up some of your suggestions as a move towards self-sufficiency.
Doubtful. As discussed earlier in another post, he's not going to turn on his base that put him in that position. Sure, he may take on other issues that are orthagonal to those base issues and take on the US, but I'd be surprised if he violated the established trust with his voters.
After all, the #1 job of an elected official is....wait for it....get re-elected.
You know, sorta like when Bud Light decided to diss their consumer base by hiring transgender Dylan Mulvaney. Bud Light, years later, still hasn't recovered from breaking that trust. Gillette, in doing a similar thing, also caused a blowup and lost market share.
Politics also has "market share" in its realm. Many here have shown they don't like Ford but don't count on him to disavow himself from his voters.
Yes, but you have to use Canadian political representatives, and say "Eh?" a lot. And, even more important, drink a lot of beer, and become rabid sports fans, with cost as no object.
I really hope that Canadians (and truly, all people around the planet) recognize that at least half of the population of the United States is horrified and broken-hearted by what is happening.
Thank you Marc. I think Americans are in for a real shock when the implications of this hit home. Frank McKenna told the Globe and Mail:
Experts have repeatedly warned a North American trade war would raise consumer prices across the continent, though Frank McKenna believes Canadians can outlast Americans in that environment.
“Our pain threshold is way higher than America’s because we know what we’re fighting for and we’re united on that,” said Mr. McKenna, deputy chair of TD Securities and a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. as well as premier of New Brunswick and a member of the Brookfield Corp. board of directors.
“In America, I think the pain threshold is extremely low, because the country is deeply divided and they have no idea why they’re in this mess.”
Can Massachusetts join Canada too?
Vermont is SO IN!!!
We here in Vermont also support you. Maybe we could become your eleventh province.
"...It’s happened- the US president has thrown up a tariff wall, 25 per cent on all Canadian products."
And all of the tariffs that Canada places on inbound US products? Like dairy around 250% or so? I put up that list on another comment on one of your other posts.
So which is larger, 25% or 250%? And the aluminum tariffs were reciprocal (both at 25%).
You have a massive industrialized dairy and egg system; we have supply management and protect family farms. Historically we have paid more for milk and eggs and people complain, let’s just open the doors to American hormone contaminated milk and salmonella encrusted eggs. Meanwhile right now you barely have eggs because of Avian flu and we have lots of little producers all over the place so it doesn’t spread.
I suspect our system will crash under US pressure and the hard right wing here (people party) but it will be a sad day for quality and for the family farms.
Lloyd if you think your system will crash knowing about the difference between the US and Canada's eggs and milk, are you sure your people know the difference? Or is it just like everywhere else, price has priority?
I thought you read stuff and didn’t just repeat lies like the 250% tariffs on dairy. It only kicks in after a significant amount of American dairy is imported, and has never been charged because the US exports never hit the limit. The US does the same to us. It is in the free trade agreement that Trump signed. We buy a tonne of cheddar cheese but nobody wants your growth hormone contaminated milk.
And now Canada, with its tariffs, have ticked off the second largest economy in the world: China has just issued retaliatory tariffs.
- additional 100% tariff on rapeseed oil
-Ditto oil cades and peas
- additional 25% for port and some seafood.
After all, Canada went after Chinese EVs, steel, and aluminum. So they tit-for-tatted.
So yes, I do read a lot.
cades -> cakes
As an engineer, I was always tasked, when brought in to fix "a mess", to find the root problem. And then employ a number of tools to either fix that root problem or make it irrelevant.
So what is the root problem in this problem domain between two countries?
Make that 3 countries, now.
You keep thinking that this is all over tariffs and a trade war - I will tell you that unequivocally, it's not. Read the transcript (a quick read) between Margaret Brennan of CBS and US Homeland Sec Kristi Noem.
That makes it clear what the real intent is.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/03/09/dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-vs-cbs-narrative-engineer-margaret-brennan/
Honestly you believe this shit? You are better than this or I wouldn’t be talking to you here.
OK, lay it on the table - are you saying that Noem was lying to Brennan?
I should have also added - the Canadian tariffs were long extant before Trump resumed his office. The present Canadian ones were not as a result of his second term of office.
So is equal "fair" or inequality "fair"?
An act I would love to see Justin Trudeau lead before the October election is for Canada to submit an application to join the European Union. The EU is ahead on so many building products and standards, plus an interesting way to stand up and push back on the orange shitgibbon in the US (put the EU on the US border) and the UK. In this dream my Washington state is extended an offer from Canada, along with Oregon and California. Marc and Massachusetts, David and Vermont, Daniel in New York are welcome too. I think we may have some friends in Maine who might want to get in on this as well. Don't wake me, I'm enjoying this thought too much.
Lets go with that thought, how many companies do you think will leave Washington State and all the others? What are you going to do when all the military bases close and all the equipment, including all the National Guards, is relocated to the United States bases? And then any products imported to the US will have tariffs. So when all this is said and done, the US and Mexico will have the illegal immigration taken care of and the illegal drugs curtailed, and the US will get it food from Mexico. Just think, shutting off the water to California, is Washington going to finally allow them some of theirs?
Good to have you have put this up. Too many people ignore the basic Law of Thermodynamics (for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction). Except when it is expressed in human/country relations, there are opposing reactions but RARELY equal in quantity and intensity.
IF Congress lets them leave (and that's not a certainty), you are right in that others that will make reactions that best fit THEIR self-interest.
NOTHING in politics (or hardly ever) is simple, calm, reasonable, or knowable in advance. One can wish for certain things ("Please, Canada! Take us!") but rarely do they work out they way one thought.
You'd have an easier time emigrating yourself instead of within an entire State. Can't say it won't happen, but heck, there are eastern parts of WA that leave and form "the Liberty State" - and WA won't let them. It doesn't get easier the bigger the move.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNKCW59pmxQ
You're welcome
That is fantastic. Thank you, James!
I've often asked my Canadian friends to invade the US, but they are too nice to think along those lines. Yet I echo Marc's comment: can NY join Canada? Apparently my family fled a tsar before the US Civil War, and look where we are today. One bright spot: I bought my passive house windows from a Canadian firm. PS: I'm sorry about your family's loss in WWII.
After listening to Justin Trudeau yesterday, I wouldn't mind being Canadian. No politician is perfect because no human is. Our president is just plain bad and your Prime Minister shines in comparison. All that aside, localizing (and to a degree nationalizing) our economies makes energetic and ecological sense. It will involve economic upheaval, and our orange menace is doing it in the most chaotic and damaging way possible, but this is needed. The present global economy is destructive of ecosystems and people. Survival depends on degrowth that switches our emphasis to improving the local biological community, becoming a partner with nature and not simply an extractor. Let us think of the pending economic depression as an opportunity for change, not just a collapse. Build those mass timber houses from Canadian lumber, and replant the forests using the recommendations of another Canadian, Suzanne Simard. Keep well.
Thankyou for the expansion on my thoughts. Go easy on the mass lumber though. Nature based insulated panellised construction with osb offers more efficient use of timber. We need as many trees as possible stood up supplying their ecosystem services. We have no time to waste.
Yes. Mass timber/cross laminated timber makes sense when it displaces steel or concrete, not when it displaces stick-framed assemblies.
Australians suddenly learned during the Second World War they were part of Asia, not the British empire, as England told them in effect, "Goodbye and good luck." Now Canada is getting the same treatment. Starmer should be ashamed by his blatant sucking up to a tyrant. The US will come to regret alienating Canada, which must now learn how to step out of the shadow of its neighbor to the south and achieve its own manifest destiny. The best way to deal with a bully is to punch him in the nose, something the Mafioso of Mar-A-Loco richly deserves.
Not disagreeing with what you're saying here but you might want to choose a term other than "manifest destiny"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
I chose that term deliberately because it is freighted with many emotional triggers, both positive and negative. On the plus side, it promotes national pride, which could be useful as Canada seeks to redefine its place in the world now that Tramp has made it abundantly clear the US and Canada may be neighbors but are not necessarily friends. On the other hand, there are the negative aspects of a country that runs roughshod over the rights of others, especially Indigenous peoples.
It was intended to provoke a response, so from that perspective, it was successful. Thanks for your comment.
Inadvertently Trump is pushing nation states to look inwards to economies anchored within their nations bioregions. It’s a strategy that could backfire for him with a net result of being good for the world.
How does this backfire in the US? If China puts tariffs on apples from the US, then we as a nation eat more apples grown in the US. This is the same game plan that Lloyd is saying for Canada. We are not the only nation that grow apples.
As I just wrote over at Lloyd's "Ontario Election Edition: Throw Doug Ford out before he kills us all" post:
>>"The good news is that the weapons of economic warfare are, by their nature, mutually punitive. Mr. Trump’s tariffs may hurt our exporters, but they will hurt American consumers, workers and businesses just as much."
>>Er, no. As I pointed out before, Canada's GDP is only $3.4 Trillion USD. Even California's is larger at $3.9T. The US GDP is $28-29T. Which means we have FAR more choices in a given consumer sector as consumers and at wider price points
>>Thus, I believe that Mr. Coyne is wrong in asserting it would hurt American consumers just as much as it would Canadians.
Well if everyone eats their own apples that’s great! Reduced carbon emissions better food!
Excellent information, ideas etc. as usual. Thank you. Apparently one point Canada had some of the world's most advanced research, design and production for windows - largely in response to the energy crisis, our climate and support from public money invested in the sector. It ended with the Mulroney era and our slip slide into NAFTA. Disappointing about UK PM Keir Starmer-read up on his help for Julian Assange and Jeremy Corbyn - your abandonment instinct seems correct.
Old people in the superinsulated solar building field (c'est moi par example) learned a lot from Canadian pioneers like Harold Orr and Rob Dumont. We were all doing this quite a bit before the German Passivhaus bunch :-)
and possibly with less upfront carbon?
Certainly a lot of double stud walls filled with cellulose :-) Although I did a lot of double walls with fiberglass batts. 3-1/2" batts in the 2x4 walls, and 6" unfaced batts laid sideways between the two walls in the 4-3/4" cavity. Very easy for DIYers, and cheap.
I'm sorry our prime minister is behaving like a coward when it comes to supporting Canada. I just wanted to let you know that many of us here do support Canada. Maybe you could do a post about what people in the UK and the rest of Europe can do to support Canada at the moment?
Yes, please! Although, speaking for myself, I’ve got a lot going on trying to take care of my family and community. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help Canada too, at least a little….
Good column, as is often the case. Now that the re-elected Ontario Premier is back from Florida & has put his Canada-Man hat back on, perhaps if he is serious he could abandon some of his more fool hardy Trump inspired ideas & take-up some of your suggestions as a move towards self-sufficiency.
You honour your uncle's memory very well.
Doubtful. As discussed earlier in another post, he's not going to turn on his base that put him in that position. Sure, he may take on other issues that are orthagonal to those base issues and take on the US, but I'd be surprised if he violated the established trust with his voters.
After all, the #1 job of an elected official is....wait for it....get re-elected.
You know, sorta like when Bud Light decided to diss their consumer base by hiring transgender Dylan Mulvaney. Bud Light, years later, still hasn't recovered from breaking that trust. Gillette, in doing a similar thing, also caused a blowup and lost market share.
Politics also has "market share" in its realm. Many here have shown they don't like Ford but don't count on him to disavow himself from his voters.
Yes, but you have to use Canadian political representatives, and say "Eh?" a lot. And, even more important, drink a lot of beer, and become rabid sports fans, with cost as no object.