War with Canada?

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

In fact, U.S. farmers rely on Canadian sources for nearly 80 percent of the potash fertilizer they use each year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Northern border states, including New York, Michigan, Vermont, Minnesota and Maine, run on electricity produced by Canadian hydropower. And Midwestern refineries are optimized to process heavy sour crude oil from Canada, helping keep gas prices lower than they otherwise would be, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...rade-strategy/

[Winehole23]

the USA buying crude oil and gas from Canada is in no sense a ripoff

[Winehole23]

​the fascinating thing about Trump's tariff policy is that it shows that he not only doesn't understand taxes/levies, he does not even understand the concept of a transaction. He thinks if you pay 5 bucks for a thing you have been robbed of $5 even if you get the thing. Just the stupidest man alive

[ChumpDumper]

You lost another war in the middle east.

Why do you keep doing this?

[Winehole23]

Coverage of the Canada trade war seems to be underselling an important point: Trump tore up NAFTA and made everyone sign a new agreement more to his liking in 2020 with a 16-year renewable term. Now he's tearing up that agreement. If his signature is meaningless why would Canada agree to anything?

[Winehole23]

if Canada were a US viceroyalty, or surrendering after losing a war, some of these demands would kind of make sense

[Winehole23]

in passing, re-starting a trade war with Canada while Hormuz is closed is really dumb

[Winehole23]

lol

[Winehole23]

Let’s set the scene, because you need the full panorama to appreciate this show. Trump had been threatening a 50 per cent tariff on roughly $28 billion worth of Canadian exports, due to hit at midnight Friday, and to do it he had to reach all the way back to Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which means the man is running 2026 trade policy on legislation written while the world economy was face down in a Depression-era gutter, all because the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs in February and told the US government it now owes importers their ing money back.


And here’s the kicker: Section 338 is a surviving organ of Smoot-Hawley, the tariff law that helped turn a stock market crash into a decade of global misery. His signature economic weapon got laughed out of the highest court in the land, so the spray-tanned Smoot-Hawley cover band went rummaging through the legal shed and came back to play the one record in history every economist on the planet agrees should never get a ing encore. Strength, my arse. The bloke’s lost his nail gun and he’s out there trying to build a deck with a rock while calling himself a master builder.


And what mighty strategic assets is this Depression-era artillery aimed at? Hockey sticks, cement, tongue depressors, booze and certain kinds of clothing, which means the United States of America has formally declared economic war on the ing hockey stick. If you wrote that into a satire, an editor would send it back for being too lame.


And one more detail, still hot from the oven: these are tariffs on goods flowing under CUSMA, the trade deal Trump personally negotiated, personally signed, and personally paraded around like a show pony through his entire first term. He is now tariffing his own trophy. The Art of the Deal has become the art of setting fire to your own paperwork, pissing on the ashes, and charging the neighbours for the smoke.

https://ifloz.substack.com/p/king-ca...kong-mode-with

[Winehole23]

According to the reporting out of Washington, one of the actual strategic war aims of this entire 50 per cent barrage, the casus belli itself, is that Canadian premiers pulled Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam off provincial liquor store shelves as payback for the first round of tariffs, and the big fella took it so personally that restocking the bourbon became a term of surrender. The most powerful nation in human history is having a full-blown -fit over shelf placement, and half of Washington is nodding along like that’s a normal ing thing for a superpower to do.

There’s a hundred years of history pissing itself at this one. During Prohibition, hard men ran Canadian whisky south over this exact border in the boot wells of Studebakers, and now the President of the United States has appointed himself history’s first Reverse Rum-Runner, fighting a trade war to force American bourbon north at gunpoint. Al Capone at least had the decency to smuggle booze people wanted.

Carney, to his credit, actually asked the premiers to consider it to help lock in a deal. And Manitoba’s Wab Kinew stood up and asked the question out loud: is putting American whiskey back on the shelf worth signing a deal that accepts Trump’s tariffs are here to stay? When the premier of Manitoba is out-negotiating the entire White House on first principles, you know the intellectual matchup is men against boys, and the boys are drunk on their own supply.

[Winehole23]

.

This is the administration that changed the terms at the last minute, according to Carney, fronted by a president who tore up his own signed agreement, and it wants the record to show the other side was unreliable. The bloke who’s spent eighteen months moving the goalposts has the front to file a complaint that the opposition walked off the field, and that takes a special kind of brass neck, the kind you only get from a lifetime of stiffing contractors and blaming the concrete.

And then came the line of the night, from a senior administration official speaking on background, as the brave ones always do. Canada is free to retaliate, the official said, but “escalation is a choice,” and America’s sole interest is protecting American jobs.


Escalation is a choice, says the side that whacked 50 per cent tariffs on cement and hockey sticks at the stroke of midnight. Every standover man since the dawn of the protection racket has run that exact patter, the bloke in the nice suit admiring your shopfront and observing what a shame it’d be if anything happened to it. Coming from a government of actual gangsters it’d chill the blood. Coming from a man with the unmistakable look of someone who lost a fight with a duty rate, it’s ing karaoke.

[Winehole23]

heel turn for former Trump fan Doug Ford

*FORD SAYS CANADA SHOULD BE READY TO CUT ELECTRICITY TO US: AP

[Winehole23]

"on January 1st"

[Winehole23]

Trump scheduled a TACO after the midterms

[ChumpDumper]

you lost again, snacks

[Winehole23]

if I were Carney, I'd escalate before the midterms -- Trump is obviously scared

[Winehole23]

elbows up

"I'll cut them off," Ford said of critical minerals. "You won't get a grain of sand out of Ontario."

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/o...trumps-tariffs

[Winehole23]

the only country that could possibly invade Canada, or acts like it wants to do so, is the USA

Vance: We have to remember, Canada is a state-- sorry, Freudian slip. Canada is a country that would get invaded by a foreign country if it weren't for America

[velik_m]

Trump is threatening new Canadian auto tariffs. That will hurt US automakers and workers

...
“Sweaters, honey and hockey sticks are not a trade war. What the president just threatened this morning is a trade war,” said Patrick Anderson, CEO of Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan-based consulting firm. “It would be a body blow to the auto industry. We would see plants closing on both sides of the border.”

Canada does have a large trade surplus with the United States. But when it comes to the auto industry, it’s the opposite — the US has a nearly $1 billion a month trade surplus with Canada.

America imported $24.5 billion worth of Canadian vehicles and auto parts in the first six months of this year, according to Commerce Department trade data, compared to the $30.4 billion Canada imported.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was first introduced in the 90s, and then the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement during Trump’s first term, the auto industry has been able to operate as if North America is a single market. Companies move parts and vehicles freely across borders, often multiple times before the car is assembled and sent to dealer showrooms.
...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/24/b...ff-us-industry

[Winehole23]

Ontario Premier Doug Ford on his retaliation against Trump:

We have to focus on the red states. The red states are Republican. The red states we're gonna hit hard

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

USDA got DOGE'd, US farmers are getting the shaft

President Trump’s first tariff war with Canada (it was over milk) led to a 40% bankruptcy rate amongst Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. And DOGE decimated the Department of Agriculture, so no-one gets financed now

Farmers Struggle to Get Basic Services From Depleted Agriculture Dept.


After the departure of thousands of federal workers, rural communities report problems obtaining loans, grants, technical assistance and support for infrastructure and other services.

www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/u....

[Winehole23]

Trump is a political moron

You know who trades a lot with Canada? Michigan, Maine, Iowa, and Alaska, all of which have close Senate races this November.