> Americans do not understand how much press there is outside the US about tourists from Ireland / Germany / Canada getting locked up in ICE jails for weeks on end.
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.
Same here. There's one or two things I can't bear to cancel, but I've moved all my email from Google Workspaces to Proton, cancelled Netflix, cancelled plans to go to DEF CON, downgraded storage for Apple iCloud to just above what I need instead of way above, cancelled plans to get a new MacBook Pro this year, stopped buying groceries from companies with American owners, etc.
What I respect most about the European countries' leving tarrifs in response is when they're choosing to issue tarrifs on products that are heavily sourced from red states, and lesserly so from blue states.
You're going to have to come to terms with the fact that a growing number of non-Americans don't care about the left/right paradigm in America anymore.
They just view America itself as the problem and are deciding to detach from it as a whole.
Sending money to Netflix means sending money to the administration through taxes in the US. Funding left wing news sources in the US isn't our responsibility either.
Most stuff on Amazon is made in China anyways. Might as well order directly from Aliexpress or the producer's website. Exactly the same items, but without the American middleman.
There's definitely going to be some sort of EU-China rapprochement now. Not that China is less oppressive - they remain more oppressive, and I wouldn't like to, say, get caught with weed going into China. But they're much less loudly annoying about it.
(another one to watch out for: opiate painkillers in your hand luggage into Middle Eastern states, including Dubai.)
It's not spite, or doesn't have to be. Non US-citizens have very few ways of exerting pressure on the current administration, but money happens one of them.
The threats to Canada aren't attracting nearly as much attention as they should. The problem is people have got too used to just assuming that what Trump says is bullshit: it's just there to sound good on the news, there's no intent to actually do it. Then the tariffs hit.
If there's the slightest possibility that what he says is not bullshit, then Canada needs to take it very seriously and the entire northern hemisphere security architecture needs to permanently change.
The annexing is so unhinged that I can't be sincere, yet anything Trump had any power to do he did do. He didn't get peace in Ukraine because he can't control Russia nor Ukraine. He can attempt an Canadian invasion because he is in control of the army.
Let's not trivialize Trump by calling him "orange man", please. Hitler was a whiny little shit nugget as well, but that didn't limit the amount of abject evil he was able to orchestrate. The problem with whiny little shit nuggets is they attract other whiny shit nuggets, and they bond (clump up) over their shared persecution complex. And now we've got a real problem on our hands.
In the context of Canada, as an American all I can say is sorry and also thank you for doing everything in your power to resist "our" dictator since our own federal government is abjectly failing.
This is what they were promised. This is what conservatives voted for. This is what conservatives want. The warnings were ignored for way too long.
> “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be”
~ Kevin Roberts - President of Heritage Foundation
Now maybe we can stop pretending that we all want the same thing and just have different ways to get there. People have very different value systems and it has been on clear display for decades now.
That's why they're terrified of Luigi Mangione. He's evidence that the left may not allow this to be a bloodless revolution. That's why they've suppressed the news about his case. They want the public to forget. Never forget.
19kg of Fentanyl got smuggled from Canada into the US in 2024, not even 1% of the total. Yet POTUS decides to impose a 25% tarrif on all canadian goods because of it. Even if it was a bluff, 100+ years friendship, solidarity and good will was just flushed down the toilet and it will probably take decades to fix. But hey, good job!
Worth noting, Canada doesn't actually charge 270% tariffs on milk. The base tariff for milk is 7.5%:
> Canada’s whole system is built to avoid a surplus -- hence its name, “supply management.” [...] Within quota, the tariff is 7.5%. Over-quota milk faces a 241% tariff. [1]
I also have to agree with Derek Holt here:
> Derek Holt, an economist at Scotiabank, said in a research note. “Better judgment would question whether an entire trading relationship needs to be jeopardized in order to appeal to dairy farmers in Wisconsin.” [1]
A country that tears up an agreement it renegotiated and signed four years earlier over spurious claims* isn't a friend and isn't to be trusted.
Sure, the dairy carveouts - which the US and Trump agreed to, again, just four years ago - are stupid artifacts of a farmers lobby group, but threatening to blow up our economy on a whim makes the US unfriendly and untrustworthy. Doing all that while the leader repeatedly says they want to annex our country by economic force and make us a state turns things from untrustworthy to adversary.
If trump wanted free trade to end, he may have gotten it, because a huge amount of the trust that underlay the north american economy is gone now. If you're cheering that on because the number of eggs your dairy farmers are able to export is under a quota, then I can only say your point of view is far too limited.
* The effectively null amounts of fentanyl & migrants crossing the border.
Even if those numbers are true, you do understand that is a very different situation than 25% tariff across the board, and 10% on energy for completely disingenuous reasons.
If it wasn't for oil, natural gas, power Canada would be at a trade surplus with the US. Oil and Natural gas are not things are not easy to find replacement US based sources.
> 19kg of Fentanyl got smuggled from Canada into the US in 2024, not even 1% of the total.
I realize this is the Liberal's talking point, but it just doesn't add up. For starters they are talking about detected/caught smuggling, which is a terrible metric to use.
Then there's the problem of how much is being produced domestically. Just in Q4 of 2024, in Canada found:
So that leaves us in a very awkward position with three possibilities:
* Canada has busted virtually every lab in Canada within the span of one quarter and was consuming amounts of fentanyl domestically that would render every Canadian an addict.
* Somewhere in Canada, someone is stockpiling absurd amounts of fentanyl just for fun.
* Canada is catching a negligently small fraction of what their crime syndicates are smuggling into the US.
What confuses me, is that when I cross the border from Canada back into the US, it's the US customs folks I deal with, not Canadians. And it's the other way around when heading into Canada.
Isn't it the job of the US to catch drugs coming into the country?
Oh give the “goodwill, friendship and solidarity line” a rest. Canada has opposed the US many, many times (as is its right), so no need for the “but our feelings are really hurt” line.
Canadians aren’t stupid. They’ve been living next to the US for centuries and experienced the ebb and flow of its decisions.
How do you know the exact figure of fentanyl smuggled into the US from CAN?
I doubt even the cartels could give you an exact figure as they aren't the only ones smuggling the drugs or the precursors.
Are you saying we only intercepted 19kg? How wouldn't that make sense to you considering the disparity of population density at the borders, as well as the infrastructure and staffing at each border??
Canada already Tariffs many products coming from the USA, many even exceeding 200%. The political theater and kindergarten understanding of geo-politics would explain your take on "100 years of friendship flushed down the toilet" lol.
Ryzen and Apple M1 were the best things that happened to CPUs. On one hand I got a super efficient CPU in the M1 and on other hand, I can get a very performant 16 core CPU (Ryzen 7950x) without shelling out insane money for server/workstation CPUs.
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.