Canada

As state-level Republicans in Alaska work to affirm their close relationship with Canada amid U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war and threats of annexation, an Alaskan senator has warned British Columbia's premier that "you don't want to mess with Alaska."

Dan Sullivan of the Republican Party, who represents Alaska in the U.S. Senate, made the remarks in an interview with an Anchorage radio station posted to his Facebook page.

During the conversation, which touched on topics ranging from energy development to Ukraine, Sullivan, one of two senators who represent the state in Washington, was asked about B.C. introducing legislation that grants the province the ability to levy new fees on U.S. commercial trucks heading to Alaska.

Here's a selection from the article:

In Delta, B.C., furniture company Prepac Manufacturing Ltd. abruptly announced plans last month to shut down one of its factories and terminate 170 employees. ... The company was acquired by Toronto private equity firm TorQuest in 2019, and opened a new manufacturing and warehousing facility in North Carolina in 2021. Prepac plans to centralize its operations in North Carolina, leaving no Canadian footprint. Prepac was founded in Vancouver in 1979.

...

at South Shore Furniture, a Quebec furniture maker. In early February, the company said it was cutting 115 jobs because of tariff threats, noting that 70 per cent of its products were sold in the U.S. and American purchasers have sought out merchandise from Asia because of the trade war.

...

Another steel manufacturer in eastern Ontario – the Canada Metal Processing Group – said on Feb. 24 that it was cutting 140 employees because of the “actions by the United States” that will result in cancellations or delayed orders.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-layoffs-take-hold-as-trade-war-intensifies/

In an interview on Power & Politics, (David Paterson, Ontario's representative in Washington) told host David Cochrane that the Canadians and Americans had a 90-minute meeting and the first half-hour was "a master class" from Lutnick in breaking down the U.S. position on tariffs.

The focus of the U.S. government is dealing with its yearly deficit in federal spending, Paterson said. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the federal government ran a $1.83 trillion US deficit in the 2024 fiscal year.

There are three ways the U.S. government is working to cut down that deficit, Paterson added.

The first is a major budget resolution that calls for billions of dollars in tax cuts, and the second is slashing the size of government through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The third is tariffs, which are meant to be a new revenue source and attract investment into the United States.

While the pace of disastrous change in the U.S. is dizzying, we should have seen it coming. Billionaires and anti-democratic libertarians have been building up to this for decades. Much of it stems from the most profitable enterprise in history: fossil fuels.

In a chapter on taxes in her book At a Loss for Words, former CBC journalist Carol Off details efforts going back to the 1960s by “dark money” forces led by fossil fuel industrialists to overturn regulations, especially environmental, and remove barriers to companies by having the U.S. Supreme Court rule that corporations have the same rights as people, among other measures. This has substantially widened the gap between rich and poor that had been shrinking since President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal. The richest one per cent now have more wealth than 95 per cent of the world’s population.

Referencing research by Democracy in Chains author Nancy MacLean, Off writes of “a small band of brothers” who in the 1970s created a “complete blueprint for a post-democracy world” that people in high places would put into play. The movement was sparked by political economist James Buchanan, a pro-segregationist who believed democracy and equality were incompatible with capitalism.

The filings show the company owes $950 million to 26 pages' worth of listed creditors: landlords, suppliers and other partners, including fashion heavyweights Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Columbia Sportswear, Diesel and Estee Lauder.

Jennifer Bewley, the chief financial officer for Hudson's Bay's parent company, said in a court filing made on March 7 that the business had to defer certain payments to such companies for many months because it was having so much trouble making payments to landlords, service providers and vendors.

The situation was so severe that she said a landlord "unlawfully locked" Hudson's Bay out of a store located in Sydney, N.S., and a team of bailiffs attempted to seize merchandise from another location it runs in Sherway Gardens, a suburban Toronto mall.

The federal government is not considering dropping tariffs it imposed last year on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), steel and aluminum, despite Beijing’s retaliation and U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a trade war with Canada, according to the industry minister.

Ottawa imposed a 100 per cent import tax on Chinese EVs and a 25 per cent import tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum last October. Beijing retaliated over the weekend by imposing nearly $4 billion in tariffs on Canadian agricultural products, including canola oil and pork.

"We’re going to stand strong,” said Francois-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science and industry, in an interview with Vassy Kapelos on CTV News Channel’s Power Play. “We want to protect our industry. We want to protect our workers. We want to protect our communities.”

The federal government, following the lead of then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, imposed a 100 per cent import tax on EVs produced in China in October of last year, accusing Beijing of “distorting global trade” by exporting EVs at “unfairly low prices.”

Ottawa also imposed a 25 per cent import tax on Chinese-made steel and aluminum last October, accusing China of “pervasive subsidization” of its steel and aluminum industry.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to launch a trade war with Canada and China’s decision to impose new tariffs on Canadian products, B.C. Premier David Eby urged the federal government to rethink its tariff policy with all countries, including China.

[...]

This is an amazing oped:

The pandemic was a brutal example of Canada’s chronic inability to plan for the worst. When Ottawa finally got around to releasing a report last October about how the various levels of government had handled the crisis, the report’s authors pointed out that its recommendations closely mirrored those in an exhaustive report on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Ontario, which in turn had closely mirrored a 1993 report on the HIV epidemic.

That same inability to focus on issues that don’t provide instant political gratification is exacerbating the threats coming from the Trump White House. The tariffs are all the more potent when applied to a Canadian economy that

Ottawa and provinces have been happy to coast on the fumes of North American free trade, never imagining this might come back to haunt the country.

Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity. That includes tearing down the ludicrous interprovincial trade barriers that have been shaving points off of Canada’s gross domestic product for decades.

...

And why? Because it’s easier to sell Canadians on immediate largesse the year before an election than it is to convince them of the need for long-term investments that will cost billions and may not be needed for years, or even decades.

Federal politicians of all stripes are guilty of this. We haven't seen a serious response to climate change, the housing crisis, or Canada's collapsing productivity. We get weird bandaids (immigration to pump the GDP/workforce, reducing GST on property purchases), but rarely do we see well thought out plans with multi party support.

Original: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-lesson-that-politicians-never-learn/

Air Canada has apologized for an in-flight display map that showed a Middle East without Israel. The airline deactivated the map display in its Boeing 737 fleet this week after a passenger complained that the map labeled the area as "Palestinian Territories," CNN reports. In response to a post on X with a photo of the map, Air Canada said it had been made aware of a "display issue." The airline said the in-flight entertainment system that included the map was produced by French company Thales, which used a map produced by another company. The airline and Thales said Thursday that the issue had been resolved and new maps would be rolled out Friday.

Hi Folks, a lot of people had good thoughts about shows on CBC Gem and I realized we hardly touched movies. So, let's do that!

cross-posted from: /c/britishcolumbia

Eby's announcement came just moments before Mark Carney, in his first act as the new prime minister of Canada, gave an order-in-council to remove the federal carbon tax.