Canada

Donald Trump's former ambassador to the European Union says nothing should be off the table when it comes to Canada-U.S. trade discussions and that the U.S. president wants immediate change on his irritants like dairy and auto manufacturing.

"You cannot have fair and multilateral trade by someone saying that something is not up for grabs," Gordon Sondland said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live on Sunday. "Everything is up for grabs. Everything."

Sondland referred to Canada's supply management system — a national policy framework meant to ensure predictable and stable prices by guaranteeing supply-managed dairy farmers a minimum price for their products. Trump has railed against the system for years.

If you run into a paywall, here is the link since this information is important: https://web.archive.org/web/20250314114401/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-measles-cases-ontario-what-to-do/

After a dozen days being shuffled between detention centres in the U.S., Jasmine Mooney has made it back to Vancouver.

The Canadian entrepreneur, who was detained after applying for a visa at the U.S.-Mexico border on March 3, touched down at Vancouver International Airport shortly after midnight Saturday morning.

“I’m still, to be honest, really processing everything,” Mooney told reporters who were waiting for her at YVR’s international arrivals area.

“I haven’t slept in a while and haven’t eaten proper food in a while, so I’m just really going through the motions.”

Video description

In the most disturbing geopolitical shift of my lifetime, the new US government is siding with dictators and lashing out at allies, waging economic war on Canada with the repeated stated goal of ending our sovereignty. While many Americans are also horrified, realistically their focus right now is internal. We need to stand up, strengthen our country, and reorient to friendlier nations. In this video I talk to three experts to learn how we can strengthen our economy by building more, especially critical needs of housing and transportation.

"Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum." 😅

I kept the original title; the article is worth reading as it touches on the history of the water treaties and what to look out for.

Author: Tricia Stadnyk - Professor & Canada Research Chair in Hydrological Modelling, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary

Similar to my post about Canadian web hosting a few weeks back, I'm looking for Canadian registrar(s) that you've personally used and wholeheartedly recommend. Ideally something with cheap transfers. Thank you kindly.

The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.

Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.

She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58590393

https://archive.is/eRaqC

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.

Michael Schwinghamer has a passion for shipwrecks and is on a mission to capture them in their watery graves — leaning on his background in surveying and diving. His 3D renderings of ships lying on the sea floor could be the last glimpse before they’re gone forever.

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/

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.

[...]