That makes perfect sense. It puzzles me why supporters of the current US regime think Canada won’t resist the US. Be it a trade war or a military invasion, Canada will make the cost so great that it may eliminate the US from the world arena. Canada has been cornered and has nothing to lose at this point.
> It has everything to lose by continuing to rely on the US, which is why you're seeing such a hard pivot toward Europe and Asia.
The problem is, this kind of pivot would take a long time and be extremely difficult. Out there in the real world, real Canadians have a lot to lose.
The US strong-arming its allies in this way puts them in a massive bind near term. Canada could eventually adapt to a different world order with reduced reliance on the US, but it would suffer a recession (or worse) in the process.
They have no good options here, because how can you really deal with a madman? (In a game theoretical sense [0], if not also a literal one) - but I think the ideal strategy is to acquiesce to the US and pursue these efforts as quickly as they can to remove any reliance going forward.
This is made more difficult by the fact that there seems no obvious way to actually appease the US, whose current goals and objectives are completely opaque.
This is silly. US is Canada's biggest trading partner and one of the largest borders in the world. 80% of people live within 1 hour of the border. Free trade has allowed both economies to prosper. Canada has everything to gain with free trade. You are right on over reliance, but free trade benefits everyone.
It takes 2 to make a trade, and the best strategy for an iterated prisoner's dilemma scenario is tit-for-tat. The party that started the silliness should end it, but until then, Canada should rightly consider stronger ties with the Europe - they do share a border with a European country after all.
Depending how you count "borders" and "European countries" they share a border with 2 (France via St Pierre and Miquelon, Denmark via Greenland) and share a landlord with a third.
The best strategy is tit-for-tat with eventual forgiveness attempts. It's way too soon for that (the US is still controlled by Republicans) but one eventually re-opening trade might be optimal, assuming there's still a USA to trade with.
Tit-for-tat inherently forgives the moment the other party stops defecting, in a game theoretic sense. It's "start friendly, every future move copies other party's previous move".
We had free trade. The US has, in a very short period of time, squandered what was a highly profitable and mutually beneficial trading relationship.
There was already a sentiment of distrust in Canada about being so dependent on American goodwill. You can see this in the debates from the 1998 federal election (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyYjRmM7RDY) on the establishment of CUSFTA, the precursor to NAFTA and later CUSMA. Brian Turner (red tie in that video) argued that free trade in Canada would lead inevitably 'reduce' Canada to becoming a 'colony' of the United States. He lost the election, and the agreement went through. Here we are almost three decades later and, as Canadians see it, those fears are at risk of coming true.
I'm not sure that Americans really understand that this has permanently damaged the relationship between our countries. It's going to be a generation before there will be the political will in Canada to consider going back to something similar to NAFTA/CUSMA again. Even assuming the United States returns to open trade policies again, the question forever on everyone's mind will be "what if another Trump gets elected?".
it is 2025, nothing takes a generation any longer unless you are implying donny and his apostoles will rule america for a generation. otherwise new administration will repair this fairly quickly
A new administration can not promise that somebody like Donald Trump will never be elected again. That's what it would take to repair this relationship.
But at this point, Trump has been re-elected with a greater margin so in terms of national interests one needs to assume the worst case (i.e. these tariffs/behaviour aren't going away).
Would it be better if they did? I think so, but as a European (but very very exposed to the US) I don't think that's an economically rational way to plan.
I wouldn't color relying on a historical ally that either produces, or is the transit corridor for, most of your food with "everything to lose".
The current trade spat is an issue, and Canada should react accordingly, but the reality is that, even with tariffs, the US still represents a very profitable trade partner, especially when they can levy tariffs of their own.
The issue is not limited to tariffs. There is consistent hostile rhetoric against Canada by multiple members of administration. And by hostile I mean threats of annexation, demands that Canada gives USA parts of its land and false accusations.
Tariffs are only part of the issue. They seem the be the first USA step meant to weaken Canada economically before USA proceeds to steal from from it.
Exactly this. It's interesting watching how Americans are talking about this issue vs Canadians. Even my liberal friends in the US think it's more "Silly" and "Troll" behaviour on Trump's part -- "you're not taking that seriously, are you?"
Yes, we're taking it seriously. It wasn't some one-off tweet. He's the official head of state and silence from the rest of the GOP and the US political class generally isn't exactly doing anything to calm tensions.
We faced heavy tariff threats under 1.0 and it wasn't anything like this. The reaction here isn't really about trade at all. It's about sovereignty.
The US is the only country that has ever invaded us.
I have been visiting Canada for decades—quite a bit of my family lives there. I was just there in 2022 for a wedding reception. It’s a nice place that seems like it won’t be a nice place in 50 years. Cops watched me like a hawk—I assume they have good reasons. Punjabi Uber driver told me he doesn’t even have to speak English because everyone at the bank, store, etc., speaks Punjabi. For some reason his elderly, past working age parents were immigrating to join him. Had to defend my being married to an American to some family friend at the wedding—there’s so many Bangladeshis there it’s possible to maintain endogenous marriage. Tried to charge my rented Tesla in a part of town that was all Indians. I let one Indian lady cut in front of me, which pissed off the Indian lady behind me, who started yelling at me “why are you letting her do that?” Not Canadian nice, certainly.
In the 1990s, Canada was a phenomenally well run and efficient country. More federalized than the U.S. (with 80% of spending run through the provinces). Canada had universal healthcare while having non-military per-capita government spending lower than the U.S. Now you’re running a sociologist experiment about what really causes prosperity and orderliness in western countries.
> The US is the only country that has ever invaded us.
Who is “us”? Surely we need to acknowledge that Europeans invaded Canada in the first place? The “us” that can make claims about having been invaded likely is just the indigenous people of that land. Of course, this applies to America as well. I do wonder what causes all of us to view a certain set of borders as the “correct” one. I also do the same thing.
> Yes, we're taking it seriously. It wasn't some one-off tweet.
As for whether Trump’s language about 51st state or whatever is a troll: I think it’s partially that. It’s really more about calling attention to the future of Canada and whether it makes more sense for it to be a part of the US than linger on its own. I don’t think it literally means annexing it through force but more like asking whether it’s mutually good for Canada to also be among the “United States” - just as you could ask that question of whether it should be in the EU.
Trump’s aggressive way of stating this has succeeded in one sense, which is drawing attention to the idea. It has backfired in another sense, which is that it is highly disrespectful and maybe has turned Canadians off that possibility entirely. Or worse, it may permanently push Canada into the arms of China or the EU. So I do agree that it is partially a troll but still destructive.
> Surely we need to acknowledge that Europeans invaded Canada in the first place?
No. Europeans (and others) "invaded" North America. The sovereign country called "Canada" didn't exist until the mid-1800s. Even the name didn't appear on maps until the mid-1500s and the indigenous peoples who lived in North America at the time certainly didn't consider themselves a part of a unified nation by that name.
> I do wonder what causes all of us to view a certain set of borders as the “correct” one.
Yeah. It's all such a mess, and if anything the European colonists (French and British) in what became Canada -- while murderous and genocidal to the first nations -- were strategically "softer" on them than their American counterparts who were openly officially genocidal.
e.g. When the treaty of Ghent was signed ending the War of 1812, the chief (and really only) "victory" for the Americans was the fact that the British gave up defending/supporting the indigenous people in the midwest who had (under Tecumseh and with the support of the British to some degree) fought off American settlers. And so the Americans were free to go in and massacre and wipe out the remaining pockets of indigenous resistance in the Americas.
& Iroquois/Mohawk under Brant fled north to Canada, where the British granted them land along the Grand River valley here in Ontario.
I actually share general skepticism about the US-Canada border and the structure of the Canadian state generally. But I also have deep skepticism of the US project generally.
I think northeastern US states have more in common with us than their own southern states. I think the Canadian political class -- both conservative and liberal -- are really parasitical awful people overall, and our own business community are oligopoly-trending douches with a penchant for using regulatory capture to screw their own citizens. I think Quebec could as easily be its own nation, in a north american federation and that the structure of much of the Canadian state is arbitrary.
But I think you've touched on something, which is that Trump has poisoned all discourse. I like many others have turned rabidly nationalist in the last few months.
In any case there's a reason why Canada exists. It's not some accident of history or just some retrograde unenlightened loyalists who liked the monarchy. Many of our ancestors saw aspects of dysfunction and injustice in the way the US was taking shape, and chose Canada as an (imperfect) alternative. And that there is an "alternate path" for governance in North America is in fact I think the precise thing that actually enrages people like Trump.
As for the "who is us?" and the invasion comment, my point is only that there is actually a long-running "meme" inside American politics since the very foundation of the US that objects to the existence of Canada at all, and included the assimilation of Canada in a large Manifest Destiny project. It's usually been a fringe position, but it has at times become amplified. E.g. under McKinley there was similar talk as what Trump is mouthing now, and of course during 1812, etc. It's "out there", but it's consistently present.
And that's the reason Canadians take this annexation talk seriously.
I see it as something similar to some of the motives driving Putin with Ukraine. All the rhetoric about "NATO at our doorstep" is just a smokescreen for what the real fear is -- he cannot countenance an alternative Russian/Ukrainian speaking polity, culturally-partially-contiguous with Russia to exist on his doorstep if it is a liberal democracy, outside of his sphere of (corrupt) control, and not subject to his kleptocracy. Because it would be an internal threat. The cost of grinding Ukraine into the ground is worth it to him if it means maintaining strict control at home.
What Trump is doing is like a kid's colouring book version of the same thing. It's crude jingoism to shore up his own base with bullshit about Canada and whatever, to build legitimacy based on jingoistic nationalism, and to try to undermine and destroy a liberal / centrist gov't on his doorstep. And, consistent with his "drill baby drill" mantra, it's also an attempt to stop climate change initiatives, to free US capital in Alberta from Canadian regulation, and to maintain/extend American control over our resource sector.
If it was just the trade spat, you might be right.
But there's also Trump repeatedly talking about annexing Canada. That goes well beyond a trade spat, and I would absolutely expect Canada to do more in response because that is in the mix. Including actively working to reduce their dependency on US-sourced or US-transiting products.
Absolutely. Canada is almost certainly going to cancel or severely limit a pending F35 order, and is actively sourcing aircraft and negotiating mutual arms deals with European partners.
Of course, NATO was founded on the assumption that the US is a reliable trading and security partner, and the defense supply chains reflect that assumption. It will take time to untangle those chains, but you're watching all of NATO speed-running that process right now.
I'm sure Rolls Royce expects their order book to grow over the next few decades. Likely some engineers have been tasked with researching the viability of creating drop-in replacement models for American engines.
> It's the US that's isolating itself. Canada isn't 'cornered'. It has the entire rest of the world to talk to and make deals with.
Yes, but any of those deals will pale in comparison to the opporunities Canada has with the wealthiest next door neighbor in the world. The oceans aren't nothing, the culture differences aren't nothing (no matter how small you try to make them with other Commonwealth countries).
Losing the US as a friend is a massive loss, and nothing will match it.
There has been some darkly hilarious reporting that much of this administration was genuinely surprised and confused that Canada didn't immediately roll over in response to US bullying. Most people realize that the world isn't made up of NPCs during childhood, but I guess the clowns currently in charge missed that developmental step. Either that or they have spent so much time on twitter and similar spaces that it has seriously warped their view of reality.
An honest question: what is wrong with reciprocal tariff? Wouldn't that be fair to both countries? I understand that there were many compromises when the countries signed trade deals like NAFTA, so we got some protective tariffs here and there, but I was wondering in general why reciprocal tariff is considered unfair.
I guess it could be fair, but those are unilateral. The official justifications such as considering sales tax, are bogus. The unofficial justification (or official depending on time of day..) is annexation. Surely, you see how this isn't perceived as fair from up North?
The trade isn't necessarily perfectly balanced, is it? In negotiations you have more flexibility if you can increase the size of the pie. Things like transit tolls or cruise ship stops are examples of that.
When there is now a 6-month backlog of people trying to take the CFSC/CRFSC courses to get their PAL, and the CAF recruitment site is constantly overloaded, yes - Canadians will definitely be resisting any military style invasion. Add that to the grassroots "Buy Canadian" movement, and no - Canadian's are not going to roll over and accept US pressure for either tariffs or annexation.
North Vietnam had 13 mil people, South Vietnam 17m. Afghanistan had 20m people at the time of invasion.
These were undeveloped countries with very low human capital. Their militaries did not hold up. And yet - how did it all turn out for the US?
Canada has 40m people, terrain ideally suited to guerilla warfare, a huge land border with the US, and a population that is not only indistinguishable from American civilians, but also enjoys much wider popular support in the US than the Vietnamese ever did.
It would be extremely foolish to think you could simply invade such a place at all, nevermind easily.
There is this bad penny bit of propaganda that a lot of people believe. Which is only the US has any agency. And everyone else does what they do either under orders from the US or as a reaction to something the US did. It's attractive if you're ignorant and stupid because it makes the world simple enough for you to think you understand everything.
Putin, the current administration and conservatives in general swallowed that hook line and sinker.
> Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’t me shifting to full-time political pundit, nor is this the formal end of the hiatus (which will happen on Nov 1, when I hope to have a post answering some history questions from the ACOUP Senate to start off on), but this was an essay I had in me that I had to get out, and working on the book I haven’t the time to get it out in any other forum but this one. And I’ll be frank, some of Donald Trump’s recent statements and promises have raised the urgency of writing this; the political science suggests that politicians do, broadly, attempt to do the things they promise to do – and the things Trump is promising are dark indeed.
> Now I want to be clear what we’re doing here. I am not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t) and certainly not if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (‘thing I don’t like’) and in that context ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements and if so, what does that mean. And I want to do it in a long-form context where we can get beyond slogans or tweet-length arguments and into some detail.
In the Handmaid's Tale TV show, the US has turned into a repressive religious state horrifyingly cruel to women, and people will occasionally try to cross the border into Canada to safety.
As a Canadian, this is increasingly becoming my best case scenario. Hopefully we can maintain our independence, and many of the freedoms and judicial process the US is currently destroying, although there are some exceptions our govt drastically needs to address *
* the biggest example I expect Americans to bring up is gun control. Canada absolutely needs to revert to a logic and data based restriction approach rather than an emotional appeal over looks or otherwise. Unfortunately while 85% of the country supports some form of gun control, only one party is actively implementing it and doing it in the stupidest way possible. That being said, I expect Americans never to agree with gun control in any form, and that's OK and another reason of the many Canadians do not want to be part of the US.
* Canada has mirrored the US in restricting protests and collective bargaining in some cases, and needs to step back and seriously strengthen the laws protecting its people. At the same time, some protestors also need to understand the difference between protesting and terrorizing neighbourhoods...
and what would data tell why guns have to be restricted?
Some questions:
- what the fraction of gun crimes are commited by law-abiding citizens, which would be actually subject of restrictions?
- is number of casualties high compared to casualties from knife fights, over-doze, obesity, and car accidents because of speeding
Is there data for this question which would back restricting populations from having tools of self defense against tyrannic government(could happen in Canada too one day) and make it high priority for society compared to other problems?
No crime is ever committed by law abiding citizen, by definition. That being said, lawfully acquired guns are routinelly used in crimes.
Plus, they make gun owning men (specifically) much more successful at killing themselves.
Plus they cause accidents.
Guns are waay more likely to be used by tyrants supporters then by anybody else. Case in point, republicans support president dismantling democracy and own more guns.
The best take of the current US situation is still "NRA fails to live up to its only reason for existing and doesn't stand up to the tyrannical government"
It was clear they were full of shit when they didn't stand up for Kenneth Walker, which was the exact fucking night time home defense scenario they're always fantasizing about.
I mean its been obvious to many they're full of shit for decades, but that was the 'If anyone still thinks they aren't full of shit after this" line...
> lawfully acquired guns are routinelly used in crimes.
They are literally almost never used in crime. So “routinely” is false. In fact, I would guess that 99.9% of lawfully acquired guns in America are only ever used in lawful ways.
> Case in point, republicans support president dismantling democracy
Democracy is not being dismantled. If you’re an American citizen, you still have the right to vote however you want. You can still say what you want and publish what you want. You can protest if you are doing so in legal ways.
If anything, the end of massive censorship in social media, like was seen in the last 10-15 years, is helping democracy. Now you can actually share ideas freely and not get your content or account banned. And the elimination of wasteful spending of taxpayer money on political nonprofits is also helping democracy by not having the government bias politics through this loophole.
Plus the worry now is executive actively harming companies and opposition. Retaliating against companies, against law enforcement, breaking laws while doing both, attacking press and stomping on people's rights. Not some kind of flimsy complaint your account was banned after you harassed several people.
It absolutely depends on the type of crime. Domestic murders most often happen with 'legal' guns north and south of the border.
Other crimes, specifically 'aggravated' crimes that involve a weapon however lean the other way where guns are mostly 'illegal' in some way (stolen, smuggled, person doesn't have the right to have due to criminal record or otherwise depending on state/country).
Both domestic and aggravated crimes happen enough that you can justify the use of 'routinely' in both cases. Its ALSO completely true that most legally acquired guns are only ever used legally.
>Democracy is not being dismantled.
- Legal visa holders being deported for criticizing the government
- Foreign nationals invited to conferences in the US denied at the border for criticizing the government
- Government officials stating they will go against legal/judicial orders
- Executive over-reach specifically to remove checks and balances and ensure what remains of government agencies and its staff are loyal to the person, not the president or the country.
- Violating multiple laws, overstepping the bounds of the executive office specifically designed to protect democracy and assuming powers of the legislative and judicial branches
- Attacking Judges for implementing the law/doing their jobs as part of the above
- Professionally and personally threatening members of the legislative branch, state governors and others if they oppose the acts of the President.
Democracy and what democratic protections you have is absolutely being dismantled right in front of you.
>If anything, the end of massive censorship in social media, like was seen in the last 10-15 years, is helping democracy.
I just logged back into facebook after a few years haitus. The majority of what was on there was provably false / fake. Its worse than it ever has been. This is SUCH a benefit to democracy (hint, its not).
While I will agree there has been overreach on censorship, the pendulum swing the other way on top of the enshittification of the internet and the introduction of AI means the average citizen is now less informed and more propagandized than ever. Add in the failings of the US education system and the abysmal literacy rate...
An educated and informed population is bedrock of democracy, checks and balances are its framework. The US foundation has crumbled and its buildings are on fire.
Yes, a tyrant could take over, but the only credible threat Canada has had of that since the second world war has been our most powerful ally 'joking' about annexing us. A well-armed militia wouldn't really help to stop that given the difference in equipment and headcount between the Canadian military, and the US military.
If Canadians decide that Canada needs one, we should implement a method to drive enrollment in the the Canadian Army Reserves, or implement a home defense militia that folks could enroll and participate in with a guarantee that they couldn't be deployed outside of Canada (I was in our armed forces, and would not join a volunteer unit that could be deployed overseas, but would immediately sign up for one that was only legally allowed to be deployed domestically for defense).
As a Canadian, I'd love to see a resurgence of Cadets, Reserves and other methods of training civilians in proper gun use, self defence and methods to integrate with militias/military command in the event we need to domestically defend ourselves.
We are smack in the middle of 2 former enemies, which in their current trajectory will become allies while making us one of their new enemies... We need to have a serious national conversation about that.
I think your link doesn't have actual mass shootings number, my bet is that majority of fire arm homicides are commited by some small caliber hangguns (unlikely to be restricted) in domestic violence setting. Wikipedia says that massshooting casualties are only 0.2% of gun deaths in USA.
My point was really that American style gun rights are not popular in Canada, and the theoretical tyrannical government isn't an adequate justification.
You can argue the merits for or against, but more than 60% of Canadians support outright bans on firearms, and more than 80% support bans on 'assault' weapons.
This is not a hugely controversial topic in Canada; personally I support hunting, and recognize the utility of firearms as someone with a rural upbringing. I also support very strict gun controls and regulation, and I don't agree that there should be a right to bear arms - it's a privilege that should be earned, and well defended through testing and responsible ownership.
Its usually not hugely controversial, but there is that small minority here too...
Some points I feel compelled to make:
About 52% of URBAN voters support outright firearm bans but that number goes down when rural is added. I've always believed regulations for urban and rural environments should be different when it comes to firearms.
The vaguely defined "assault" weapons clarification always draws criticism so i'm going to avoid it. Personally I support banning fully automatic weapons, concealed/shortened shotguns, high capacity drum magazines, bump stocks and other items that exist to increase lethality in ways that cannot be justified for sport or hunting purposes. I also support restricting handguns, restricting magazine sizes, and other regulations. Most people that are against assault weapons I personally talk to agree the looks aren't the problem its the capabilities. Tacticool is fine, any gun being used for a crime will be scary. My point is that there is a lot that can and can't be included in 'assault' weapons, and everyone has their own list of what they do and don't think applies, so that 80% number isn't homogonized on what they are supporting.
We both 100% agree its a privilege that should be earned not a right. Testing and responsible ownership are requirements of keeping that privilege. Steps need to be taken to ensure that volatile domestic or mental health situations that are known to police and communities aren't left to fester with easy access to weapons. We also need to focus on illegal guns crossing our border from the south.
> Is there data for this question which would back restricting populations from having tools of self defense against tyrannic government(could happen in Canada too one day) and make it high priority for society compared to other problems?
The US has these tools and a dictator upending the country and yet these tools are not being utilized.
It’s a third, but also that’s not a criteria for “dictator” – the term refers to unchecked power, and while over time that tends to build resentment it’s not a given. This is especially true when they favor certain religious or ethnic groups where the beneficiaries like the dictator and everyone else does not.
Poll is an actual check, that his actions are aligned with what population wants from him. Laws and institutions are always not perfect, and all governments violated some rules.
>and what would data tell why guns have to be restricted?
We have banned, restricted, and unrestricted classifications. There are good arguments for fully automatic weapons, concealable shotguns and handguns being at least restricted, and for fully automatic and concealable weapons to be completely banned. I'm not going to rehash the arguments, because frankly we're likely going to disagree on most of them and neither of us are going to benefit from rehashing the debate. There are many arguments and viewpoints, but the salient fact is 85% of Canadians view the arguments and decide gun control under some logical framework is needed and support it, while Americans largely take the opposite side which can be traced to cultural and other differences between the countries.
That being said, the fact that the majority of non-domestic gun crimes are done with restricted/banned weapons that are being illegally imported from the states demonstrates a few things.
1. restricting access to those weapons is in fact the correct approach
2. internal restrictions need to be accompanied by stricter border enforcement due to the prevalence of guns and gun culture south of the border. Making it difficult to get legally needs to be superseded by making it incredibly difficult to get illegally first/foremost.
If anything good is coming from the current political nonsense, Canada's stepping up border protection has actually made Canada safer from US drugs and guns illegally crossing the border north, while having almost no impact on the traffic south as Canada Border agents don't stop or search traffic moving south without specific requests from US officials (something most Americans seem to misunderstand about border crossings)
>Is there data for this question which would back restricting populations from having tools of self defense against tyrannic government
Is there data comparing the known and predictable harms to a population having open and unrestricted access to weapons (see the impact of US social problems exacerbated by gun culture vs other countries) vs the concept that it would in fact help in 'self defense against a tyrannical govt'?
Frankly the 'standup against a tyrannical govt` argument has held little weight for decades as modern militaries and equipment vastly outclasses what any civilian can and will have even in the US. A proper democracy with checks and balances will serve far better than any number of civilians with military purpose weaponry, in fact the argument more so applies to a strengthened education and judicial system to ensure tyrants can't bloviate their way into power and remove all checks and balances.
>unless military decides to level all cities in the country.
See Gaza, most of eastern Ukraine. The existence of armoured equipment, air support, satellite monitoring and encrypted/EW resistant communications means civilian resistance is all but irrelevant.
Civilians co-operating with an organized, funded and supplied military is one thing, but on their own its a laughable concept at best.
> See Gaza, most of eastern Ukraine. The existence of armoured equipment,... means civilian resistance is all but irrelevant.
I cannot say anything about Gaza.
But I live in Kyiv, Ukraine, and I have lot of talks with civilian resistance, from about 2012 (yes, Euro-2012 significant).
And I could say, map of occupied Ukrainian territory is very close to map of least pro-Ukrainian civilian activity.
I could state exactly - territory where pro-Ukrainian civilian activity (mostly in form of various Non-Government Organizations), was high before war, stay under control of Ukrainian government, but territory where previous power just physically destroyed civilian activity was lost.
Exceptions are Kharkiv and Odessa, where anti-Ukrainian Organizations was very powerful, but they appear very early and pro-Ukrainian forces successfully neutralized them.
What I mean saying about physically destroyed civilian activity, for example The deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
In Ukraine, militia with rifles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Defence_Forces_(Uk...) dug into the ground and stopped invasion of 1M army with thousands of armored vehicles, absolute superiority in artillery, airforces, tactical missiles and 100B annual budget.
In Gaza, Israel with all tech advantages struggles to efficiently police relatively small urban area for 70 years already.
Yes the Territorial Defence forces in Ukraine, an example of government backed reserves/semi-trained forces with equipment far beyond the oversimplification of "rifles".
Actual untrained civilian forces with nothing but rifles on their own made little impact to the speed of russian advances however, which after multiple defeats and setbacks led to the formation of that defence force.
Gaza is a whole can of worms in many ways, but its a shining example of a civilian group with access to arms being completely unable to stop a superior local force from driving over them multiple times when they have the desire and political backing.
Which is exactly the point. A bunch of untrained sport shooters and hunters with more guns than they can personally use at once and no supply lines for ammunition or anything else aren't going to stand for any length of time against an organized military, especially on the military's home soil.
More realistic scenarios in any case are full civil war and the military itself splitting and civilians join sides as reserve forces to back them. in which case civilians having blanket access to arms before hand doesn't have any significant bearing on.
All of this is hypothetical, and ultimately comes down to the argument for unrestricted access to guns being 'so we can stand up to a tyrannical government' falls short. You are welcome to disagree, and that's OK with me. My country is largely in line with my sentiment and sees gun ownership as a privilege not a right, one that comes with restrictions balancing the safety of our society. You do you, we will do us.
> Territorial Defence forces in Ukraine, an example of government backed reserves/semi-trained forces with equipment far beyond the oversimplification of "rifles".
I don't think this is true. They were formed at the day of invasion (or few days before) with those who voluntarily enlisted(very many people), they received some old AK with bullets, and then moved to frontline to dig tranches, and that's what stopped advancements, because it is still extremely difficult to clear infantry which dug into the ground.
> A bunch of untrained sport shooters and hunters
A bunch is not, but in US number of gun owners is not "a bunch".
> but its a shining example of a civilian group with access to arms being completely unable to stop a superior local force from driving over them multiple times when they have the desire and political backing.
Sure, superior in tech and numbers force can "run over" aka walk on the streets, while being regularly shot from the windows in urban area, and it was with 5x superiority in population. Now imagine dictator tries with say 100k loyalists establish his rule in country with 350M population?
>I don't think this is true. They were formed at the day of invasion (or few days before) with those who voluntarily enlisted(very many people), they received some old AK with bullets, and then moved to frontline to dig tranches, and that's what stopped advancements, because it is still extremely difficult to clear infantry which dug into the ground.
Read your own wiki link I guess? There was multiple losses before the formation of the reserve defence force. There was also a high element of public participation in training and military force before hand. At no point did a bunch of untrained and unorganized civilians with only rifles significantly hold back the russian advance on their own, however partially trained armed and organized reserve forces did.
>say 100k loyalists establish his rule in country with 350M population?
More like 70 million+ loyalists in the country including the majority of the military which upends the point you are trying to make completely.
> a bunch of untrained and unorganized civilians with only rifles significantly hold back the russian advance on their own
I didn't say anything like that, though many were untrained and with only rifles. I said that in urban environment it is still soldier on foot is deciding factor, and in Ukraine freshly enlisted territorial defense units dug into the ground and stopped invasion.
> More like 70 million+ loyalists
70M is a civil war setting, but we are discussing setting of dictator + loyalists military vs population.
We're talking about the average citizen with a rifle and no training against a dictator/tyrant.
In Ukraines case, that civilian group was not initially effective at stopping the attack, but your example of the defence force is an example of a supported reserve force digging in backed by logistics and support from a military/country.
Those are 2 different things. My contention is that unrestricted access to arms doesn't in any way turn an untrained populace into a reserve force.
You're attempt to frame it as "dictator + small loyalist military" as well as focusing solely on urban settings are a fun hypotheticals, but that's all they are. The reality is that actions like that in a developed nation result in an almost certain war if external or fracturing of countries internally in any real scenario with civilians supporting militaries/militias on the various sides.
There is no reasonable assumption that unrestricted access to arms will stop a tyrant from destroying the country and tossing it into some form of civil war. The accompanying fact those people aren't trained, organized, or supported by logistics is the fundamental reason why they will fail to be effective. (I could also digress into the well organized militia and if we want to get all originalist about the interpretation but this has been unproductive enough)
What we are really discussing is whether gun regulations make sense. Extreme edge cases like your hypotheticals fail to make a convincing argument they are a negative for society, especially when contrasted against the harms lack of regulations has been shown to cause society.
my observation is that they were not reserve. They were patriotic citizens who voluntarily enlisted at the day of invasion. Gun ownership and hence training was much lower in Ukraine compared to US. And wiki says about the same: they were some semi-organized units before invasion, and during invasion 100k people volunteered and joined them, and they were absorbed by army.
> Actual untrained civilian forces with nothing but rifles
This is myth. Ukrainian war began in 2014 and all adequate Ukrainians learned books about war or have some training, and this was very respectful form of pastime.
Plus, many Ukrainians just served in military from 2014 consciously, this was great patriotic boom.
To be honest, I think, if Ukrainian science and education was reformed before war 2022, we would be much better prepared and would not lost additional territories. But unfortunately, we hear from our governments constant "don't critic us, or Putin will attack", and this is hard to broke circle.
My point is untrained, inexperienced and under-equipped civilians have little chance against a military.
Once you start giving them training, organizing and arming them with a logistics arm backing them the discussion completely changes.
Ukraine is an example of reserve/partially trained and backed forces being able to make a significant difference, but its also an example of how unorganized civilian resistance on its own has little to no impact on a modern military.
Mostly agree. Ukraine lost territories mostly before 2022, because population there was mostly anti-Ukrainian (what interest me, many refugees from Ukrainian east, become more pro-Ukrainian than people in center of country, where nearly not seen occupation).
I would be agree about non-trained people before 2014, but from 2014 we have even experience of self-defense, because in February 2014 government just not paid money to militia (soviet analogue for police), and they just avoid to maintain law.
2014 was not full-scale war in standard understanding, it was more like war against terrorists, but it was very serious, with many cases of terrorists used military weapons and military equipment.
Many people participated in self-defense after 2014 joined military, others participated in trainings, and yes, businesses and civilians supported these trainings, and government don't resisted.
So, on 2022, really many people on territory controlled by government have participated in trainings and even was experienced in real battles.
Mariupol, and other cities now occupied (after 2022), because there was anti-Ukrainian population and they believed will live better under Russia.
Also few border cities occupied (Kherson, Energodar, where Nuclear Power Plant placed), because Ukrainian military avoid to conduct serious city battles, to avoid huge civilian casualties.
And I must admit, Ukrainian military before approx Summer 2023, suffered from shortage of heavy weapons and air support, but now forces are nearly balanced. BTW what also interesting, huge part of Ukrainian weapons used on zero are now FPV drones made in Ukraine.
This is already happening. Canada is starting to accept Americans on refugee status. I have multiple US friends or acquaintances applying for Canadian Visas or Citizenship as either an active plan or as a contingency. A cousin of mine who is a Can/US immigration lawyer is absolutely swamped right now.
I think this idealism/naiveness is why you're now sliding further and further away from democracy. Older countries already had their democracies stress-tested, but seemingly this is the biggest test so far for the "checks and balances" in the US, and I feel like many other countries learned to always live with idea that democracy can slip away really quickly unless you always pay attention.
Americans, and actually young folks worldwide, don't value democracy anymore. There's an episode of Radiolab or This American Life that dives into the results of a worldwide survey.
It's deeply concerning. Essentially, people don't care about democracy because they've grown up in it.
It's one of those "My father rode a camel, I drive a land Rover, my son will drive a land Rover, his son will ride a camel" type stuff.
On top of that, Americans truly believe we are different. We don't have to follow the rules that other nations do because we have manifest destiny. This prevalent all throughout American culture. You'll notice it when you start to look for it. "You can count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else." Americans are stubborn.
Full franchise democracy in the US is arguably younger than living memory. So are a lot of things we take for granted as civil rights (and some of powers that be seem determined to roll those back).
But even assuming the premise, it’s not hard to see how generations who’ve enjoyed a privilege might be more likely to take it for granted than societies that have more recently gained it, and are within living memory of fascism in power (or in neighboring states).
Civil rights is orthogonal to democracy. Creating a democratic country like the U.S. is the real achievement. Most countries never come close to accomplishing that.
Fun fact: The US isn't counted as a "Full Democracy" by that index, so seems it's not as a great of an achievement as you seem to think. I'm looking forward to see how the ranking of the US changes in 2025, seems to be slipping downwards rather than upwards sadly.
> However, the political and structural problems that caused the US to be downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 (a downgrade that pre-dated the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in January 2017) persist. These include low levels of trust in political institutions and the media; institutional gridlock; excessive influence of lobbyists, interest groups and the mega-rich; sharp economic and social inequalities; and an absence of social consensus on core national values.
Sorry, but why exactly should we care about what some random score that some people invented and named Democracy Index says? It’s not like there is some universal agreement that maximizing the score in these people’s quiz is good or proper.
At least they provide justification and reasoning behind the numbers they assign, they're not throwing darts to see what to score things. Read through the report yourself, then come back if there are specific things you disagree with. Or maybe even better, find some better research and link it here.
Just saying "USA is the most democratic country in the world" feels like worse than at least trying to look at things objectively.
I didn’t say the U.S. was the most democratic country in the world—I wasn’t comparing the U.S. to Norway or Denmark. But the U.S. achieved in the 18th century something that Germany, France, Spain, etc., didn’t achieve until the mid-20th century. That’s an achievement.
And the lack of universal suffrage back in the day doesn’t diminish America’s achievement. India and Bangladesh and Iraq and many places have universal suffrage but they’re not as democratic as the U.S. was in 1789. Getting to that point is the 0 to 1 of democracy. Expanding the franchise from there is incremental development.
This index unironically puts countries that practice government censorship in the category of full democracies. Sorry but this isn't a democracy index - it's just a progressive index.
The founding of the US is absolutely a remarkable achievement. A group of colonies successfully broke from global imperial power to successfully establish a society heavily influenced by the best enlightenment thinking and classical civil philosophy. It's really something. Looking at some populist reactionary movements that happened in the early 19th century, one wonders if the outcome could have been as good as the US constitution even 30 years later.
That said:
* it existed in a historic and cultural context of states that had already made significant movements in that direction -- it was a big leap, but it wasn't simple 0-1. More like a 0.4 with a lot of the relevant ideals and institutions (elections, representation, courts, legislative bodies, executive authority, rule of law , etc) fairly well developed and demonstrated in various ways pulled together into a coherent 0.75 and woven in with enlightenment ideals as expressed in documents like the declaration of independence.
* There is at least a partial linear dependence between civil rights and democracy. The franchise relationship is where it's strongest. Democracy is effective, principled, & honored ballot access. Without any effective franchise what you have instead is an opinion poll. And mere fractional access to the franchise walks elections & representation down from "1" -- it is literally the coefficient you have to multiple a "1" democracy by in order to arrive at its effective democratic nature.
That's just the start, though. It's a bit like that old Churchill/Shaw/Twain/whoever story where Clever Guy™ is having a conversation with a woman:
“Would you sleep with a stranger if he paid you £1,000,000?”
“Yes.”
“And if he paid you £5?”
“£5? What do you think I am?”
“We’ve already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.”
Ha-ha! A country without a universal franchise has already established that some people don't get a democratic say, it's just haggling over who those people are. And that means it can haggle over whether you get to be one of those people. And even eventually over whether anyone gets to be one of those people, over whether it is democratic at all.
This generalizes to other rights. In order to have them guaranteed to anyone, they must be guaranteed to everyone. It's why constitutional guarantees tend to be features of constitutional representative democracies since the enlightenment, imperfect leap though the US is.
The big question is if the US (among others) can finish climbing the ladder when the political headwinds seem to be against "guaranteed to everyone."
> A country without a universal franchise has already established that some people don't get a democratic say, it's just haggling over who those people are. And that means it can haggle over whether you get to be one of those people. And even eventually over whether anyone gets to be one of those people, over whether it is democratic at all.
I don't think that inductive reasoning works. Every country excludes lots of people from the franchise. The U.S. has almost 100 million people who aren't eligible to vote, mostly young people and non-citizens. No country has a truly universal franchise. Under your reasoning, that's unstable--if we can take away the franchise from 17 year olds, we can take away the franchise from 18 year olds, etc.
Historically, the big democratic jumps were probably extending the franchise to prominent family heads voting, followed by landowning males.
"Young people" or other age limits are a dramatically distinctive case because the considerations involved are universal, cross-cutting and temporary. Age-based standards can't be used to create systematic outgroups. They bind and protect everyone equally in the ultimate and most practical sense because (a) everyone grows into enfranchisement (b) no one has it until they do. Which gives everyone an equal stake in what the specific age limit is too.
Contrast that with sex, religion, ethnicity, origin, asset ownership etc and the real question is why anyone would accept that they're truly comparable.
Citizenship may be the only truly stickier corner case. Largely because international relations will sometimes produce reasons to limit it more tightly or extend it more freely by broad categories such as national origin. But even here (a) most countries recognize that is often only one of several important judgements in a wise process (b) it's possible to review the equitability of citizenship qualifications: can they be met by anyone by way of objective assessment of investment in society and respect for acceptable participation?
I guess I'd ask you to define "democracy" first, as for me it would at least include that all citizens are allowed and realistically can vote. It took until 1920 for women to be able to vote, and it wasn't until 1965 every citizen realistically could vote. I don't think in that case it would come close to being the "oldest country with a continuously running democracy".
The world has many old countries. Most of the world’s most democratic states are constitutional monarchies, with centuries of history of not being a settler colony like the US.
How do you reconcile your comment with the fact that the US in the democracy index (from The Economist) is a flawed democracy, and considerably less democratic than a whole bunch of monarchies.
I don't think these ideas need to be reconciled, because there's no conflict between something having existed for a long time and it not continuing to exist. The Roman Republic had existed for over 450 years when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
Well we've only been a true "liberal democracy" for the past sixty years or so. Before that we were a de-facto apartheid state. Maybe at a stretch you could say 105 years if you go by the 19th amendment. And frankly i'm still skittish to call America pre-Trump a democracy with my full chest given the electoral college, completely bonkers division of the country into states, the senate, complete lack of a right to vote, our continual human rights abuses in terms of poverty and imprisonment/executions, etc etc.
I'm just saying there's literally dozens and dozens of countries with far more obvious realization of democratic ideals than we've ever managed to figure out, and at this point our age and blind devotion to dead assholes ("founding fathers") are major barriers to any sort of movement forward.
It's history: if a person doesn't grade on a curve, every page of the textbook looks the same (ie: people being jerks).
In order to deny that England, America, and France spearheaded the modern democratic system (albeit inspired by Ancient Greece), a person needs to explain who did?
> In order to deny that England, America, and France spearheaded the modern democratic system
That doesn't mean these governments make any political sense as a democracy today relative to the status quo. Hell, Britain is probably the only government on earth more dysfunctional than America's. At least France refreshed relatively recently; what the hell is Britain's excuse? Even North Korea and Eritrea seem to maintain more dignity internationally than any of the three of us and they barely even attempt to come across as "democratic".
I don't believe any of the founders believed they were creating a "true democracy," or even that it would be desirable. Read Federalist Number 10. The modern fetishism of democracy will lead bad places.
Yes, pretty much all claims of democracy come from the 20th century. I hardly think we were a more functional country at the time, though—it's only through the miracle of rampant exploitation we didn't all just immediately start killing each other. Thank god for the civil war to kick us to continue booting up a democracy.
One day we'll finish the job, I swear. Pinky-promise.
You'd have to do some contortions on the current definition of "democracy" for that to be true. For most of it's history, not everyone could vote, and if that's your bar then democracy in the US is... returning to it's roots.
We're sliding away from democracy because nobody seems to genuinely care about democracy anyone. People want a dictatorship that they agree with. It's not like DOGE was something Trump was hiding. On the left, you don't exactly see anyone applauding the Democrats for not packing the Supreme Court or the relative productivity of the 117th Congress either.
It's pretty wild. I'm someone who thinks that disasters and existential threats are seriously underrated by most people, but even still a decade ago I would have put the odds of a major US collapse in my lifetime at a low very number. Now though? I wouldn't even be surprised.
And in Cyperpunk 2077, the EU rearms and asserts is power, resulting in the euro becoming the world’s currency and the US being broken into multiple competing city-states and regional governments. Also everything is ruled by corporations. We’re not on the fun timeline :(
Phoenix and Las Vegas are already major metropolitan areas. With enough money invested in desalination (expensive, but cheaper than migrating a whole country) it's doubtful that any part of the US will be rendered uninhabitable.
Also Snow Crash, the US consisting of many large, corpo-owned city states (also being discussed in the current news with techbros trying to start up their own self-regulated cities).
Little touches like those names, and General Jim's Defense System, and Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates (featuring Elvis in its pantheon!) help make Stephenson's novels magical
I think "annexing" Canada seems a bit ludicrous still. I have no doubt Trump wants to expand, but I suspect such expansion would be deeply unpopular in a country proud, seemingly for the grace of simply not being the US (as, let's be honest, Canada is far more similar to the US than it is to any other country in north america).
Comments like yours sound eerily similar to Ukraine pre 2014 (and even 2022!). Back then the idea of a full-scale invasion was regarded as ludicrous as well.
Most countries in north america are more similar to each other than they are to the US or Canada, yes. That is precisely what I am saying. Canada is basically the colony that didn't bother.
I’m surprised all the countries the US is trying to bully aren’t considering moving to the Euro as the reserve currency (even China might go along with this). It would be so damaging for the US they might actually understand they have been benefiting from a win-win situation since the end of the Second World War.
Why does a reserve currency even need to exist? Bretton Woods was a result of the extraordinary circumstances of WW2. The move to the petrodollar was a good deal at the time letting the US play world police. Now it's clear that the US isn't a reliable security partner even if other countries wanted it. The oil producing nations would surely be happy to start selling in other currencies.
You're always going to have one currency that is used for most of international trade, because it's much cheaper for country A exporters and country B exporters to settle in one currency. 1-N systems are generally stabler than N-N systems.
If you are manufacturing complex things with complex supply chains (like a Boeing 787 or a Caterpillar power shovel), the imports being expensive bit also drives up the price of exports.
But regardless of what happens with trade balance, it will also make borrowing money much more expensive, which is not great for the US since our debt to GDP ratio is over 100%.
It also removes another non-military weapon from our toolkit.
They would have to unwind USD denominated investments, which make up a large chunk of many pension and sovereign wealth funds' portfolio. This can't be done overnight, but over a few years, definitely possible.
* The US is able to get very cheap loans, which enables the US to throw around money when necessary to do things that are important (emergency projects, economic stabilization, etc).
* The US has an extraordinary power to influence global politics due to their ability to control trade and banking systems.
* The US dollar is stable in part because of its status as a trade currency. And a stable currency is extremely important for citizens of a country.
> Because it enables us to run unsustainable deficits?
No, it it actually the primary reason that enables the US to run huge deficits sustainably. The currency is important enough to the world that giving a loan to the US is safer than giving one to another country whose currency is not as important.
But that sounds bad! Why should we be borrowing all this money from foreigners when we’re a rich country? What if I want the U.S. to build stuff, instead of moving money around and trying to “influence global politics.”
I’d also love a sane domestic politics that acknowledges that borrowing money from foreigners every year because we can’t square our spending with our taxing is a bad thing.
Taking out a loan and promising to repay it is a voluntary exchange of value that markets are comfortable with -- to issue debt is to play by the rules. Printing money directly is just an exercise in pissing on the users of that currency. People don't want to use currencies that do that. When people buy US debt, they are implicitly validating their trust in the currency to be paid back later.
It is related to the general definition of inflation.
Those with existing assets (including retired folks in the US) theoretically "lose" in this situation.
You can split the US and see inequality arise from printing: (1) US federal govt vs non-govt entities (2) US citizens with assets vs US citizens without assets, (4) people who received money first vs people who last bits of the "trickle down".
In various cases, certain people "win" and others "lose"
Because "borrowing" money 1.) recycles foreign dollars back into the US economy 2.) maintains foreign interest in accepting US dollars for goods and thus sustains US trade deficit 3.) prevents idle foreign US dollars that would other wise buying US assets that then inflates their price (eg real estate)
Okay, but then doesn’t that undermine your point about the importance of the US being the world’s reserve currency? What does that matter if most of our debt is to ourselves anyway?
Japan runs huge structural deficits and most is held by its own citizens.
Basically this is why times have been great for industries like finance and tech in the US, but sucked for manufacturing. In turn leading to wealth inequality and, dare we say the class struggle that seem to have reached a boiling point.
the american standard of living would collapse if america could not run deficits. in the very long term, like in 50 years, it might actually be better for america, but this generation of americans would be hurt big time.
Why? How? The US balanced the budget under Clinton. I was pretty young, but I don't remember the standard of living collapsing in the early 90s (quite the opposite in fact).
I mean, the CBO has a range of policies for fixing the federal deficit, most of which are pretty reasonable. I'm a fan of taxing the better off more (but I'm not a US citizen or taxpayer so that's easy for me to say).
Define "the better off?" I also agree with you in principle, but you're overlooking an important fact about American politics. The mainstream "left" in the U.S. is dominated by affluent professionals who hate paying taxes as much as any Reagan Republican. They pay lip service to the idea of "taxing the better off more," but by that they mean "billionaires." That's not a big enough tax base to raise the $1-2 trillion we would need to fix the deficit.
That's why you get a ridiculous situation where even the center-left party is promising not to raise taxes on people making under $400k/year. In reality, such a tax plan wouldn't even meaningfully raise taxes on people making $1 million a year. You can't solve the deficit by raising taxes if you're unwilling to tax 99.5% of the population.
Which countries are we currently invading? Regardless, in the 2023 budget Social security far outstrips defense, Medicare is just a shade higher, and Medicaid is not far behind. I'm entirely in favor of slimming down the US military industrial complex, but doing so isn't going to fix the deficit. You could 0 out the defense budget entirely and there would still be another trillion dollars of deficit to deal with.
Just listing the ones from my short life so far: Afganistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine & Lebanon (indirectly through massive support to Israel). I'm sure I missed a few since there are so many.
Being able to trade arbitrarily-devaluable IOUs from a future America for real goods today is a fantastic deal. Putting it in the kid terms that seem to be necessary for this dynamic of endless "questioning" - if Bobby can get ice cream treats from the corner store by giving them pieces of paper with his picture on them, that's pretty awesome for Bobby.
In the bigger picture - the reserve currency dynamic has allowed many things to grow detached from reality, and those things are in dire need of reform (eg the everything bubble). But that the destroy-America-first platform can include condemning the whole dynamic is itself just another symptom of that detachment and entitlement. Talk about wanting to kill the goose that lays golden eggs because you don't understand it, and don't want to spend any effort trying to understand it.
> In the bigger picture - the reserve currency dynamic has allowed many things to grow detached from reality, and those things are in dire need of reform (eg the everything bubble)
It seems like you don’t even disagree about the problem, you just think we should chip away at the symptoms instead of getting at root causes.
Free ice cream is bad! Bobby is going to not learn how to work for a living, and he’s going to get diabetes on top of that.
The root causes are stability and general wealth. Working to "fix" those is abjectly retarded.
If letting our industrial base wither is a problem, then spend some of the resources we get for merely exporting our currency on explicitly building it back up. Those IOU's can be traded for machine tools just as easily as disposable "fast fashion".
If the all-asset bubble is a problem, then stop letting the Federal Reserve drop interest rates to the point that wild or highly-leveraged speculation makes sense.
If the churn of cheap non-repairable throwaway crap is a problem, then ban it and/or mandate repairability outright.
If the proliferation of do-nothing middle managers in government/academic/industry is a problem, then figure out how to increase accountability, actual meritocracy, and general nimbleness. Turning the financial and authoritarian screws mostly hurts people who are focused on doing their jobs rather than focused on keeping them.
Humans are not wild animals. Free ice cream is an unequivocally good thing - it can always not be eaten. If little Bobby is eating unhealthy amounts of ice cream, then his parents should stop him from doing that independent of financial constraints.
If little Bobby is not developing a work ethic, then teach him to work hard directly and teach him how to save his money for larger goals. Certainly don't think that teaching him to live hand to mouth for ice cream treats is doing him some kind of service.
These are all problems of abundance. The destructionist movement seems to be based on wanting to revert to some idyllic version of the past with a struggle we understood. Whereas we really need to be solving the new problems we face.
As it stands, the destructionist approach is going to leave us without financial wealth or industrial wealth. Tariffs and allowing increased corporate externalities are basically the economic equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" .
Consider that this is the point of all the machinations. The US having the reserve currency is a liability in many ways and the direct reason why it's a consumer not producer economy.
Losing reserve status will be damaging to some parts of the american economy and create a boom in others.
Take a look at what current tariffs are across the world. The US isn't necessarily bullying as equalizing.
> Losing reserve status will be damaging to some parts of the american economy and create a boom in others.
Which parts will benefit from higher inflation?
The only reason the US has been spared from >20% inflation after engaging in what would be called "money printing" by American press when practiced by a 3rd world country is that there are deep pools of unused reserves slowing the overall velocity. Americans don't know how good they have it.
All domestic producers which produce products that cost less than imported competitors.
I agree with you. The question to be answered is what kind of economy do americans want to have going forward. It's great to be in America at present, but what happens if global relations continue to deteriorate and fracture?
> All domestic producers which produce products that cost less than imported competitors
Who will afford to buy their expensive products? Cheap imports are what is making minimum wage-earners circumstances bearable. Full-on reshoring is untenable without reforging the entire economy for higher salaries at the bottom. The whole system has feedback loops (higher wages -> higher product prices) which will cause pain for a long, long time before things stabilize. I don't think Americans have the stomach for it now, moreso with the threadbare social safety nets being shredded. Any politician or political group pushing for this will not survive long enough to see it through. The task is impossible for leaders incapable of considering second order effects, and beyond.
> Who will afford to buy their expensive products?
Fewer and fewer people. Yes, a shrinking of the consumer economy. It will work, just not like it has in the past. As I see it, you are absolutely correct in your assessment. Absent a proactive approach, the alternative (which I think we will live to see) will be watching the system break.
Perhaps a lame duck president rebalancing tariffs can slow the slide, but I think the end result will be the same.
I could be wrong, but think the German economy just broke last week when they blew the cap off their debt ceiling and kicked current day payments to future generations. Note that Germany protects its production with tariffs and VATs, the rough average I've found is 19-21%.
I think China is the one to watch. They have double the energy output of the US and are basically the production capital of the world for the foreseeable future unless something changes.
Germany doesn't protect its production with tariffs any more than, say, North Carolina does. There are no German tariffs, because Germany is part of European Union, which sets up common, shared tariff regime, and tariff-free goods movement within EU. Germany can lobby within EU to propose tariffs that it considers beneficial to it, just like North Carolina can in US, but if other EU members don't like it enough, it will not go through.
Second, how does VAT protect domestic production? VAT applies to both imported and domestically manufactured goods equally. VAT is really ultimately just a sales tax, just collected in a somewhat different way, and you pay the same sales tax regardless of where the good was produced.
Thank you for clarifying, it did not occur to me that member states paid VATs.
From outside the EU, the VAT is no different than a tariff. They are both taxes which inflate the cost to do business. From your example, I think it's fair to sum the state taxes into US tariffs for comparison.
You did send me down a research rabbit hole trying to better understand VAT. It's complex so I picked a car as a test product. As a comparison, I found that to import a car from Germany into the US it costs 2.5% of the cars value. North Carolina charges an additional 3% state tax on it for a grand total of 5.5%.
To import the same German car into France the cost is (cough) 20%.
To import an American car into France the same 20% is paid plus a 10% import fee for a total of 30%. I'm sure I'm glazing over many, many smaller charges/exemptions in these examples.
To answer your question about protection using the numbers above, companies outside the eu that want to compete at an equal price with an equivalent German car would need to do so with a product that is at least 10% cheaper.
To import the same German car into France the cost is (cough) 20%.
No, the cost to import is 0%. The 20% VAT you are talking about here applies equally, regardless of whether the car is imported, or (cough) French. Again, VAT is just a kind of sales tax, and you pay sales tax for all goods, imported and domestic.
To import an American car into France the same 20% is paid plus a 10% import fee for a total of 30%.
No. Importing an American car to EU is 10%, regardless of which country you import it to, and then it's 0% to move it between EU countries. As I repeatedly said, you pay 20% VAT on any car, imported or not. Often, you actually pay additional registration taxes on top of that. For example, to import a car to Poland, on top of 10% EU customs duty and 23% Polish VAT, on a car with engine over 2000cc, you'll pay additional 18.6% excise tax upon registration. So, a $25k Chevrolet Malibu imported from US will cost $38k to buy in Poland.
To answer your question about protection using the numbers above, companies outside the eu that want to compete at an equal price with an equivalent German car would need to do so with a product that is at least 10% cheaper.
Yes, EU does apply protectionist tariffs, but my point is that they are not German tariffs, they're EU-wide. Germany might benefit from these more than countries without car industries, but most large EU countries have substantial car industry. For example, Poland exports $40B of vehicles and vehicle parts each year.
> Losing reserve status will be damaging to some parts of the american economy and create a boom in others.
The primary effect of losing reserve currency status would be on the government's ability to borrow money. That's going to be a problem since US government debt to GDP ratio is >100%. We have no fiscal discipline now and neither party shows interest in making cuts or raising taxes. DOGE hasn't changed anything yet unfortunately, as daily government outflows are still roughly inline with where they were under Biden. Even if DOGE cut all discretionary spending (obviously impossible), we'd still have a budget deficit and massive existing debt burden.
If we lose reserve currency status, my guess is we'll go full Argentina with hyper inflation as the government prints money to pay debt and fund the government.
Oh, I think that's inevitable for the reasons you listed. DOGE would need to do way more to actually matter. Observing the current upheaval due to minimal cutting guarantees the future will be Argentina.
The upside is the debt decreases in value as the currency inflates. So there's that.
The dollar is appealing because you can buy US treasuries for however much you have of it (because America's debt appetite is almost unlimited). I don't think you do that with the Euro yet, holding it would be much more complicated because you couldn't stash large amounts of it as easily into bonds. Also, the EU might not like being a reserve currency, and can do what the swiss did when CHF was used abroad too much: negative interest rates.
The EU appetite for debt would grow if non-EU kept trying to buy it. It would force practical EU interest rates lower regardless of what the central banks do, allowing governments to choose to take on more debt-funded projects due to debt being cheap
The US dollar is just so, so, so incredibly ingrained into the global economy, it just ain't that simple. You can or course hold whatever else instead of USD, but then you'll find yourself just exchanging back and forth to/from USD.
It's a bit like coming up with a realistic scheme for a computer with no RAM, only hard drive and CPU caches.
You couldn’t switch overnight but it’s hard to imagine that if, say, the EU, Canada, etc. started shifting to euros that it wouldn’t have a significant effect over time. They have massive economy anchoring their currency and right now there seem to be a lot of countries who would be receptive to reducing their exposure to economic uncertainty here. The USD has been popular due to stability, but if we voluntarily give that up there isn’t some kind of magic moat.
China only has one currency, the renminbi or yuan. There are capital controls so it isn't fully traded on international markets. It has only been internationally traded since 2015, and I think there were various schemes before that.
I hadn't noticed that. I guess that is how they manage the capital controls. It sounds like they are supposed to be the same internally but that there is a spread. That seems like it could be a weakness.
Perhaps? I can't imagine that either could take the loss of production capacity the way the US has. The global inflation of product prices alone is staggering to consider.
I would suspect that some countries would definitely go to China due to the more sizable economy. But a large number of others - especially those with more democratic idealogies - would go with the Euro.
What a lot of commenters cheering this headline might not know is that there is only one single internal road connecting east and west canada which regularly closes. Most commercial routes go through the US. Don't believe me? Route Ottawa to Vancouver in google maps.
This move would amount to throwing rocks from a glass house.
Trans-Canada regularly closes? That's news to me.
The reason google maps goes through the US is that it's significantly shorter. We also don't haul things regularly across the country in the same way they do in the US, we use the trains, and the majority of things would go through ports. If you're on the eastern half of the country (which is the majority of the country) they use the great lakes.
The parent comment is likely referring to Highway 17, which is the only road connection between Manitoba and Ontario. A boulder once fell on this highway leading to its closure for a period of time.
I've seen this incident be the subject of hyperbolic clickbait articles and YouTube videos discussing the complete cutting off of East and West Canada (conveniently ignoring the realities articulated by your comment). Perhaps the parent comment is vaguely aware of incidents like this and is extrapolating to unfounded conclusions?
While you make a strong point, I'm not ready to cede it. Canada has winter storms that will close that road, albeit for shorter periods of time than the boulder situation. Being able to re-route through the US is critical during that time.
I don't really see how the Highway 17 situation is unique in the context of winter storms though. As per the comment above this, most transit of East and West goods occurs via other means, meaning the Highway 17 bottleneck is hardly some vital artery. A winter storm shutting down Highway 401 for example is much more economically chaotic, and has the practical impact of making travel through its corridor impractical (and in some circumstances just as impossible as if it were a single bottleneck). This scenario does periodically happen, and people manage just fine since the closures are expected to be short-lived.
So I don't buy the argument that Canada needs the US because of the threat of transit networks being completely cut off. I am much more amiable to the argument that reciprocal road tolls like this would be stupid because they'd increase the cost of goods for all of us (Canadians and Americans alike). As noted earlier, the fastest route between East and West is through the US due to geography. But or course things like this are stupid, and I doubt an argument as to why is required here. Maybe we should pull back and stop doing all this nonsense like arbitrary tariffs on close allied nations? Especially those who's explicit purpose as described by the elected head of state is to threaten the sovereignty of the other?
Your point is terrible though. How many people live in Kenora? 15,000? There's not a highway of trucks that are backed up from Kenora, anything that needs to be transported to Winnipeg will come from the West coast, and anything to Toronto will come straight down the St.Lawrence.
It's also not actually true there's only one. To get through northern Ontario, sure. But there's also the Yellowhead all the way from Winnipeg to Haida Gwai, and plenty of highways that connect to Hwy 2 from there.
Trans-Canada is a highway system, not a single road.
It's true that the stretch from Kenora to Sault Ste Marie is a vulnerability. It's tough terrain.
While the majority of the population and infrastructure is located close to the border with the U.S., Canada's East and West is not connected by a single internal road. People do not have to travel through the U.S. to get from one side of Canada to the other. People even have multiple options! I should know. I'm Canadian, and I've done the drive from Montreal to the Yukon and British Columbia.
My take is that you have never been to Canada, and if you have, it was only to a major city, like Toronto.
I'm not sure this is evidence of anything that you're claiming. Google routes based on criteria you choose, typically 'fastest' or 'most fuel efficient', that does nothing to prove that other routes don't exist.
> Don't believe me? Route Ottawa to Vancouver in google maps.
Default 44hr route goes through the states. If I click and drag the route up to go through winnipeg, it becomes a 47hr route that doesn't go through the states. I don't think this proves anything.
Listen Im all for smart reactions to dumb policies. This sounds like a dumb reaction to a dumb policy. Right now any article that does anything pro Canada anti US is going to get cheered in Canada because they are David against a mean Goliath (former best friend) situation.
Intelligent conversation and debate has no baring in this absolutely ridiculous situation.
This is truly one of the biggest unforced errors I have seen in a long time.
What intelligent options are you offering for Canada then? The US is going to tariffs us. They have stated that their aim is economic warfare focusing on collapsing our economy so that they may annex us.
It seems in the face of existential threats to our sovereignty, every option should be considered where we have advantage, and there are few.
It seems like a posturing thing that the party wants to do in order to get votes and it hurts individuals while not actually providing real value. Tariff goods etc fine but don't start arbitrarily charging some people road access - thats dumb policy idea which probably got it's idea from a not so smart politician.
You're using the pronoun "they" for the US. But this is by no means the case that there is a singular entity that has stated this policy.
Right now the US is in a political crisis. It has elected a weak, narcissistic man without coherent or sensible policy who is for the short term without serious opposition. (Mainly because its own neo-liberal elite has done a garbage job of running the country for the last 30 years and the population is desperate to try something else.) That man and the sycophants who travel with him is trying to use us as a whipping boy, a sacrificial victim, to rally his base.
In reality what is happening to Canadian workers via these tariffs are not in the interests of American workers, either. If they wake up they will eventually deal with Trump. Things will come to a head. The US will either destroy itself, or rescue itself. Unfortunately we're very much tied to this process because of geography.
Trump is not weak. He has more power then any other previous president and completely loyal party behind him. He does not have e to even worry about laws at all.
Plus, Trump will blame Biden, woke, women, democrats and especially Canada and EU for bad economy. And Trumps base will 100% believe him.
Powerful people "speak softly and carry a big stick". Trump spoke loudly, then swung the stick that was given to him and proved to the rest of the world that the stick was a lot smaller than they believed it was.
No, that was a movie gangster. Trump is a real one. The world is literally afraid. Foreign countries don't think he is weak. They think he is dangerous bully.
Au contraire. A strong leader does not need to rely on the kinds of tools Trump has been employing.
The rise of someone like Trump to power reflects I think a fragmentation of consensus and weakening of legitimacy of the government. He's a reality TV star, an entertainer. Yes he has what seems like a blank cheque, but it's likely to backfire on him eventually.
No, you are doing a value judgement. Or using strong as a term of approval.
I am using "strong" as powerful and "can push for what he wants". Trump is absolutely that. There is no meaningful opposition.
He has control over DOJ, fired everyone involved in suits against him, hired loyalists. He is destroying law company that sued him and everyone is taking notes. Less opposition in the future.
He breaks law, courts already judged he can and when they don't, he attacks judges. They will fall.
The opposition has security removed while fans are made to hate them.
He is not weak. He is powerful. And saying he is weak just makes him more powerful
It looks like the longer route adds about 1 hour and 30 minutes. So, truck drivers would compare the toll price, additional gas usage, and the schedule change to determine if paying is worthwhile, thus limiting how much the toll could effectively charge.
They also have the cost of maintaining the roads that the truck drivers are using. They might decide that a toll that brings that cost down is still a worthwhile toll even if it doesn't bring in money.
>> Should also toll the ‘shortcut’ between Detroit and Buffalo for foreign high-axle-weight vehicles like transport trucks and maybe some electric cars.
Nah, Canada ships too much trash to Michigan to go after one of those crossings. Yes it's weird that part of the US is used as another first world countries garbage dump. I've never looked in to why this is happens. Maybe we could put a tariff on trash?
I don't understand any of the justifications for a trade war with Canada. IIRC, Trump was fudging numbers by only including the "goods" part of "goods & services" so the deficit looked worse than it actually was (assuming a deficit is even bad in the first place)
It's also bewildering that Trump literally negotiated a trade deal in his first term with Mexico and Canada but is now saying we're getting screwed? Is this the "art of the deal" he always talks about?
The justification is Trump wants to do to Canada much what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Russia being allowed to take Ukraine legitimizes world powers engaging in conquest within their sphere. It's really that simple.
The talk about fentanyl, the supposed trade imbalance, and all the rest is just smoke and noise, because if he said that he wanted to raid Canada for resources and Lebensraum it might actually threaten his support.
He's not being subtle in this. He and his people have made constant comments that Canada doesn't work as a nation, that the border is artificial, and even explicitly that the tariffs would just go away if Canada became the 51st state. This is economic warfare driven by manifest destiny.
It is worse than this. Trump is just the spokesman for a younger group who is steering him. He doesn't actually know anything, he's just being fed punchlines and he's good at regurgitating them.
Is annexing Canada something the United States could even realistically achieve in the next four years?
Even if such an effort were attempted, any progress would likely be reversed by the next administration, assuming Democrats return to power.
Beyond that, the situation has been highly disruptive to Canada. I've witness movements like "Free Alberta" and "Alberta 51" have gained traction, while some people display pro-Trump stickers and wave U.S. flags. At the same time, others are booing the U.S. national anthem and removing American flags.
Overall, this growing division is unhealthy for Canada and has only deepened existing tensions.
To be honest, I've never seen Canadians this united. The polling numbers on "Canada joining US" dropped significantly between December and March (from a tiny number to an even smaller number). The number of Quebecois identifying as Canadian and pro-Canada also went up markedly.
Canada's market is 10% of the USA. Of course there's going to be an imbalance in trade. Trump doesn't understand this, and he thinks that it means that Canada (the government) is literally ripping off the USA.
Just like he doesn't understand that tariffs are paid by the buyer, not the government of the seller.
Finally, the current trade treaty between Canada-USA-Mexico was negotiated by Trump himself, and it replaced NAFTA. When he says it's a bad deal, why is nobody pointing out that he negotiated it? And famously said it was the best trade deal in history.
Republicans have an amazing ability to just ignore criticism. Their base is primed to also ignore any criticism. This makes it seem like everyone is bringing up a "non issue". It's wild. Thats part of why some issues seem to never gain any traction.
This is a major reason trump kicked a bunch of reporters out of the press pool. They challenged the narrative which doesn't let them ignore criticism.
My take is that part of this is the fact that the US far right took an interest in Canada after the "trucker" convoy protest here during COVID. Multiple Fox segments on what a terrible "communist" place Canada is. And so it's become a brainworm in Trump's head, among a bunch of others. And a useful demagogic point to distract or rile up his base with.
(Nevermind that DHS would have shot some of those protesters on site if the same kind of protests had occurred on the US side of the border. There's a reason the convoy was mobilized towards Ottawa and not to Washington, even though the vaccine requirements for truckers were actually a Biden regime initiative.)
That and a generally liberal government holding power directly on your border, in the same linguistic/cultural/economic mileux has potential domestic consequences / threat.
> It's also bewildering that Trump literally negotiated a trade deal in his first term with Mexico and Canada but is now saying we're getting screwed?
That's the really blatant part that is ignored/swept under the rug. He's made recent comments about the worst deal made, and dismissive comments about whoever made that deal. It would be funny if he was being ironic knowing that he was the one that made that deal, but we all know that's not why he says it. He says it because he knows his followers won't look up the details.
It's been considered, but it's not going to help much. A tiny percentage of Alaska's goods come through BC.
Instead, alternative markets and surcharges for potash, minerals, energy, counter tariffs and bans of American goods, expanding interprovincial trade, bans on government procurement from the US, bans on American propaganda and media should be sufficient. And re-armament.
Given that it's clear that America cannot ever again be trusted, (electing Trump once was an accident, twice is actively malicious), and given that it's likely compromised by Russia, it should be considered what it is - a dangerous, unstable, suicidal foreign adversary. A kind of North Korea, but with nuclear weapons.
> It's been considered, but it's not going to help much.
It may not help much in terms of revenue, but it may help with public perception. People spend a lot of time and energy in their car. Think about how much people talk about gas prices as a measure of whatever politicians they think are responsible for them.
Yeah, I'm not sure it won't be worse than you think. I think about 8% or so of goods to AK go by truck along the Al-Can. I suspect though there is a very good reason for that 8%.
You force that 8% on to ship or by air and I suspect whatever that cargo was is going to get a good deal pricier or a good deal late.
I'm kinda surprised they haven't been doing this all along, or at least something to recover revenue from US folks using their roads to travel between the US but not contributing much to the economy in between.
I wonder if they make enough in taxes off those to offset the road damage done by US drivers. It's easy to overlook some of that stuff if you have generally good relations with another country, but I'm sure they are huge costs that likely aren't offset by the economic increase from US drivers.
> The government of British Columbia filed legislation Thursday that would permit the province to levy tolls on vehicles between the Lower 48 and Alaska.
> The bill does not automatically impose fees on vehicles, but it “just gives BC the tools to do so down the road if Trump continues to escalate his threats towards BC and Canada,” according to a statement from the provincial Ministry of Transportation and Transit.
Totally off topic, but after reading some comments here I got curious and went to Google and typed "population" and autocomplete offered "of Canada" with an answer of 40.1 Million already there. Of course that's what I was going to type, but but but... I'm in the U.S. so there's no reason to know what country I was going to look for unless Google (or this MS browser) knew I was just reading this in another tab. Really kind of creepy.
It makes no sense as a single "state". We have two official languages for a reason, Quebec is Francophone and culturally distinct and very large. Other provinces (e.g. New Brunswick) are fully bilingual. We have three ocean coastlines, and a geographic mass which is the second largest country in the world. How you fit that all into one US "state" is preposterous and in fact that's probably one of the most inflammatory ignorant things about the whole way Trump speaks.
Not that we'd ever be "admitted" as a state should we be forced to grovel down to that point. We'd be some sort of occupied territory with no voting rights, but with 100% right for American capital to take our resources freely and dismantle our institutions.
basically, assuming the US continues as a democracy in the same way it is now, the GOP / Trump would loose terribly in the next election. Then I guess it probably becomes independent again.
Ah so mostly just absorbing structures as is. I was thinking there was some obscure annexation law or something from a long time ago I wasn't aware of.
> Making Canada one huge state would be stupid, even more than annexing Canada.
Given the numerous crazy possible pasts, presents, futures and conspiracies spoken of in this conversation alone, should any one of the potential outcomes vented here (they do seem to be ventings, indeed of a gaseous nature) should come true I will be amazed. Reminds me of an old joke...
Q. What is time for? "Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once".
Attributed to John Archibald Wheeler.
Yet reading here, one might conclude that all things bad are occurring as we speak!
How small-minded Trumpism is, just frustrated lashing out at things they refuse to understand.
Canada has been so close to the US we would lovingly joke about it being "the 51st state". Canada's cities are all pressed up against the US border precisely because it's so tightly economically integrated with the US. We share the world's longest undefended "border" for a reason.
The small minded neofascists think that someone being part of their sphere of influence must mean they can shit on them, tell them it's caviar, and they'll lap it up and come back for more. It's like they can't see that Canada (along with most of the rest of the world) was already strongly aligned with the US, in favor of some stupid imagined written on paper "ownership" direct-command relationship. They really can't get past the two bits in front of them and see larger constructive situations, at all.
(I'm of course talking about all the useful idiots cheering this on, and enabling it by not impeaching. The Manchurian Candidate himself is just following the directions of Russia/China supplied by his handlers directly into his cancerous ego.)
They are consistently on the wrong side of Chesterton's fence. Many of them were completely blind to politics until 2016 and have suddenly entered the chat with no context or background on what they're talking about. They assume, ignorantly, that everything that they can't immediately understand is a needless barrier erected for no reason and without context.
This is a very intentional worldview organized, funded, and distributed by - shocker! - powerful people who find themselves constrained by the law.
It's especially galling to me. I'm libertarian. If you communicated the Trump 2024 platform back in time to me in 2012, I'd be stoked that many of these issues were finally being talked about. I wanted to be having honest conversations about decentralizing federal power to the states, reducing monetary inflation and no longer taking being the world reserve currency for granted, dismantling the DEI-HR industrial complex, etc. But cheering to demolish the plane while you're still flying on it is just a special kind of stupid.
So really, it's the age-old political dynamic where frustrations with the current system are used as fuel for the next round of destruction, looting, and centralizing of power. It's why the Trump appointees are a menagerie of malcontents. Each has achieved popularity from criticizing the status quo on their own pet topic, but without constructive solutions. And now they don't need to actually agree on anything apart from the need to butcher our institutions.
~10% support overall. However, that's 21% of Conservative voters and 1-3% everyone else. So it's beyond fringe for everyone else, but maybe not as much for Conservatives.
Note that despite the headline, The Ipsos poll also says 80% polled would never vote for Canada to become part of the United States, while the Leger poll says 82% would not like Canada to become the 51st state. These are 3 of the standard pollsters that regularly get commissioned by TV and newspaper to do polls for them, and I have no reason to suspect that the polls are "cooked". 338 rates Angus Reid as B+, Ipsos as A, and Leger as A+.
There are lots of Canadians who have felt under attack from within their own country. The ruling regimes of Canada have over time implemented certain policies and ideological values that are a deviation from what was in place before. Not everyone shares those new values, and they feel like the real principles and political culture of Canada has been broken. They’re rather have change, and they see that in America’s rejection of progressive politics. What I’m saying is, to them, it’s not an invasion but a return to normal from a different kind of invasion. I don’t know if it is fringe or not - just explaining the perspective.
Culturally "left" wing and especially socially liberal policies are incredibly popular in Canada, enough so that there's enough of a block of an electorate that holds those opinions that two whole political parties can exist along the continuum and still one manages to hold majority power.
And our Conservatives have suffered electorally drastically when they've strayed too far into culture wars and socially conservative territory. If they're sick of being out of power, they should properly learn that lesson.
TLDR the "new values" you speak about are actually incredibly mainstream and not any kind of imposition from some radical regime.
Likewise with environmental issues. The Albertan oil industry is very vocal, and very powerful, but still the majority has strong concern about climate change enough that the plurality of voters are very much in favour of regulation of that sector -- even in Alberta -- much to the chagrin of the ruling political "regime" there.
> Culturally "left" wing and especially socially liberal policies are incredibly popular in Canada
I can see that being true for certain policies and topics. But what about at a more basic level? What do you think of Canada’s shift towards restricting or punishing speech on controversial topics, and giving agencies that regulatory power? Or the tactic of using the financial system to punish protesters? Or significantly reducing firearm rights? To me these seem like not just everyday policy changes but a rethink of basic Canadian law, and it does seem radical relative to what Canada was like not too long ago. I can see why many Canadians who support a more freedom oriented Canada would want to reject the new Canadian regimes or support being part of America, because it would give them back rights or culture or whatever they thought they had.
PS: it sounds like you live in Canada but are more progressive in your politics. I would be curious to have your opinion from that perspective but also hear what you think the strongest argument for the other side might be.
Frankly it feels to me like you and I aren't going to have many reference points in common. We're unlikely to share ideological / philosophical presuppositions and I gave up arguing with right-libertarians years ago. Ok but here comes my rant.
FWIW, I'm not in my mind a "progressive", I don't believe in progress. I'm not a "liberal" of any kind. I'm a socialist. And so I don't speak for liberals or what they might do.
And so re: guns I'm personally not in favour of firearms regulation the way the liberals have gone about it. I also grew up and live rural. So my perspective, again, isn't urban-liberal-gun-control.
Also the left-wing social democratic party here, the NDP, historically always had a much more moderate gun control policy than the Liberals, and I've supported that. Though this has shifted in the last decade.
But I also see the gun debate in the US as preposterous. Frankly the 2nd amendment as interpreted by the right in the US looks like idiocy to me and likely has its origins in the need/desire to suppress slave revolts, and reflects the US's explicitly slave-holding racist history.
In any case, you also sound like you're repeating things as facts you've found in right-libertarian forums. You're declaring things as trends or policies or tendencies which are at best situational related to things that happened during COVID. Or you have a thing about the way people talk about trans stuff, I dunno. And you're presenting this stuff from a certain rights-fundamentalist POV which I wouldn't agree with.
For one, I haven't seen any shift in Canada on "punishing speech" on "controversial" topics. I am aware that people like Jordan Peterson have spread misinformation on this topic, claiming persecution when there usually isn't any. It's also not worth my time to get down into the weeds with people like that to try to disprove every single of their claims.
But western democracies outside of the US have tended to interpret the concept of freedom of speech in a different manner than the US, and I think it's naive to expect a country with a British parliamentarian tradition to frame things like the US has.
"Freedom-oriented" is pretty coded, frankly. I don't recognize libertarians as "freedom oriented" -- I see them as market fundamentalists who will take the hard boot of corporate authority as legitimate while gutting shared governance. And they're also ridiculously naive -- I don't see a hard line between state and private ... they're one in the same authoritarian structure and the capitalist "free" market creates the repressive state to support itself, so imagining one without the other is incoherent and irrational. It's not "freedom oriented" at all.
We live in a commonwealth. In a shared society. And in that society if people park on my street for three weeks hitting their horn day and night, threatening people with assault, blocking ambulances and firetrucks... I want governance to intervene to fix this.
What do you expect to happen?
If people arrive in your capital city trying to overthrow a democratically elected government? That being their stated aim, and they refuse to leave til said government is "gone"... And then you see that they are receiving funding from foreign governments, corporations, and extremist organizations. You're still going to call them protesters? You still think freezing accounts is an unreasonable move? Did you object to the freezing of accounts of ISIS sympathisers and the like during the "war on terror"?
Nevermind that these people, what they experienced, is a fraction of the repression that left wing protesters got after a single evening of protest during the G20 in Toronto years ago. Because in Ottawa, the "convoy" protesters -- led by far right radicals -- had the sympathy of the police.
Look, as someone who comes from the radical left I can tell you now... the US government is far more draconian in suppression of protest and dissent than the Canadian state ever has been. It has a history of repression far more drastic going back since before the cold war.
It's just that so-called "freedom oriented" people aren't used to feeling the blunt edge of that. Because their politics fundamentally conforms to the authoritarian structure of actually-existing capitalism.
I will end this by pointing out that it's a cliche about Canada, for 150 years, that our motto is "Peace, Order, and Good Government" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace%2C_order%2C_and_good_gov...). Which differs starkly from how US has framed rights, historically around e.g. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", etc. This is just the commonwealth tradition.
There's nothing new about this outlook, which conservatives and liberals in Canada shared for decades. In fact, it has historically been Liberals who chipped away at the stricter and more uptight interpretations of this motto. So, no I don't actually see a degradation in the rights structure of Canadian democracy. Just more of the same.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Canadians certainly have differing opinions on politics however it's definitely a tiny minority that share your opinion on being happy if Canada became part of the USA.
It's all quite preposterous because many Canadians would probably have been fine in the past with some kind of currency union and trade and enhanced labour mobility if such a thing had been proposed during e.g. the Obama years.
At that point our currencies were often at par, the two governments were generally very friendly, and trade was going rather well. Canadians would probably welcome increased competition and services domestically.
Since then the US has become successively more dysfunctional. And while we have had our own issues and things have become problematic here in many ways (cough cough housing prices cough cough), the kind of insane disgusting culture war going on in the US is not something the majority has an appetite for.
In any case a full political union where Canada is absorbed makes no sense, it's so radically out there... the two political cultures are so far apart... and especially a "proposal" that reduces an entire continent spanning country with 3 oceans, 41 million people, two official languages... to a single US state. It's preposterous and inflammatory. "51st state" is not a serious idea, but it's become an idiotic battering ram destroying all civil discourse.
It seems like a completely misleading "fact check" to me when you actually read the Wikipedia article I linked.
> Those high tariffs kick in only after the US has hit a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year – and as the US dairy industry acknowledges, the US is not hitting its allowed zero-tariff maximum in any category of dairy product.
1. The USMCA was agreed upon in 2020, but it has largely not taken effect yet as ratification is scheduled for 2026. So the "Trump negotiated" claim is false right out of the gate. Any terms Trump negotiated have not even taken effect yet. We're still under the NAFTA terms.
2. These quotas are very low. The new increased quota scheduled for 2026 is 3.6%. What does this mean? It means for dairy products, the U.S. can only export as much dairy product into Canada until it reaches 3.6% of Canada's total dairy market share. After that, you see 160-300% tariffs applied to those dairy products.
3. The claim that the U.S. is not hitting its dairy tariff maximum is true, but again, this is misleading. The reason for this is that Canada is granting such a small portion of their dairy market to the U.S. (3.6%) that it isn't worthwhile for many U.S. dairy producers to even bother. This is by design. If you can't compete with the other 96.4% of the market without seeing your goods being slapped with up to 300% tariffs, why would you?
> In 2015, the three top dairy imports into Canada were specialty cheeses, milk protein concentrates (MPCs) and whey products. The largest suppliers into Canada were the United States, New Zealand, France and Italy.
That should tell you something? Dairy producers are only exporting specialized dairy products into Canada, including non U.S. ones.
4. The U.S. isn't the only country with a problem with Canada's tariffs. [0]
> Ten dairy industry organisations, including the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand (DCANZ) and other dairy industry leaders from the US, EU, Argentina, Australia, and Mexico, co-signed a letter to request that their governments intervene in ending Canada's "new and harmful" 'Special Milk Class 7' mechanism by potentially entering a complaint through the WTO's Dispute Settlement System (DSS), a process which could take several years to conclude.
This is just one of many disputes Canada's trading partners have had regarding Canada's protectionist tariff policies.
Continually hinting at invasion, of a much smaller neighbour, makes the tariffs not seem like a a trade issue but a test of sovereignty for said neighbour.
It's appropriate to take things seriously under these conditions.
If the US leadership hadn't started threatening Canada, there would almost certainly¹ have been a government open to cutting trade barriers by the end of the year. Canadians haven't been thrilled with some of our protected oligopolies, like groceries and telcos.
Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick specific products rather than look at tariff rates as a whole. What's your justification for that?
The World Bank's 2021 data shows that Canada has a 2.35% mean tariff rate weighted across all products, vs 1.47% for the United States.
The United States is an agricultural giant. Seems reasonable to start there?
But I think you're the one being intellectually dishonest by hiding behind these aggregates. The only reason why Canada's tariffs rates are so low is because no trading partner is actually paying their 160-300% tariffs. Canada has been the subject of numerous WTO disputes by numerous nations for their tariff policies, the United States is far from unique in this regard.
The United States has a trade deficit of 131.38% for dairy products with Canada. [0]
The United States dairy imports from Canada are far from zero, measured in the hundreds of millions.
> United States Imports from Canada of Dairy products, eggs, honey, edible products was US$324.96 Million during 2024, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade.
> Cheese and curd $87.54M 2024
> Buttermilk, yogurt, kephir, flavored or not $86.00M 2024
> Whey and milk products not specified elsewhere, flavored or not $55.76M 2024
> Birds' eggs, in the shell, fresh, preserved or cooked $43.37M 2024
> Honey, natural $27.48M 2024
> Milk and cream, not concentrated or sweetened $11.11M 2024
> Birds' eggs, not in shell and yolks, fresh, dry $8.29M 2024
> Butter and other fats and oils derived from milk $3.84M 2024
> Milk and cream, concentrated or sweetened $1.43M 2024
> Edible products of animal origin, not specified elsewhere $144.51K 2024
The US already has heavy agri subsidies, so it's a completely hypocritical comparison. And a pointless one, as you pointed out.
It's fascinating to watch the spread of official propaganda talking points through online media. This one started two-three weeks ago, presumably from Trump. People who knew nothing about the Canadian dairy market suddenly "experts"
Canada has its own agricultural subsidies, in fact they're almost double that of the U.S. [0]
> The OECD estimated the subsidy equivalent in 2012 (producer support estimate) in all Canadian agriculture represented 18% of the value of the industry with most of this amount going to supply managed sectors which represent only a percentage of Canadian agriculture. Critics say that this results in a "much higher effective subsidy" for supply-managed industries.
> According to Hall Findlay's 2012 study, in the European Union, the effective subsidies were 27%, with the United States at 10%, Australia (6%), New Zealand (1%), Brazil (6%), and China at 9%.
This is at best misleading, but basically disinformation. Here is a better explanation that is also specific to US/CAN trade under USMCA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZvDhayPHxs
The video you posted is itself misleading. For example, the video claims that if the United States were to implement reciprocal tariffs in the same form that Canada places upon the United States that Canada would not pay any tariffs either. Sure, technically if you don't export you won't pay any tariffs. But a reciprocal quota would be devastating for Canadian exports. To avoid equivalent quota tariffs Canada would need to reduce their exports to the U.S. by some 90%. That video completely sidesteps this reality and largely ignores the real effects these supply management quotas have on trade.
You may not be aware, but Alaska is not part of the blob of 48 contiguous states. If you want to get from the main body of the US to Alaska over land, you'll have to cross Canadian territory.
HN title says "... road access from USA to Alaska".
"Contiguous USA to Alaska" would be fine, but ~"USA to USA" is poorly-worded.
Not confusing, mind you. Just poorly-worded!
If you spend any time living in Hawaii or Alaska, and then move to the mainland, you will receive a shockingly high frequency of questions about what it's like to move to the US.
GP might have similar experiences.
For non-US readers, or for the geopolitically-unaware, Hawaii and Alaska became US territories in the late 1800s, but didn't become states until 1959.
Well if Trump is looking for a reason to invade, he’ll have one he can promote. I don’t agree with it it, but he can say, “they’re cutting us off from our people!” Then he’ll invade BC to form a contiguous border to all our territories.
Hell based on the representatives going to DC to discuss making Alberta a state, he’ll probably gin up even more support.
> The bill does not automatically impose fees on vehicles, but it “just gives BC the tools to do so down the road if Trump continues to escalate his threats towards BC and Canada,” according to a statement from the provincial Ministry of Transportation and Transit.
Also this
> The government of British Columbia filed legislation Thursday that would permit the province to levy tolls on vehicles between the Lower 48 and Alaska.
No one is yet doing anything and no one is cutting anyone off.
That’s not how Trump will spin this. He’s going to pander to some idea of right to move between territorial holdings. He can whip his base up to request an invasion. There are few republicans that are willing to stand up to Trump. That’s why we have the idiocy of impeachment against judges.
How do you think Canada should react to a neighboring country that not only unilaterally declared a trade war but also continues to threaten to annex them?
