Made You Blink!

Only thirty more shopping days until Halloween ...




What the newly rehashed NAFTA - now USMCA - deal says.


What it means:

The auto and energy industries were the big winners under the original trade deals and they remain our two leading exports today. However, their position in North America has diminished and will continue to shrink for the foreseeable future. Canada’s share of North American auto production peaked in the 1990s and since then has steadily eroded with no new auto plants built since 2007. The best we can do is fight a rearguard action that slows the inevitable decline of autos as production shifts to lower-cost jurisdictions in the U.S. and Mexico. This relegates Canada to producing more auto parts, where it remains competitive — although parts production is not as lucrative as auto assembly.

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Mussell said the most striking concession is the elimination of Class 7 milk products, including high-protein products like milk powders and baby formulas, which were long a sticking point in Canada-U.S. trade negotiations. The classification was introduced in March 2017 as a way for Canadian producers to keep input costs artificially low.

The deal also slaps a levy on any Canadian exports of Class 7 milk products over a certain threshold, effectively limiting companies’ access to foreign markets.

Hall Findlay said the Class 7 concessions, combined with wider access to the dairy market for U.S. firms, will restrict the ability of Canadian firms to compete globally.

“It’s a win-win for the Americans,” she said. “Were opening more of our domestic market, but we’re doing nothing to enhance our ability to expand into other global markets. At some point this does not make sense for Canada.”

(Sidebar: the same supply management board that rips off consumers but I digress ...)

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But beyond that, other bigger markets become more closed and more managed. We and the Mexicans are no longer free to export as many cars and parts to the U.S. as we want to. We now face the possibility of permanent quotas on steel and aluminum. And private investors lose the protection of Chapter 11, which let them challenge governments that unfairly favoured local investors. If you want foreign investment, as we do, reducing foreign investors’ rights is not a good way to get it.

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The Ford government in Ontario has also expressed concerns about dairy concessions, and the fact that steel & aluminum tariffs remain in place.

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Take the agreed exclusion of Canada from section 232 tariffs on autos. Canada would only fall foul of 25 per cent auto tariffs if passenger vehicle exports were to reach 2.6 million units a year – significantly above the 1.8 million units sold south of the border now. But no investor is going to build a new car plant in Canada knowing the prospect of crippling tariffs still exists, if that threshold is crossed.

A similar quantitative cap is likely to apply to steel and aluminum, if and when that tariff is removed – and it will prove a similar disincentive to investment.

“It’s the preservation of a 25 year-old status quo,” said James McIlroy, a trade consultant at McIlroy and McIlroy in Toronto. “This is a silent job killer and it’s not good for Canada.”

Essentially, Justin, the non-negotiator that he is, walked into the room with his cap in his hand and walked out without it.

Losing the auto sector entirely is something that even the ovine masses will notice when the next federal election rolls around. His ridiculous virtue-signalling demands notwithstanding, the new deal favours the US more than Canada and Mexico and stands to make things either just as expensive or more for the average citizen.

There is nothing win-win about this unless you are the US.



In other news ...



Now, we must elect our juries:

Peremptory challenges, which allow prosecutors and defence lawyers to reject jurors on sight, sparked widespread outrage following the Gerald Stanley/Coulten Boushie trial. Stanley’s defence team reportedly used the challenges to block Indigenous jurors.

Bill C-75 scraps peremptory challenges, but defence lawyers argue they frequently use them to get more jury diversity in cases where a person of colour has been charged. They also argue this measure is a knee-jerk reaction to the Stanley trial.

“The reality is this: there actually has been no objective research conducted by this government, or any other, on the use of peremptory challenges in the criminal justice system,” said Ottawa defence lawyer Solomon Friedman.

But China is Justin's favourite country:

Senior officials overseeing U.S. cyberintelligence expressed strong skepticism over Canada’s recent declaration that it possesses sufficient safeguards to address the risk of cyberespionage through devices made by Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.

Top officials from the cyberpolicy office of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, the FBI and the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Co-ordinator of Cyber Issues convened in Washington last week to discuss cyberthreats, according to Pierre Paul-Hus, the Conservative Party’s national-security critic, and Christopher Parsons, a research associate at the Munk School’s Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who both attended the meetings.

Mr. Paul-Hus said he asked the U.S. officials whether they agreed with Scott Jones, the head of Ottawa’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, who in testimony to a Commons Committee on Sept. 20 dismissed the need to follow the United States’ and Australia’s lead in barring Huawei from playing any role in the telecom networks that will connect the next generation of smartphones.

Mr. Jones told House of Commons standing committee on public safety and national security that the federal government has a robust system of testing facilities for Huawei equipment and software to prevent security breaches − one he suggested is superior to those of some of Canada’s allies.

Yes, about that:

Among the concerns, the Globe says, is that under Communist Party law, Chinese companies must work for their intelligence agencies if requested. There are worries Huawei equipment in sensitive parts of government networks could be used to steal data, or shut down communications.

I'm sure the oft-ignored cyber-watch dogs in the country can do battle with China any day of the week.




Why does this sound awfully familiar?:

Ri Yong-ho told the UN General Assembly the sanctions were deepening North Korean mistrust of the US.

Pyongyang has repeatedly appealed for UN and US sanctions to be lifted and has support from Russia and China.

But the Trump Administration has said that sanctions should stay in place until North Korea denuclearises.

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met at a landmark summit in June, which saw Mr Kim pledge to work towards nuclear disarmament. Tangible progress since then though has been scant. 

One may never know his motives:

The day after the attack, however, an unnamed former co-worker of Sharif’s told the CBC that he had expressed support for violent extremists years before. The person claimed that while the two worked together on a construction site in the summer of 2015, Sharif held “genocidal beliefs” and had “major issues with polytheists.” He also alleged Sharif talked about hating Shia Muslims and expressed support for the so-called Islamic State.

And, of course, mentally ill.




A system that could have prevented the deaths of hundreds in Indonesia was not installed:

An early warning system that might have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.

The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fibre-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in the region in 2004. But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just 1 billion rupiah ($69,000) to complete the project mean the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

It is too late for central Sulawesi, where walls of water up to 6 metres high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings.