Your middle-of-the-week burst of sunshine ...
Carney is not here for Canada:
Those could include hard-to-solve trade irritants, bold foreign policy moves, and the larger continental framework for a potential deal.
In his latest move, U.S. President Donald Trump raised the baseline tariff rate on Canada from 25 percent to 35 percent on July 31, noting how Canada had imposed counter-measures on the United States and is allegedly not doing enough to counter the flow of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid causing deaths on both sides of the border.The hike came after Trump secured a series of trade deals with close allies such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea. Trump has kept a general tariff rate between 10 and 15 percent for these countries and the EU, which have in turn in most cases pledged to make hundreds of billions in investments in the United States while also opening their markets. ...Trump showing limited flexibility on steel and aluminum is potentially one of the reasons Canada hasn’t been able to secure a deal so far. The industry is highly integrated across the border and the impacts of U.S. tariffs have particularly roiled the Canadian sector, while leading to increased prices south of the border.
This integration is likely a card Ottawa can play to set it apart from other trade partners as it negotiates with Washington. But with Trump’s stated goal of bringing back manufacturing to the United States, as a matter of national security, Canada might have to make concessions in other areas to protect its steel and aluminum sectors.
Hood-winking people with food:
The economic outcome is predictable. Margins in grocery retail are razor-thin, often between 2 and 4%. Retailers cannot absorb steep cost increases without passing them along to consumers, and in some cases, they simply drop the product altogether. Sobeys appears to be the first major grocer to delist Bick’s, though it is unlikely to be the last. Counter-tariffs, often framed as a patriotic defence of domestic producers, can instead reduce competition, shrink consumer choice, and push retail prices higher. In practice, Sobeys has shifted shelf space to its own private-label pickles, which are often imported and carry higher profit margins. Ironically, the result is a product category that is now even less Canadian.
The policy flaw is glaring. Canada is effectively taxing products made with Canadian cucumbers and Canadian lids solely because they were processed across the border. This is not a protection strategy — it is an economic own goal. It illustrates how tariff structures can penalize integrated North American supply chains and undermine the competitiveness of Canadian companies.
Some may argue that TreeHouse should reopen a plant in Canada, but the economics of food processing make little sense for the company to shift production north. In reality, they may simply abandon the Canadian market altogether — a withdrawal that would further reduce competition and highlight Canada’s weaker position compared to the United States, a market of nearly 400 million affluent consumers.
Elbows up, everybody!
There will be no cap on residents in this country, one that is not good enough to be a citizen of:
Immigration levels in the first third of the year outpaced Prime Minister Mark Carney promised cap on quotas. Figures released by the Department of Immigration for the first 120 days set a pace that would see nearly 400,000 new landed immigrants in 2025: “The system isn’t working.”
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More than a year after announcing a new immigration stream that would have granted permanent residency to low-wage workers already in Canada, the federal government has yet to move ahead on formally launching the program – suggesting that Ottawa could be backing away from the plan altogether.
Hardly.
A petition sponsored by a Liberal MP is reviving calls for a fresh look at whether veterans of the Afghanistan conflict should be reconsidered for Canada’s top military honour.
Liberal MP Pauline Rochefort is sponsoring a new petition in Parliament. It calls for the creation of an “Independent Military Honours Review Board to review Afghanistan veterans’ cases” to determine whether any of them meet the bar for the Victoria Cross.
The federal government says the Victoria Cross is reserved for soldiers who demonstrate “the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy.”
What the author of this piece is really saying is that freedom is terribly gauche and government over-reach is what the children of Canada need.
And by children, I mean adults:
Nova Scotians are protecting their province from fire as they protected it from disease, drawing on a communitarian political tradition and high levels of social trust.
The opposition to these measures is mostly coming from points west, parts of Canada with a more libertarian political culture. A ban on entering the woods would likely not work in Western Canada, because so many people would see it as an infringement on their personal liberty. They are fuming even though this doesn’t affect them.
(Sidebar: au contraire, sir. Precedent affects everyone, even those who see right through this absurdist claim that banning a walk in the woods instead of proper forest management is the way to go.)
Their libertarianism is a force for individual freedom, at the glorious heart of our constitutional tradition, but, as the Americans say, the constitution is not a suicide pact. In emergencies, the state must protect public health, and wildfire is a pressing risk to Canadians’ health.
(Sidebar: ah, playing the anti-American card! How novel!)
The world has entered the pyrocene era, where climate-induced wildfires are choking our lungs, destroying communities and turning our boreal forest into a source of emissions. The individualists who object to public safety measures to reduce the risk are the same people who complain loudest when governments try to reduce the emissions that have put us in this situation.
They are not going to win this argument in Nova Scotia.
They certainly won't.
But ... special ... :
Parks Canada yesterday without comment deleted all reference to “genocide” in its latest historic site designation of an Indian Residential School. The agency as recently as last February 12 called the schools “cultural genocide.”
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For example, until 1920, parents had to sign an application form for their children’s admission to these schools. When school attendance became mandatory in 1920, parents could still send their children to Indigenous Day Schools on their home reserves, if these were locally available, or to nearby provincial public schools. If residential school attendance was the sole option, force was not used to compel students to attend unless they were orphans or living in neglectful or abusive households.
Of the minority of indigenous students who attended a residential school — one-third of all eligible students — Robert MacBain points out:
“Indeed, the testimony of hundreds of former students and the unspeakable horrors they described at the TRC hearings would break a heart of stone. But that’s not the whole story of Indian residential schools in Canada, many of which provided sanctuary for thousands of Aboriginal children from horrific circumstances in their profoundly dysfunctional home communities, and helped them integrate into the mainstream of Canadian life. In light of these facts, there is no reasonable basis upon which to charge Macdonald or anyone else with the crime of genocide.”
The single most telling fact disputing the genocide accusation is the absence of a single substantiated case of an Indian Residential School student murdered at any of the boarding schools during the 113 years of their operation, 1883-1996. So much for the genocidal act of “killing members of the group.”
We don't have to trade with China:
China announced a 75.8 per cent preliminary tariff on Canadian canola on Tuesday, following an anti-dumping investigation launched last year in response to Canada’s tax on Chinese electric vehicles.
China’s Ministry of Commerce published the details of the plan on Tuesday, claiming the “dumping” of Canadian canola into the Chinese market is hurting its domestic canola oil market.
The Canola Council of Canada says “anti-dumping investigations are initiated when a country suspects a product is being imported at a lower price than it is sold for in the domestic country in which it is produced. ...
The Prime Minister’s Office deferred comment on the canola tariffs to the minister of international trade, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Canada imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in October 2024, a move that is to be reviewed within one year.
If China can't get to the US (SEE: Trump, honey badger), then it will get to the weakest link, Canada.
Canada has kind of burned its bridges at the moment thanks to the non-leadership of the past and current governments who care not a whit how in the tank this country goes. Otherwise, we could absorb that particular loss and move on to another trading partner.
But no.
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Canada must “source domestically for federal contracts,” Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound said yesterday after touring a British Columbia shipyard. He made no mention of outsourcing shipyard jobs to China through a billion-dollar contract currently under investigation by the Commons transport committee: ‘We’re creating a prosperous economy.’
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The Belt and Road program has allowed China to gain foothold into other countries and virtually take them over.
The toxic spill occurred on February 18 at one of many copper mines in Zambia owned by Chinese companies. These Chinese mines have frequently been cited for poor safety and environmental standards plus abusive labor practices, but the Zambian government takes little action against them.
Critics say the government is reluctant to penalize Chinese mine operators because Zambia is over $4 billion in debt to Chinese banks. Sino Metals Leach Zambia is a division of a Chinese state-owned enterprise called the China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group.
The February incident involved the collapse of a dam holding extremely toxic “tailings” from the copper mining operation. Some 50 million liters of toxic slurry poured into a stream that led to the Kafue River, a major source of water for plants, fish, animals, and humans in the area. Environmentalists called it a “disaster of catastrophic consequences” and feared the toxins would effectively destroy the Kafue River.
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The Times, citing pro-regime “experts,” praised leftist South Korean President Lee Jae-myung for having “sent positive signals of friendliness toward China” and the alleged police investigation as a vote of confidence from the Lee government towards the Communist Party. The South Korean reports do not indicate that Lee is directly involved in the investigation in any way, though he recently called for government measures to silence alleged “fake news” on YouTube, which some polls indicate as many as half of South Koreans use to gather news.
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China didn't interfere with the elections but it did.
It also didn't break the laws even though it interfered or didn't.
Although the federal foreign interference task force said China had likely manipulated the 2019 Liberal nomination race in a Toronto-area riding, Canada’s election watchdog says she found no evidence federal election laws were broken.
The revelation is buried in the Commissioner of Canada Elections’ latest annual report published last week.
In the report, Commissioner Caroline Simard says she looked into two instances of alleged foreign interference that were discussed at length during a public inquiry. In both cases she found “either no evidence or not enough evidence” to support a breach of the Canada Elections Act.
Hogue’s initial report concluded that while foreign interference did take place during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, it did not affect the outcome or the overall result of those elections.
So which is it? Interference or not?
Both Hogue and Simard know there is interference from parties related to China but will never admit how rigged everything was.
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