Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
bbc.com352 points by tartoran 16 hours ago
352 points by tartoran 16 hours ago
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement...
Everything the current US administration has done has been an unmitigated disaster. Tariffs are taxes. Manufacturing is still declining, not returning and a man who could not run casinos successfully is not going to change that. His economic and foreign policy are dictated entirely based on who flatters him the most. Add to that continued environmental damage, domestic policy dictated by a regressive religious minority and a lack of interest in performing the duties of the position in favor of caring about only what it can be leveraged for. A failing state operating on grievances and stupidity. I get that statistics can be manipulated but... https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/... > Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report. > The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. > “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row. Manufacturing has never really declined in US, not in absolute terms. It's simply facing the same fate of agriculture: automation. Politicians want to sell to people they can bring back manufacturing jobs, but it's not like in china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand. It's all automated everywhere. Every founder I know in manufacturing is thankful for this admin. There is a ton of invested interest in not having tariffs or a pro-manufacturing industrial policy as a lot of people got rich shipping it overseas. For some reason this is all ignored because the president is a very unpopular person (for obvious reasons) What are they manufacturing? It must not involve any metal. Due to the tariffs on metals manufacturing costs have increased significantly for anyone using them. It must not involve electrical components either, or any of the other inputs the US cannot produce at the scale or price-point of other countries. As someone who grew up in a machine shop, still in manufacturing, and have my own hobby shop, its gross how much raw materials cost. I can get finished parts shipped from China cheaper then I can buy the raw material here in the US. I almost wept looking at over $500 for a simple 2x4 foot sheet of 1/2 inch thick 6061 aluminum. Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead. Perhaps their founder contacts are in the ragebait and clickbait manufacturing business. What’s your sample size? Unless it’s 30+ politically-neutral manufacturing founders, you’re citing anecdotal evidence. Then every founder you know has no idea how policy should be done. There’s a difference between having a pro manufacturing policy and applying tariffs and trade wars ad hoc based on how you feel slighted and giving no warning to any businesses nor having any sort of stability to your plans for any sort of appreciable time in the future. Also, the whole announced news on Friday changed it on the next week so that whoever is betting on the stock market can make some money also is not great for a pro manufacturing base. It’s all a grift and your buddies are dupes to believe in it. > Every founder I know in manufacturing is thankful for this admin Are they MAGA? Everybody I know in construction, especially larger scale, is losing their minds because nobody can bid on jobs without risking loosing their shirts. Tariffs could hit somewhere between the bid and the time the job starts and could increase material costs by 150-200% and could cause more delays. It's been like this for 2 years or so and they're losing their minds. Tariffs have been hell for marina renovation work I'm associated with. Things paid for well in advance have exploded way past their budgets thanks to all the raw material costing so much more. Thanks to Trump. Even the MAGA folks I have to deal with are bitter about it. They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect. I think they'd still vote for Trump though. I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Really? I know people in the hardware space for whom the tariffs have been an unmitigated disaster. They had to go through a lot to not lose their customer base outside the US. I have seen many US-people with businesses swearing about that admin, especially the smaller ones. Uh, I'm in manufacturing in the US and EU. Can confirm the tariffs are a total disaster. It's increasingly difficult and expensive to ship raw materials and components to the US! "Just find US suppliers." It's not that simple. There are a lot of things that simply aren't made in the US. (The majority of tool steels, all titanium alloys, everything made of tungsten, and I could go on all day.) Besides, dealing with the Chinese is like life on easy mode. Handshake agreements are always respected. In most cases service and support are 24/7. Importantly for QoL, they never make you fill out a dozen forms, pay for a D&B report, "let's get on a Zoom call to touch base," and all of that nonsense. American B2B firms aren't really into customer service, as a general rule, I think. Until that handshake deal isn't respected despite you doing everything right i.e. know supplier, know broker. it's remarkable how much presentation can distort ppls judgment .. they'll actually admire narcissistic behaviour as long as its wrapped in a polished and presentable package (the ex PM of cananda) and yet label the less polished, ill mannered person with common sense as the narcissist .. >His economic and foreign policy are dictated entirely based on who flatters him the most Are you sure, it seems mostly based on illegal share trading. Murdering foreigners and sending soldiers to die is a lever Trump/his handlers keep pulling because they 'win' $millions every time. One could call facilitators of his self-enrichment and abuse of office "flatterers". Hope the voters remember this for the next couple election cycles. I'm not sure how old you are, but shortly after Obama took office in 2009 there was quite a bit of reporting claiming that the Bush administration had been so disastrous and young people had been so thoroughly poisoned by Republican policies, that it would likely be a generation before the Republicans had the chance to win the presidency again. Remember, Bush left office in the depths of the Great Recession. Instead, it took less than 8 years for us to get MAGA. They didn't in the last couple. Those elections went 49% vs 51%. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the next couple. They feign surprise, but it isn't like it was a mystery as to what he was going to do. He campaigned on everything he is doing. The last few elections have been the most active in history, especially in 2020 essentially everyone voted. Which should inform the credibility of anyone declaring one issue or another would definitely motivate voters to come out and vote for whatever policy they want to say is a winner: the last two elections, despite enormous new voter activation, the split in preference followed polling trends anyway. The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>. They won't. I have industrial clients who are financially eating shit from all this and they have posters of Trump hanging on their office wall while extolling his antics. The workers think the same way. We're boned unless these morons wake up (they won't.) The vast majority of voters don’t ever understand why they’re being screwed by economic policies, they just know when they are. And they’re too dumb to remember who caused the problems and just blame the other team no matter what. This is difficult even for experts paying attention because economics is cyclical and policies can take time to show their effects Voters don’t go and actually look at the data themselves. They rely on pundits and the news to tell them the salient points. The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash. This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media. "But...but...but what about gender equity in high-school sports?" - Voters Social issues are just as important to voters as the economy and attacking them for caring about this issue, one that very clearly the people have asserted their opinion on, is dumb. If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections. It's Republicans who are dying on the hill of unpopular policies. Nobody cares about men in womens sports to the point of dying from diarrhea or closing shop. If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections. I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well. I don't think it's helpful to suggest that "both sides" are equal in American politics, but I do think you have to be a least a little understanding that the democrats aren't an attractive alternative to most Americans. I'm afraid a pretty large minority of Americans have landed in the lose-lose position of "if i can't make it better, i might as well make it worse faster". My Bangladeshi immigrant mom and her sister are complaining on Facebook that they were "good Democrats" until "Obama, AOC, and Bernie" brought their "radicalism." Democrats wave away this stuff as "performative," but people feel it viscerally and it subdivides and splits the coalition. Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are. Anyone who says Obama, of all people, was radical clearly listens to too much Fox News and conservative talk radio (which is an entirely different problem). The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin. My mom watches CNN and liked Obama as President. But my parsing of her comment—I haven’t talked to her about it, just saw it pop up when my aunt responded “me too, sister”—is that she views Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging. This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan. > Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging. Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years. I get that you are trying to state facts but to the average person they are all Democrats so it don't matter. > they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are. You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful. Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe. According to polls democrats are the worse side, they are the most unpopular party maybe in history and are at an extreme low in terms of their approval rating. Trump is almost 20% more popular than the Democratic Party and they are polling below AI and ICE, they are right around the same approval rating with the American people as Iran. And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular. Part of that is because progressives also hate the Democrats for being hypocritical and/or ineffective. Doesn't mean they're going to vote for an R, though. Your comment is spot on. Don't know why you're being junked. -Independent.. This is where the democrats need to smarten up. They should be hammering “tax and spend” Trump, 24x7. The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else. Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks. If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files” I'd argue more largely that the right is a loose coalition of people with differing goals...whether it's conservatism, lower taxes, anti immigration, religious right, etc. I'm reminded how my econ professor would say that hardened bootleggers and hardcore Christians would pretend to be friends just long enough to vote to keep alcohol illegal. I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain. The current US right is a hodgepodge in terms of what they love, but for Trump's victories was unified by who they hate. The Republican base doesn’t give a shit about “tax and spend” either. For all their hand-wringing about deficit spending, Republican administrations have for decades been the party of excessive spending and ballooning deficits. They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back. Huh? Check out the Twitter feeds of your favorite Republican or Republican-aligned personalities. It's racial or nationalistic dog whistles all day every day. The Democrats are not smartening up. The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc. The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class. Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating DSA are democrats. clearly they are smartening up Smartening up in the sense of winning elections? Or serving their constituents? They have been winning elections. Trump and MAGA also won elections. My point is winning with a shitty plan is not smartening up, unless your only goal is winning the current election. The Republicans committed suicide, we saw it live. DSA are not "democrats". DSA's agenda is socialism via the democratic process (vs. with a violent revolution, the way we typically get there). There is nothing between their agenda and principles and those of the traditional Democrats. The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process. Socialism (to contrast with social-democrats like some European nations which are primarily democracies, free markets, with a social component) is not a democracy those are opposing ideas. > The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process. That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself. You can't just go and change everything. There are always unexpected consequences. The US process is far from ideal. I agree with that. I'm not American and looking from the outside there's a lot of head scratching I can do. But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years. You can't just take that and throw it in the garbage and replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo. Seriously. It doesn't work. You can't say let's take Germany's process and apply it in the US. It won't work. We should know better. There is a delicate balance of power (arguably already somewhat disrupted) and there is a culture and a history. That's why we also can't just bring "democracy" to non-democratic countries that easily. The DSA are saying let's break everything and then figure it out. It won't work. We need responsible adults not revolutionaries to fix things with care. > replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo. Isn't it clear to you that you're misrepresenting DSA's position? >But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years. Except form the million of black people living in the south of the US. For them, the USA is a democracy only since 1964. And if you argue "yes but it got better", the Republicans are making everything to get back to before 1964. Incidentally, your "we can't let workers decide" sounds a lot like "we can't let negroes vote" or "we can't let women vote". And is as much FUD. This 100%. I think most of us want a moderate Democrat. I hope populism dies with Trump/MAGA in the coming years. We don’t need to match them with our own distasteful populism. How is DSA populist? The United States is a country famously opposed to socialist, I don't think they could've picked a more controversial position.
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