How a Canadian is Born, 25 seconds clip:
Cindy Blackstock @cblackst:
I have not heard Trump explain why no tarriffs were threatened against Russia.
@charlieangus104.bsky.social Feb 5, 2025:
This is an article that all Canadian and American friends must read.
Donald Trump has broken a bond between the nations.
Aided by quislings Danielle Smith and Steve Harper’s PeePee Puppet From here on in, everything is changed.
@jordantcarlson.bsky.social:
I was not expecting to read this in a Postmedia paper, of all places:
Opinion: Farewell to my American friends. It’s over. Pete McMartin: Where there was once admiration, there is now a firm and angry resolve. Schoolyard bullies don’t want to be buddies. They want your lunch by Pete McMartin, Feb 03, 2025, Vancouver Sun
Goodbye, America.
It’s been nice knowing you.
Goodbye New York, and your Jewish delicatessens with corned beef sandwiches stacked as high as your skyline.Better can be enjoyed in Montreal, Quebec!
Goodbye Detroit, my boyhood neighbour, and so long to Tiger Stadium, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Motown.
Goodbye Bellingham, Seattle and Portland — how I’ll miss my Cascadian cousins with our shared Pacific sensibilities. And while I’m at it, goodbye to the cheap gas and shoreline cottages of Point Roberts, America’s appendix dangling just below the border not a mile from me. What was once so close has never been so far.
Goodbye Stag Leap’s Pinot Noir, Maker’s Mark bourbon, and Hebrew National hotdogs. My tastebuds mourn.
Goodbye to the cowards on both sides of the border who have demonstrated that whatever fidelity to democratic ideals they profess to have extends only so far as their self-interest. They should get a real job, say, in a chain gang.
Goodbye to anyone, again on both sides of the border, who bends the knee to Trump, rather than standing up to him, as any self-respecting person would and should, and telling him to piss off. Goodbye to a culture that demands we bend the knee.
Goodbye languid vacations in Maui and Palm Springs. My next winter vacation will be in a sunny climate other than any America can offer, and preferably in a country the U.S. has treated as disdainfully as mine. I’ll have more than a few to pick from.
Most painful of all, goodbye to my American friends, some of whom I have known all my life, and some of whom I’ve collected along the way. I can cross your border but no longer wish to: Your Narcissist-in-Chief has decreed that my countrymen and I have the choice of becoming destitute, vassals or enemies. I’m choosing the latter.
Meanwhile, your silence and the silence of all Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you.
Of the hundreds of Americans I helped keep frac’ing out, and or shared my decades of frac’ing and gas migration research with, only two sent me condolences about Trump threatening my country and fellow Canadians. Some became angry at me when I expressed my horror to them about it. I find that ghastly. Also, I refuse to live under Nazi rule.
Goodbye to the image of America I once held dear — the America of Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley and James Brown, of George Gershwin and Aaron Copeland, of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, of Martin Luther King and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Goodbye to what I envied as the country that prided itself on encouraging unparalleled innovation in science, art and business. Any good that remains of it has been overshadowed by rapacity, cheap commercialism and egotism.
Goodbye to that ever-present sense of inferiority I once had when considering the relationship between Canada and America. What doubt I had of our own greatness is gone, and in its place is a certitude that Canada is superior to the U.S. in all the ways that matter. I look across the border now and see a violent, burgeoning autocracy now ever on the edge of civil war, and a population that is either cheering on this new brutalism or quaking in fear from it.
Goodbye to tepid patriotism. If Trump has done us any favour, it is awakening us to the fact that we can no longer take Canada’s existence for granted, that the bad actors in the world have begun to look covetously upon our improbably vast land that is laden with riches, that they want those riches and that niceness as a national character is not enough to dissuade them from taking them. Schoolyard bullies don’t want to be buddies. They want your lunch.
And after a long era of living a geopolitical life of convenient economic and military subservience, we’ve awakened to the fact that we are going to have to relearn our independence and fight any way we can to keep it.
Goodbye to living under the American nuclear umbrella, or any form of American hegemony. Goodbye to negotiation, wheedling, genuflecting or feel-good hands-across-the-border fairy tales. The American government has shown that established alliances mean nothing to it now, and so cannot be trusted. In Trump’s new world order, all the old verities are off the table, so let us make new ones.
Do levy tariffs, as we have promised to do, and do grit our way through the inevitable economic pain that will come. Re-arm as if we were on a war footing, because we are on a war footing. Conduct the mother of all public relation campaigns that let Americans know how badly they are perceived in the world, that they’ve gone from the shining city on the hill to just another empire with the same tired territorial ambitions as Russia or China. Do anything to impress upon Americans that their government is without real friends or allies, and that they, in essence, are alone.
So, goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore. I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.
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Trudeau tells business, labour leaders at economic summit Trump’s 51st state threat ‘is a real thing’, PM meeting business leaders, unions to discuss fortifying Canada’s trade in face of Trump’s tariff threat by Peter Zimonjic, CBC News, Feb 07, 2025
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told business leaders at the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit in Toronto that U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to annex Canada “is a real thing.”
“Mr. Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing. In my conversations with him on…,” Trudeau said, before the microphone cut out.
The prime minister made the remarks to business leaders after delivering an opening address to the summit Friday morning outlining the key issues facing the country when it comes Canada’s trading relationship with the U.S.
After the opening address, media were ushered out of the room, when a microphone that was left on picked up on what was only meant to be heard behind closed doors.
Following his public remarks at the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told business and labour leaders that U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments about making Canada the 51st state are ‘a real thing.’ Trudeau’s comments were heard over the loudspeakers.
Asked about the comments, Labour Minister and government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said Canada may have different regions and political difference, but the country “is united on one thing: its pride in being Canadian.”
“Canada is free, Canada is sovereign, Canada will choose its own destiny, thank you very much. But Canada is forever — so Canada will make its choices,” he said.
“We will always, always, always, stand up for this country, for its people and for the ability to make our choices for ourselves.”
In Trudeau’s opening address to the summit, he said Canada needs both a tactical response to Trump’s tariff threats in the short term, as well as a strategy for dealing with a less co-operative United States in the long term.
“We are in a moment, a moment that we have to meet for Canadians, to see not just how we get through this particular challenge over the next 30 days or few months, but how we get through and thrive and grow stronger over the next four years, and into what may be a more challenging long-term political situation with the United States,” Trudeau said.
In order to have success on both of those fronts, Trudeau said that attendees of the summit will be discussing how to do three key things: deliver an internal free-trade deal, ensure Canada-U.S. trade works for both countries and ensuring Canada properly leverages the trade deals it already has with partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim.
After a tense weekend, Trump announced Monday afternoon he was shelving his promise to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods for at least a month, with Canada offering a plan to address Trump’s border security and crime concerns.
Trudeau said earlier this week that despite that reprieve, concerns remain and the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit will “find ways to galvanize our economy, create more jobs and bigger paycheques, make it easier to build and trade within our borders and diversify export markets.”
Interprovincial trade
Business leaders in Canada have long complained that it’s easier to do business with other countries than other provinces, largely due to restrictions on the sale of alcohol, technical barriers such as vehicle weight standards and regulatory barriers such as licensing and paperwork requirements.
The prime minister said Friday that all of Canada’s premiers are united in wanting to drop internal trade barriers that Trudeau says “just don’t make sense,” and now the timing is right to get it done.
“We have to move forward on it,” Trudeau said Friday. “This is one of those moments and opportunities where we actually can. There’s a window open because of the context we’re in, we have to jump through it.”
To get a truly internal free trade agreement, Trudeau said, will require governments and business leaders “to step up and push hard and make sure that in this moment we actually move forward on free trade within Canada.”
Trading from a ‘position of strength’
Internal Trade Minister Anita Anand was asked during a news conference on Wednesday if “interprovincial trade barriers [could] be dealt with, wiped away in 30 days?”
“The short answer to your question is yes,” she responded.
Trudeau also said that Canadians have to accept that our proximity to the U.S. means that we are going to be trading north and south for many years to come.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is meeting with Canadian business and labour leaders Friday to discuss attracting investment, improving interprovincial trade and responding to the ongoing tariff threat from the U.S. Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, discusses what he’s hoping for going into the summit.
“We are always going to both benefit and be challenged by trade with the United States,” he said. “Its always going to be a big chunk of our economy.”
Trudeau said that to succeed, Canada needs to be “deliberate and strategic” about how it forges business partnerships with the U.S. when it comes to the trade in critical minerals and energy to ensure both countries win.
“These are things that we can deliberately look at, that we are looking at,” Trudeau said. “We’re always going to be trading with the United States, can we make sure we’re doing it from a position of strength?”
Trudeau said Canada also has to make sure it is “taking advantage of the incredible trade deals” the country has signed with the European Union (EU), Pacific Rim countries and the United Kingdom.
“Its not enough to just sign a trade deal, we have to then follow up on it with trade missions, with actual investments, with partnerships,” Trudeau said.
The prime minister said the summit will try to tackle how Canada can get more out of its free trade deal with the EU, how it can open new markets and diversify supply chains.
“There is a moment right now that we should be talking about,” he said. …
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