In order to support tariffs, you must first support eliminating jobs and companies getting rid of emplyees due to lack of sales from the higher prices. Tariffs on Canadian imports means Canadians lose their jobs. Retaliating with tariffs on American imports means Americans lose their jobs.

COVID was a wake up call for me. As we struggled to get masks, ventilators, and vaccines, I realized that we make incredibly little here in Canada.

I now do my best to EXCLUSIVELY buy Canadian. I’m admittedly privileged to be able to afford to, but it isn’t that much more expensive if you approach it from the perspective of buying a few quality products rather than tons of crap.

For footwear, Boulet Boots makes great summer and winter weight boots for about $300. Made just outside Trois Riviere. It’s a lot of money - but they can also be resoled, repaired and still look new in their second winter.

Most of my pants and shirts are from Common Manufacturing out of Winnipeg. $150-$200 for a shirt and $170 for a set of chinos. I used to buy Banana Republic type stuff for about half the price but I would destroy them within a year. Common offers free repairs for life but I haven’t needed to use it yet.

My belts and watch straps are from Popov Leather in Nelson, BC.

Pots and pans from Meyer in PEI.

When I tossed my black plastic kitchen tools, I replaced them with beautiful hand carved wood replacements from a local craft fair.

Every time I need something I go looking for who is making it in Canada. It’s fun, I get to support small business, and I enjoy the higher quality - even if I have less shirts.

I agree in principle. Personally, I think Canada needs to pivot hard to being much closer to the EU. However, that approach will take too much time and bear out a lot of pain before we’re done.

In the short term though, Trump is a bully so responding to tariffs with anything other than escalation is likely to attract more tariffs and economic damage.

I guess on the one hand, it wouldn’t make a material difference because the US can and would criminalize it and the American market for the product would be non existent…

But on the OTHER hand it would make very little impact in terms of dollars and cents…

But I guess on the OTHER hand it would trigger disproportional responses because Trump is heavily funded by tech bros…

I suppose on the other hand, though, we could pivot our tech sector creating a product that will need to be locally dismantled once a friendlier president gets elected…

But, on the other hand…

I’m all for FOSS, jailbreaking, owning what is yours, right to repair… Etc etc, but trying to frame this as an appropriate or meaningful response to terriffs is nonsense. It’s drawing a line between two things that aren’t connected. And nobody would give this proposal the time of day on its own merits, the only reason it’s even making the rounds on the socials is that Cory said it.

@theacharnian

This should *absolutely* be part of a multi-pronged response.

Imo:

1. products tarriffed by #USA should immediately lose export permits to the USA. E.g. if softwood lumber is tarriffed, none can be exported to the USA for a time, and then it needs to be reviewed.

2. dollar-for-dollar forced sale of Canadian corporations owned by US entities.

3. Nationalize resources. The provinces have failed to guard them, monitor their exploitation, or enforce rehabilitation.

#cdnpoli

Totally agree with Doctorow as usual that this would be ideal, but there is NO way the US would allow that without things getting much, much uglier. Maybe we could get away with the app store temporarily but I’m sure it would get shut down eventually… unless we can convince our other allies to back us first. Unless he thinks there’s a high chance of this, I think he’s underestimating the kind of response we would face-- especially given the current climate.

As he says in the article, we’ve won some trade disputes but I doubt any of them were under an ISDS. Either way though, we do definitely need to boost our own tech sector so we have self-sufficiency if things go bad.

This needs to be one part of a multi-part retaliation to the US. The trade deals between the US and Canada are worth almost 1 Trillion dollars with manufactured goods and fuels being a large part of it. With the US being so politically unstable and aggressive, we need to find new trade deals and walk away from these draconian agreements we made with the US.

Canada has major ports on both the Pacific and Atlantic coast with rail and road infrastructure linking them to the rest of the country. There is a lot we could do. Will we? Probably not. A sizable portion of our own political sphere wants to bend over and take it from Trump even though he will give no love in return.

Ye and no.

Good ideas, but also the retaliation tariffs are not planned to be on everything, the last time we saw this it was things like targeting Tennessee whisky and other specific luxury goods. While they would harm consumer choice, there are tons of alternatives in many of those categories from both Canada and elsewhere.

As soon as I heard “retaliatory tariffs” I was like Jesus fuck why? Can we maybe think for longer than three seconds about this in terms of effecting the working class citizens of Canada? Retaliate in ways that hurt American citizens and benefit us. Destabilize the country instead of just making both worse.