Tags: USA

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

BULKING UP.

The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.

This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.

It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?

Read on…

STAY IN SCHOOL.

It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

CUTTING OFF YOUR NOSE.

My first experience with the politics of “Ready, fire, aim…” happened long ago at Queen’s Park in Toronto, the heartbeat of Ontario’s government.

The province’s farmers were protesting some new policy that would hurt the agricultural sector. So they drove hundreds of tractors up University Avenue and parked them in the middle of the circular road that rings the Provincial Legislature.

Chaos. Huge, instant traffic jams. Many thousands of people were inconvenienced by this. Thousands more were very annoyed. Politicians were enraged.

The farmers? They were positively righteous in their anger. “All Ontarians need to know just how badly they’re treating their farmers.”

I thought, “Why would you protest in a way that will get your allies and curious bystanders really mad at you?” One  answer of course was to force the other side, in this case, the province, to back down. That’s the purpose of all strikes everywhere.

But with Palestinian protesters against Israel, the collateral damage to Canada’s writing community is deadly.

Read on…

Mutts.

“[Kamala Harris] was always of Indian heritage and she was always promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know: is she Indian or is she Black?”

Donald Trump asked that last Thursday to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

His question then begs mine now: Is Donald Trump white?

He’s mixed nationality for sure, part Scottish and part German. And less than 100 years ago Germans viewed themselves as “The Master Race”.

Wikipedia’s history of the Trump family says they descended from an itinerant lawyer in Germany in 1608.

Read on…

RamsayWrites

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