Caught this article from Axios. Axios, you should know, is yet another American billionaire family propaganda rag, where the Cox family serves up slop for the piggies (that’s how they view the reader).

Several of the quotes are outright hilarious nonsense.

One core dispute: Washington wants to prevent China from using Mexico or Canada as a back door into the North American market — a particular flashpoint for Canada, which recently struck a limited tariff truce with Beijing.

Canada made an agreement with China to sell them our canola1 in return for a tiny number of Chinese cars to be sold in Canada2, to Canadians. You know, the very Chinese cars that are massively popular in Mexico already. In no universe is Canada trying to be a “backdoor” for Chinese goods — whereas Mexico long has, where those goods don’t just go directly to the US — and saying this is a “flashpoint” for Canada is amazing propaganda targeting the ignorant.

Various members of Trump’s administration have warned that Canadians who buy these cars won’t be able to drive them into the US, and the response of Canadians has been a collective yawn.

Saying this is a “flashpoint” is propaganda nonsense. Canada has always been onboard with source of origin tracking and declarations, and has never tried to “backdoor” Chinese goods to the other CUSMA partners.

In reality, they simply want Canada subjugated and reliant upon the US in all ways, and if we’re going off and making our own trade deals, well that works against the goal. In this case they are trying to doublespeak backdoor — which would mean that we secretly buy Chinese stuff, slap a maple leaf on it and ship it to the US under CUSMA — into meaning Canada simply trading with other parties.

“We have issues with Mexico we’re still working through, but Mexico intends on coming to an agreement with us,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rick Switzer said last week at an event organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mexico is literally everything Trump complained about. They long funnelled massive amounts of Chinese goods into NAFTA cum CUSMA, relabelling and hiding the origin. They entirely rely upon the US economy, and the US sells very little to Mexico, and instead its economy exists by undercutting US labour.

The US has 4x the trade deficit with Mexico than Canada, and even that is massively misleading because the bulk of exports the US sends to Mexico are unfinished parts that will end up coming back for the US domestic market.

The only reason the US has a trade deficit with Canada is unprocessed oil that the US imports and sends to the gulf coast refineries to then sell at a massive markup, largely internationally. If you don’t include oil which the US literally makes billions from, the US has (had?) a trade surplus with Canada.

Of course Mexico will play along with the US’ cabal. It is an infinitely more motivated supplicant in that negotiation. When the US is so pathetically desperate for Canada to please bend that they have to prop up Mexico as the good guys…lol. And I’m not blaming Mexico, and they should look out for their own country and treat Mexico as #1, but it’s telling that the US keeps trying to portray Canada as bad relative to Mexico, betraying how poor of a negotiating situation they are in.

“The grown-ups are in the room talking because there’s a grown-up in leadership there. And I would argue there’s not a grown-up in Canada in charge,” Switzer said, referring to Mark Carney, a widely respected former central banker who became the nation’s prime minister last year.

Parody. The US is being run by a clown show of foolish idiots who think they get to throw barbs like this consequence free. Quotes like the above are just an astonishing inability to read the room. Having that idiocracy, with an administration full of unbelievable levels of incompetence and corruption, talk about the “grown-ups in the room” is…well, it’s simply amazing stuff.

They really thought could force Canada to do whatever they wanted. They don’t begin to understand our resolve on this as we pepper-spray these vile people in the face repeatedly in return for their hubris of thinking they just get to have their way.

There will be zero progress on trade until these foolish simps shut their idiot mouths and stop thinking they are some sort of mafia operation that gets to push people around. This article was clearly issued to Axios, desperately trying to coerce Canada to somehow give them a “win” for their failing president. Pathetic.

Want a trade agreement? It’s called CUSMA and was renegotiated from NAFTA by this very same president, and currently the US is in absolute violation of a number of terms of it (steel, aluminum, vehicles and parts, softwood, among others).

When they can’t abide by the very trade agreement they already signed — the very one Trump declared the “best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA” — signing additional agreements with that same group would be the definition of insanity.

Footnotes

  1. Canada had previously imposed a 100% Chinese EV tariff in lockstep with the US to protect what we saw as North America’s automakers (Mexico, you’ll note, never did), to which China retaliated by tariffing Canadian canola. Then Trump declared that actually it’s US auto companies and he should destroy Canada’s integration in the CUSMA3 auto industry — completely in defiance of the very trade agreement this same dipshit signed just a few years earlier (but also, please sign new trade agreements!) — so…get wrecked boyees. We’re willing to see Ford, GM and Chrysler destroyed if they are willing to go along with this. ↩

  2. There’s a social media guy named “Mario of the North” who long lambasted the government for the tariffs on Chinese EVs and the subsequent canola retaliation. He complained that the government was choosing Ontario autoworkers over Western farmers. Then, after the government came to a truce with China, he did an instant 180 and now Chinese spy cars are going to steal all of our secrets and this is insane, etc. He, like so many others in the space, is just a partisan noisemaker, and these people are an absolute cancer on democracies.

    When someone demonstrates that they don’t have values they have teams, their rhetoric is betrayed to be worthless noise. ↩

  3. Canada has had a vibrant auto manufacturing industry for about as long as the US has. Indeed, NAFTA replaced the Autopact, and then CUSMA replaced NAFTA, but the basis of all was that Canada would proportionally be involved in manufacturing, or “American” automakers will be shut out of Canada. ↩