Canada Catch-All | Trump 51st State “plan”

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Dear GOP America, kindly get fucked. Signed, everyone in Canada.

www.bbc.com

US lawmakers write to Canada to complain that its wildfire smoke is spoiling summer

The politicians say their constituents are "limited in their ability to go outside" because of the air quality.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

Smoke from Canadian wildfires is drifting south and making it difficult for Americans to enjoy summer, six members of Congress have said in a letter to Canada's embassy.

"We write to you today on behalf of our constituents who have had to deal with suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke filling the air to begin the summer," they wrote to Ambassador Kirsten Hillman.

It was signed by Tom Tiffany and Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Michelle Fischbach, Brad Finstad, Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer of Minnesota. The Canadian embassy told the BBC that Canada takes wildfire prevention "very seriously".

Two Canadians have died in this year's wildfires and tens of thousands of others have evacuated.
Tom Emmer is a senior member of Congress, serving as Majority Whip in the House of Representatives.

He and his five fellow Republican lawmakers wrote in the letter, published Monday: "We would like to know how your government plans on mitigating wildfire and the smoke that makes its way south."
 
altmin said:
Dear GOP America, kindly get fucked. Signed, everyone in Canada.

www.bbc.com

US lawmakers write to Canada to complain that its wildfire smoke is spoiling summer

The politicians say their constituents are "limited in their ability to go outside" because of the air quality.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

Smoke from Canadian wildfires is drifting south and making it difficult for Americans to enjoy summer, six members of Congress have said in a letter to Canada's embassy.

"We write to you today on behalf of our constituents who have had to deal with suffocating Canadian wildfire smoke filling the air to begin the summer," they wrote to Ambassador Kirsten Hillman.

It was signed by Tom Tiffany and Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Michelle Fischbach, Brad Finstad, Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer of Minnesota. The Canadian embassy told the BBC that Canada takes wildfire prevention "very seriously".

Two Canadians have died in this year's wildfires and tens of thousands of others have evacuated.
Tom Emmer is a senior member of Congress, serving as Majority Whip in the House of Representatives.

He and his five fellow Republican lawmakers wrote in the letter, published Monday: "We would like to know how your government plans on mitigating wildfire and the smoke that makes its way south."
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I'd suggest a wall. It would have about as much an impact as the one on the southern border.
 

The Canadians Are Furious​


Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.

For months, Donald Trump had been casually threatening to annex Canada and turn it into a state, adding insult to the injury of the trade war he was waging on the country. One prime minister resigned amid Trump’s bullying, and another was elected because voters thought he could stand up to him. In the ordinarily placid provinces, feelings of bewilderment, anxiety, and offense hardened into a defiant resolve against the United States. “Elbows up,” went the nation’s new hockey-inspired mantra. As a Montreal journalist told me, Americans were preoccupied with “12 different crises.” In Canada, this was the crisis.

​

Anti-American resistance was visible as soon as I landed. At a news kiosk at Toronto Pearson International Airport, the cover of Maclean’s, the de facto national magazine, teased “20 Reasons to Eat Canadian.” Inside was a letter from the editor about canceling a vacation to Cape Cod. This was mild compared with the cover of its next issue, “The New Nationalism,” which contained articles about “Why Canada Will Never Be an American State,” “How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Tariffs,” and “Fear and Loathing in a Canadian Border Town.” The publication had a new promotional campaign: “Canada’s Not for Sale. (But Maclean’s is.)”

In grocery stores, Canada-affiliated products had been demarcated with red maple-leaf insignia — an official act of solidarity that complemented the consumer practice of flipping U.S. products upside down to make them easier to avoid. At a Loblaws, a woman wearing a leather jacket and AirPods was inspecting a jar of pomegranate marmalade to verify its country of origin. “I’m so disgusted by what’s going on down there. The most recent Harvard thing?” she said. “I shop on Amazon all the time — I recognize it’s an American company — I switched from buying stuff made in America to buying stuff made in China. And you know what? I’m okay with it.”

She suggested I download an app called Maple Scan, which would tell me how Canadian a product was when I took a picture of it. (Canada Dry ginger ale, I learned, is owned by the American conglomerate Keurig Dr Pepper.) The app is just one of a crush of new tools that people up North are using to scrutinize the Canadianness of their purchases. Another one called TheCanadaList.ca was founded by a forensic-psychology professor at Ontario Tech University. He broke down his new habits in a newspaper interview: “I’ve switched from Oreos to Dare or Leclerc, from Nature Valley to MadeGood, from Lay’s to Hardbite, from Oikos to Liberté, from Tostitos to Mad Mexican.”

...

The country’s political class has attempted to sever itself from the U.S. by reorienting the Canadian economy in an east-west rather than north-south direction. For example, Canada is knocking down interprovincial trade barriers that make it near impossible to order a bottle of gin from Winnipeg if you live across the country, in say, Halifax. But on an individual level, the most evident rupture has occurred with respect to travel. Southbound commerce and tourism, even to once-symbiotic border destinations, has fallen off a cliff. Horror stories circulating about aggressive U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents don’t help. Buffalo’s new “Buffalo Loves Canada” campaign is trying to entice Canadian visitors by raffling off a $500 gift certificate and by emphasizing its appreciation of Canadian brands. (“Looking at you, Tim Hortons, Swiss Chalet, and Labatt Blue!”) The director of New York’s Thousand Islands tourism bureau stopped showing American images to Canadians on social media “because that allowed for some of that negative sentiment to fester.”

...

I spoke to snowbirds who are not just boycotting the beach but have sold second homes. One tech investor who built a house north of Palm Beach a few years ago told me his American golf buddies started making 51st-state jokes: “The first time, it’s funny. The second time, okay. The third time, it’s becoming annoying.” The last straw was a guy in a pickup truck who saw his plates in a parking lot and told him to go back to Canada. This is no way to live, he recalled thinking.

Dale Hajas, a retiree from Ontario, recently kissed good-bye to her Greater Tampa development, where she estimates one-fifth of the winter residents are Canadian. “I’ve written to every tourism outlet in the United States — and not very graciously, I swear — to tell them why I will never set foot” there again, she said. “I redacted and then sent out-of-date bank statements showing what we’ve spent in the U.S. over the years.”

Edmundston, New Brunswick, sits directly across the border from Madawaska, Maine. Both communities are bilingual, and until this year, their historically Acadian roots bound them more to each other than to their respective nations. Now, Edmundston’s mayor, Eric Marquis, told me border tensions have ruined everything. Residents say they will never return to the U.S., even though everybody has family on both sides and Edmundstoners used to cross over all the time for cheaper gas. “We had to procure two new fire trucks this year,” Marquis said, and this time, they had to be Canadian made. “The first question posed by the city council was ‘Where do they come from?’”
 
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