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."
Click to expand...
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?’”
 
Gift article:

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | ‘Acute, Sustained, Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada Finds Its Voice

America’s withdrawal from the global order is forcing former allies to rethink their identities.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com


In response to this threat, two options are being discussed north of the border. The first is nuclear weapons. The other is whole-society defense. That latter is how the Finns survive living next to Russia, a much larger neighbor intermittently collapsing under the weight of incompetent government and exploding outward with imperialist ambition. Canada has a long tradition of conscription during global crises and world wars, but it is not a country that revels in its military.

The mind-set of Canada is changing, and the shift is cultural as much as economic or political. Since the 1960s, Canadian elites have been rewarded by integration with the United States. The snipers who fought with American forces. The scientists who worked at American labs. The writers who wrote for New York publications. The actors who made it in Hollywood. Mr. Carney himself was an icon of this integration as chair of the board of Bloomberg L.P., the financial news and data giant, as recently as 2023.

As America dismantles its elite institutions one by one, that aspirational connection is dissolving. The question is no longer how to stop comparing ourselves with the United States, but how to escape its grasp and its fate. Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister, used to speak of Canada as a “post-national state,” in which Canadian identity took second place to overcoming historical evils and various vague forms of virtue signaling. That nonsense is over. In several surveys, the overwhelming first choice for what makes the country unique is multiculturalism. This, in a world collapsing into stupid, impoverishing hatreds, is the distinctly Canadian national project.


...

Canada is now stuck in a double reality. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s top threat, and 55 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s most important ally. That is both an unsustainable contradiction and also a reality that will probably define the country for the foreseeable future. Canada is divided from America, and America is divided from itself. The relationship between Canada and America rides on that fissure.

...

But it’s the American system — not just its presidency — that is in breakdown. From the Canadian side of the border, it is evident that the American left is in the middle of a grand abdication. No American institution, no matter how wealthy or privileged, seems willing to make any sacrifice for democratic values. If the president is Tony Soprano, the Democratic governors who plead with Canadian tourists to return are the Carmelas. They cluck their disapproval, but they can’t believe anyone would question their decency as they try to get along.

...


Canada has experienced the second Trump administration like a teenager being kicked out of the house by an abusive father. We have to grow up fast and we can’t go back. And the choices we make now will matter forever. They will reveal our national character. Anger is a useful emotion, but only as a point of departure. We have to reckon with the fact that from now on, our power will come from only ourselves.
 
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Americans love the freedom to die in fiery auto crashes more.


Until around a decade ago, virtually all of the gap between the US and Canadian rates of crash deaths were explained by Americans simply driving more. Rebecca Weast, a coauthor of the study who works at IIHS, said that collisions in both countries dropped in 2007 as the global economy tanked. “Historically, crashes go down during recessions,” she told me. “But the US bounced back, and Canada just kind of kept going.”

From 2010 to 2020, Weast and her coauthors found, total road deaths rose 18% in the US but declined 22% in Canada. That finding is even more jarring when considering that Canada’s population grew faster during the decade. This “crash gap” also widened when calculated as deaths per mile driven, a measure that, unlike deaths per capita, excludes changes in car use.


After crunching data from both countries, the researchers identified several factors that help explain the deepening statistical separation. Pedestrian and cyclist deaths have surged in the US, reaching their highest levels in decades, but they have fallen in Canada. At the same time, speed-, alcohol-, and semi-truck-related crashes have increased in the US but dropped to the north.
 
www.ctvnews.ca

The majority of Canadians that own property in the U.S. plan to sell, survey finds

Trade tensions between Canada and the United States have many Canadians that own U.S. property weighing a sale of their home south of the border due to the economic policies of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration.
www.ctvnews.ca www.ctvnews.ca


The majority of Canadians that own property in the U.S. plan to sell, survey finds

Trade tensions between Canada and the United States have many Canadians that own U.S. property weighing a sale of their home south of the border due to the economic policies of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration.

More than half of Canadians with U.S. real estate holdings (54 per cent) say they are planning to sell their American homes within the next year, according to a recent Royal LePage survey conducted by Brunson.

“Those are big numbers, particularly when you consider that we have about 1 million snowbird Canadians travel the United States each year, particularly during the six months of fall through spring, so the wintertime, and about over 60 per cent of those own property,” Phil Soper, president and CEO of Royal LePage, told BNNBloomberg.ca in a Wednesday interview.

Nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of respondents surveyed, who are considering a sale, point to concerns with Trump and the White House. Meanwhile, 33 per cent are motivated by personal and financial reasons and five per cent are worried about extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes, floods and forest fires.
 
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