Summary
Ontario Premier Doug Ford warned that Canada could cut electricity exports to the U.S. in retaliation for Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Canadian goods.
The U.S. imposed a 25% tariff on most Canadian imports, citing border security concerns. Ford emphasized that U.S. states like New York and Michigan rely on Canadian energy and should “feel the pain.”
Canadian officials also announced $155 billion in counter-tariffs.
If enacted, energy restrictions would likely raise prices in the U.S., escalating trade tensions between the two countries.
Canada and US are in negotiations to renew the Columbia River Treaty, where the US pays Canada for flood control upstream. They protect the cities along the Columbia River, and the hydroelectric infrastructure on the River, and the bridges. If Canada decides to play hardball, there’s a lot at their mercy.
“to cut” is very different from “could cut”
This headline makes it sound way more imminent than I’ve been lead to believe. The first order of business is just messing with things like Florida orange farms and Kentucky bourbon, then we might escalate.
Why is the fairness meter of the article “unfair left leaning”, when it just reports on something someone said?
I don’t see any opinion piece there, but pretty much just direct quoting
How can this be even left or right leaning? Oo
We Americans have a serious problem labeling anything we disagree with as “those other guys”. I might even say it’s our main problem. We wouldn’t be where we’re at today without the divisiveness and team mentality.
Sadly it’s not just Americans…
Seeing the same we-they pattern here in Austrian right wing communities/parties
Sadly it’s not just Americans…
But they’re the best at it. Tremendous at it. Everyone says it. People say it. You know it
Sometimes I go look at r/conservative just to take temperature, and on returning to political communities on lemmy I find the same ad hominem insults and dehumanizing efforts as over there, certainly less of it and less virulent, but just as spiteful and aggressive.
I’m all for being upset when it’s appropriate, but I am afraid that political affiliations are no guarantee of sanity or reasoning.
I’m just fed up with the constant sensational shock fake news (usually of right wing parties), which only aim for fear, anger and hatred
Yeah, we all have problems and we need to work on that. That’s pretty much life - especially social life and much more (geo-) political life.
But I can’t stand the rhetoric anymore. From highschool bullies playbook to imitating Hitler’s rhetoric. I’m just too fed up with it.
I want fact based politics and crowd sourced solutions - from the people that are actually affected.
And not some idiot calling a whole group of people degenerates and worth shit.In the late 90s with the “real” Internet still alive and all of the people starting to face global problems, I was really optimistic, that this would bring us all together.
To work on a global solution.
But nah, we need to have populistic simple “solutions” for complex problems, where seemingly every time it’s just the fault of some minority group or some foreigners.This now just isn’t the world I wanted to live in and I naively hoped for so much better and more…
Edit: to make extend on that:
Society doesn’t need a rigid framework of rules to live in. So fuck social control - doesn’t matter if it comes from religion or from state.
The laws we live in should reflect the society we currently are. And not try to pressure society into some form of ideological picture.
And with that, fuck ideology as well.Society is always changing and our rules to live by need to be as flexible as that.
But somehow people still long for a wannabe strongman leader, who only cares for himself.We could just build our own society, with basic democracy, no real leaders, but maybe just elected representatives.
We don’t need anyone to tell us, how we should behave.
We hopefully are grown up enough to see the ethical correct way.But people seem to prefer to be childs and just hand over responsibility…
Unfortunately, ideology is like halitosis: it’s always someone else’s problem. Showing how a position is “allowing you to participate in your own oppression” (my definition of ideology) can seem impossible or require great skill.
Emotionally, a lot of people seem to need a leader not a representative. I wonder how much is culture and ideology, and how much is evolutionary.
We like sweets, too, and learn to do without. I believe we can do the same by suppressing leaders and thus managing the Sociopath in Power problem.
I just don’t know how a grown up and educated human can still look for a leader in its life
I’m in favour of a primus inter pares concept, so I do get, that I give off responsibility in some parts of my life to people, who just do it better.
Like, I’m not really good with mechanical stuff, others are. So it’s better that they do it.
But I’m rather good with computer stuff, so we help each other out.I just don’t see the need for a kindergartner in a society of grown ups.
Problem is, that we’re currently lacking education in quite some parts, so many people never really get to actually grow up and need to rely on other people, because they never knew better.
This sounds a bit derogatory, but that’s the only way I can image, why people want to have a “strong” leader above them - they just don’t want to take responsibility.
That’s why I advocate for anarchism.
Take the power away to coerce people.
Yeah, I’m an Anarchist as well
So that’s what I basically described here ;-)
Or at least a form of it
Why is the fairness meter of the article “unfair left leaning”
It isn’t; that article is rated neutral/fair. You need to vote on the fairness rating yourself first, then it’ll show you the average score
Ah, ok!
Thanks!
Still a weird thing to show for an unvoted stateYeah, I don’t know why it just doesn’t show the needle at all until you vote
Because many people in the US (and elsewhere, sadly) are not media-literate enough to understand the difference between the veracity of an article and their opinion about it.
In the US, reporting on simple facts makes you “radical left” while obvious propaganda makes you “right leaning”.
Reality has a liberal bias.
Yeah, wherever I talk with right wingers, who support fascists and extreme right radicals, it’s always the extreme radicale left in opposition.
Because everything, that’s not on their extreme right site, seems to be radicale left…
You’re supposed to click where you think it should go. It’s a voting mechanism.
Yeah, I thought it’s showing me the current voting already.
In another comment someone explained to me, that this is just the default position before the vote - which I find prettyintuitiveunintuitive.
But maybe that’s just me…Did you mean “unintuitive?”
Intuitive means it feels right.
Ah, yeah, thanks.
Auto correct fucked me over…
It’s supposed to be for the publication as a whole, not the specific article. No idea what metric they’re using, though.
Edit: Never mind, was talking about something else.
Nah, it’s article by article.
Hold us accountable and submit your rating of this article on the meter.
Ah, I thought they were talking about the bot that is or was on here that rated sources.
Oh, so they crowd-sourced it and it’s being brigaded by Trump morons. Got it.
Play stupid games win stupid prizes. Glad that Canadians are standing up for themselves.
Can’t wait to see this happening. It’s a language A bully like Trump might understand. might.
Unless HIS power goes out, I’m not sure he’ll care. But I hope the people affected know where to lodge their complaints…
Ford didn’t care about Canadians when he did nothing about the housing shortage for the last 4 years, I wonder why he pretends to care now?
virtue signalling, hes probably doing this for political pts.
Whatever the reason is I just hope he doesn’t suddenly turn and start supporting MAGA at some point. God knows he’s corrupt, the shit he’s doing and been trying to do here in Ontario is absolutely awful.
If I have to deal with another 4 years of Ford at least let him keep up the fight against Trump and his administration.
Pretend to care just won him another 4 years as premier so why wouldn’t he?
Those bribe cheques certainly helped
Ford was literally pro trump and congratulating him when he won, he pivoted almost immediately to gain favour with Canadians and it worked
Need to scan the border to make sure they are not running an extension cord through it.
It would be buried, grab your metal detector.
Gotta change the National wifi password as well.
“sorry” was never a good password anyway
I’m Canadian and I don’t think we should be doing this in the middle of winter. Plus it’s going to affect blue states, which will only make the MAGA fuckface idiots glad that the libs are being owned.
We should repeal US IP protection laws instead and cut out their potash. Make technofeudalists and rural conservatives scream.
American here in a state bordering Canada. We get energy and trade with Canada. Our winter is basically over.
Please cut the power for an hour. Make it daily. Increase it to 2 hours. Do it at the most annoying times.
Hospitals and such have backup power systems, so a short outage wouldn’t directly harm anyone. (I’m sure some elderly shut in will coincidentally die of old age and it would get blamed on the outage) But it would get everyone’s attention and mostly be really fucking annoying for some people.
It’s not the middle of winter, it’s March. It’s spring time where I live in Canada, it ought to be warmer down south in the USA.
It’s still the winter. Spring starts in a couple weeks.
It’s still dead of winter here in Quebec, where are you, Windsor?
Calgary. It’s 5 to 10 degrees out for the last week and there’s no more snow on the ground.
Come on, you know better than that. Winter isn’t over until May-two-four.
However much I’d like to see it happen, I do see problems in cutting them off too. It’s not easy to cut power on such scale, but if possible, i’d be in favor of intermittent outages. Random on/off periods of random length. The only thing that sucks much more than no power is unreliable/unpredictable power.
I don’t think we should be doing this in the middle of winter. Plus it’s going to affect blue states
US citizen here, in a blue state. Do it, you’re doing us a favor. Let’s get those guys up there to get out the pitchforks, let’s see people freezing on the news.
The current blue is purple, let’s make it blue again.
Libs need to be in the streets. The Maga viewpoint will fall as the stock market shutters and their kids are in danger of getting drafted to fight a war on two sides.
Thank you. Californian over here. I am disgusted with what our government and the magtards that voted them in are doing. Do what you need to do to defend yourselves but please keep in mind Americans are not all awful.
keep in mind Americans are not all awful
Thnx for the reminder. I am trying, but I admit it’s not easy nowadays so it’s needed every now and then. I think by far the biggest part of Europe won’t argue when I say we totally lost trust and respect for the USA.
The few of us that aren’t awful are fair sacrifices, please, do whatever it takes to dethrone the maniacs.
Surprised you had trust and respect for the USA in the first place, have you already forgotten all the countries the USA have illegally invaded?
Just keep it in mind when some of us start needing to flee. Some of us just want to be safe from the fascists and to work together with our neighbors around the world in a cooperative way.
Turning the lights off and on is usually how you deal with a cranky misbehaving group of children.
So yeah. Let’s do it just for the sake of the metaphor.
Good for them, maybe our economy will collapse too, and an angry mob will storm the white house and kick Trump out. He can emergency evacuate to Russia, and we can find an administration that isn’t insane.
Heyy… a guy can dream.
I’d prefer we do more than kick Trump out. Like…guillotine them all.
Broadcast it live on PBS!
This was just off by 50 years.
Yup.
It isn’t just Trump that has to go. It’s every traitorous Republican in Congress who have abdicated their responsibility to the Constitution and to every single U.S. citizen.
Feel free to get on with that angry mobbing.
sort of the best case scenario
Best case Ontario.
Im still flabbergasted that so many people are just shrugging at what Trump is doing and saying, well, if only Kamala or the DNC did this or that instead. Maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
In general, the more a person brags about something, the less true it is — and Americans love to brag about how tough and free they are…
Leftists aren’t capable of self reflection.
Oh, how disappointing, I thought leftists crossed a broad spectrum of thinking and many were annoyingly, mutually, critical.
Which semi-fictional political segment generalization is self-reflexive then?
Imagine thinking Harris is a leftist
I think you had a reading comprehension fail.
I guess you proved your own point.
Cept that is what the rich want. Shit to fall apart. Cuz then they get to buy shit up for cheap and consolidate even more wealth.
The rich aren’t going to be buying anything if the dollar is literally worthless. Hyperinflation is no joke.
Also, they won’t be buying anything if they become festive decorations on fences and lampposts across the country.
The Rich™ want to buy the dip and buy up property (see project 2025). They need the economy to break but not to completely collapse. And then it will “bounce back” enough that they can transfer their USD to other currencies.
Whether trump’s fucking stupidity will accomplish that seems REAL questionable.
That said: Massive power outages (also, this is just the equivalent of a state governor with a crackhead brother saying it to appear strong to Canada’s conservatives) might be what this country needs to get out en masse in places other than the blue states.
With a dead crackhead brother you mean
That works until their shit gets burned.
When the only things left to buy have to be built with hands and eyes, they will have to share the wealth with the rest of us.
We won’t do shit until we are literally starving. Look right here at Lemmy, non-stop memes and stories about how what horrible economic shape we’re in. So how is everyone fat?! Meanwhile, I go to work and look at what’s for sale, at what prices, and think, “Jesus, people pay for this?!”
Even the Great Depression didn’t have us storming the White House. Think on that.
tl;dr: Americans aren’t near broke enough to band together.
Very true.
But we’re speedrunning the fall of America.
Give it another year or two. You’ll start seeing widespread violence. We can only cross our fingers that it gets directed properly toward our traitorous government.
You say that but the other team went far into your capitol and they looked well nourished enough.
Yeah, thats why I said a total system collapses. And that’s not out of the question.
The great depression had the bonus march. They camped in front of the white house and were dispersed with tear gas and cavalry charge led by Douglas MacArthur.
I wish we weren’t pinning our hopes on angry mobs. But you play the hand you are delt.
Considering he won an undisputed election and at least a quarter of his base are gun nuts, plus police love to use excessive force & violence, that scenario would probably play out poorly for pretty much everyone. I would say try to show conservatives how terrible he really is, but that’s not going to happen in Lemmy. I’m not even conservative, I’m anti-authoritarian centrist but even I find this place extremely hostile to conversation with anyone who doesn’t embrace the group-think.
Nobody is going to support trump if the whole system collapses. We’ve seen it play out over and over across history.
Well, yeah. But if people try to forcibly remove him before that happens probably there will a lot of unnecessary beatings, incarceration and death. Honestly even leftists have been saying this system needs torn down for decades. So if he tears it down, build back better.
If you take a shot at the king, you best not miss.
In reality, it isn’t shitty enough for people to revolt. 3 days of food scarcity and shit will happen that makes the French revolution look tame.
And that is when you stage a coup.
As an American, I agree 100%. Canada needs to kick our ass. We deserve it.
Maybe you guys should just kick out the traitors that very obviously work for a foreign government.
We wanted to. Unfortunately, the corporations run the country and so we have no effective opposition party. The Democrats are as beholden to big money donors as the Mazis.
I agree with the sentiment but those states are all pretty blue. Trump might just let it happen to widen the divide and somehow claim that it’s punishment for not bending the knee.
Given that Canadians don’t typically vote in American elections, I don’t see how that has anything to do with us or should affect our decision making.
The USA is tariffing us, not just the red states.
Yeah, the us is bad at thinking everyone is inside their crazy system. It does not matter to us if you state “don’t blame me I voted for Kodos”, at the end of the day you are all citizens of a belligerent nation. Your government is representing you all on the world stage, if you don’t like it do something about it.
That’s some weird logic. Trump enacts tariffs on Canada,who retaliates in kind, so you’re worried about blue votes. Trump may claim that after the fact, but he’s definitely not playing chess that many moves ahead.
The dude can barely plan a double jump with hopscotch, much less checkers.
Trump enacts tariffs on Canada.
Exactly. Trump. Not the states that voted against him. If you want to retaliate, retaliate against Trump. Make him, and the people that voted for him feel the pain.
Look at the things he’s doing domestically. There’s nothing he and his MAGA dipshits love more than sticking it to the blue states. So, Canada doing something that predominantly hurts blue states isn’t going to hurt Trump at all. Quite the contrary, it’s going to give him huge hard-on.
So, if your goal is to help Trump, well then carry on.
What is it you actually think I intended? Are your glasses foggy?
Like it or not, Trump’s actions are America’s actions now and we’ll fight back in any way we can.
Also Canadians are pretty pissed at Americans in general right now
Cutting off power in blue states will mean that the energy has to come from somewhere else, which means higher demand, and higher costs across multiple states, also red ones.
And let’s not pretend those “blue states” don’t have very large numbers of maga idiots as well
Washington State, here. Can confirm. Seattle and Bellingham carry the state blue. Them yokels everywhere else vote red.
I’ve literally seen Dixie flags here in Washington. Like, how fucking dumb do you need to be?
I’m curious, is there somewhere you can see votes broken down by county, or preferably more granular than that? I remember seeing an article a month ago about one of those small Alaskan panhandle towns that relies on its bigger BC neighbour town. They were begging the BC/Canadian government to take it easy on them because they didn’t vote for this but the article immediately fact checked them with an Alaskan government stat showing that town in particular voted something like 80% for Trump. My point is, I’ve been hearing a lot from both Point Roberts and Port Angeles and I’m curious if they’re full of shit or not.
Definitely not. Port Angeles has a major ferry service going back and forth to Victoria. I love that ferry ride - you often get to see grey whales on the trip, and god damn, Vicky is just one of the most beautiful cities. I love it so much. I wish I could move there.
I’m not sure this gets granular enough. I don’t think that the upper peninsula is as blue as this map suggests, seeing as when I was there before the election, it was just littered with Trump signs. https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-washington/
Far be it from me to suggest a Fox site, but this also breaks it down: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/wa-county-voted-president
Anyhow, the GOP voters will, in the words of the inimitable Ricky from Trailer Park Boys, “cut off their nose for spiderface.”
Dixie flags are usually a dog whistle for racism
Thanks. I was just mentioning it for fun. I definitely wasn’t insinuating that. /s
That Ozempic chewing orange twat has never physically jumped in his life, let’s be honest.
not on those 3inch heels, making his stand like a frontaur.
Can’t with them bone spurs
Im gonna tell you right now, as a Canadian, we do not care what colour your states are.
Got it. The Americans who have been struggling against this shit storm are still allowed to communicate.
Yeah well the country you guys are threatening to invade is allowed to have a fucking opinion on it.
I support that. I invite you to hate on the US government and the assholes that put it in power. But you do yourself and many like me a disservice by acting like all US citizens want this to happen.
You do yourselves a disservice by allowing this to happen.
You’re right. Sorry.
We are not acting like all US citizens wanted this to happen, but we understand that this is happening and what you wanted at this point is not relevant. If you don’t want to be lumped into the rest of your belligerent nation, do something.
You’re right. Apologies. Its been a shitty decade.
But also - we invite secession!
Secession is a nice idea, but merging into Canada is a nonstarter.
Canada is 40 million people, New York is 20 million. That kind of influx would be insane to manage. And that’s just one state…
I can only think of east/west Germany as the closes parallel and they are still merging the halves.
There is a simple solution:
Form a North American union
Let’s start with something smaller - Vermont is cool, they can come over (PS Bring Bernie).
I agree. I think we’d be better off supporting their new independent nation[-states?] than absorbing them. Too many systemic issues and too large of a population to change overnight, not to mention all the guns. Maybe we could accept Hawaii, I think they’re far enough removed from the continental states.
Isn’t the balkanization of the US explicitly part of Russia’s goal, and establishment of city-states (or CityCorps) the explicit goal of the dark enlightenment types that Peter Thiel is backing?
“We can’t merge states with Canada because what if we tried with <third largest state with largest city in either country>?”
Your logic here is flawless.
New York would be a state affected by the power freeze?
This is a great comment.
I think that Americans have forgotten that not everything in the world fits into US partisan politics.
Americans rarely think outside of terms of “America” and “not America”
Vermont in particular is heavily dependent on imported energy.
those states are all pretty blue.
Minnesota is. Michigan tends to be (especially now that our districts are drawn independently), but we voted for Trump as a state. And New York is mostly red except for NYC.
I almost want to see our power bills skyrocket in Michigan. But at the same time I know full well the dipshits who voted red (including my own family) will blame everyone else before they blame the people who might end abortion. So it won’t matter. They won’t learn. Instead we’ll all suffer because of their idiocy and they’ll continue to think that we’re winning.
(In fact they’ll be thrilled because it will mean increased oil and natural gas production to close the gap in demand.)
The problem with that is trying to ramp up oil and gas production in the US is a losing proposition. Even with a friendly administration, it takes a long time and a lot of money to do it and it may not pay off.
There are no blue states. It’s red country and blue cities.
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it… America needs to learn, I say this as an American.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s going back to any level of normal. Maybe by quickly destroying the system, we will be able to quickly rebuild it (after all the destruction to everyone’s lives)
Elon and Trump seem to be intentionally destroying the system, or are so profoundly stupid that they’ve pulled a “We did it Patrick! We saved the city!”
Honestly with those two I can never tell if they’re being dumb or malicious.
I can definitely tell that they are always being malicious. Sociopaths like them doesnt do humanitarian acts, it is always exclusively about themselves
Him blanket accusing a guy of pedophilia simply because he was getting more attention and didn’t wanna use a Musk made submarine was everything I needed to see to know he’d turn out like this
They are absolutely intentionally destroying the system
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump threatened military action in return, should Canada go forward with it. I mean, it sounds crazy to write it, but is it really too crazy for Trump?
Absolutely would not surprise me one bit.
Don’t get too excited. Ford loves to talk tough but he’s a fucking pussy.
We’ll see what actually happens. No one here is holding their breath.
Hey pussies can take a pounding.
R.I.P. Betty White
So he’s a big ballsack?
Does he have anything in plan to protect Canadians rather than just revenge on the US? Like in BC they’re pushing the buy local, cutting down American liquor sales, and realloting some money to prep for what’s expected to be all the upcoming layoffs.
All I’ve seen from Ontario is Ford saying he’ll kick America’s ass metaphorically but is there anything in place to protect the local jobs that’d be lost if they were to cut off all that electricity?
The Fords aren’tgreat at Making ng stuff work. They’re better at stopping things.
Not sure, I don’t live in Ontario anymore so I’m not so plugged in on provincial politics. It would certainly be very like Ford to make all these big aggressive moves but ultimately fuck over Ontarians in the process. But like I said, I’m not aware of the details, so that’s just baseless speculation.
LCBO is actively removing American products from shelves.
I do think there’s more technical problems related to decoupling a massive load from the grid, but Ford does seem to be following through with at least some of the promised retaliations. Time will tell if he keeps it up.
