March 17, 2025 – A whirlwind first quarter of 2025 has swept up Canadian politics and tossed it back down in an unrecognizable jumble.
Conservatives Crumble: Liberals surge past CPC into majority territory, but Grits’ vote commitment is softerhttps://t.co/D6J0FlkoTy pic.twitter.com/iQdNbluGaa
— Angus Reid Institute (@angusreidorg) March 17, 2025
h/t Mauser
The King should go to Ottawa and open parliament as a reminder to Trump who the head of state is
The news that the prime minister of Canada saw the King yesterday would not normally set the pulse racing, but we live in new times.
Let me go back a bit. As a young journalist in 1982, I remember being faintly perturbed by the Canada Act of that year. This “patriated” the Canadian Constitution, getting rid of the last vestiges of British power over Canadian affairs. It came into effect just after Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands. I sensed it might be a bad idea.
The Act was perfectly logical, however. It was the final step in the emergence of Canada as an entirely independent country.
I think Charles would receive a warm reception but not overwhelming adulation. The Firm ain’t what it used to be.
On January 11, 2025, Amir Arvahi Azar, 32, of Toronto, was arrested. He has been charged with 29 criminal offences:
Journalists have always had a tendency to treat Donald Trump as a gold medalist in some kind of Olympics of Stupidity. But even for them, the trade war he has fitfully waged over the last two weeks has been dazzling in its illogic and arbitrariness. He has imposed tariffs, both on China and on his country’s nearest neighbors and closest allies. Then called them off. Then reimposed them.
Sowing ill will, repelling investors, decimating the 401(k) plans of those who once thought it was a good idea to vote for him, Trump appears to most newspapers readers as a mad king, or as the crazed naval captain Humphrey Bogart plays in The Caine Mutiny—someone from whom control ought to be wrested, and soon.
Interesting info on the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency pro and con among other things.
OTTAWA, March 17 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump must stop making “disrespectful” comments about Canada before the two countries can start serious talks about future ties, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Monday.
Trump, who is promising potentially crippling tariffs against imports from Canada, frequently muses about making the country the 51st U.S. state.
The Ring of Fire in northwestern Ontario has become a key figure in the battle to control critical minerals, which experts say is the heart of U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada.
While a remote Ontario peat bog may not be the stage that first comes to mind when picturing the geopolitical conflict, the critical minerals beneath it are essential to renewable energy and digital technology.
Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire is a crescent-shaped mineral deposit that has been eyed as a critical source for Ontario’s burgeoning electric vehicle battery industry.
What “burgeoning electric vehicle battery industry”???
The Liberal Party of Canada has selected a non-MP to become prime minister, but precedent suggests he won’t last long. Mark Carney represents the worst aspects of both John Turner’s and Michael Ignatieff’s political rises and appears destined for the same electoral futility.
Toronto details plan to fight Donald Trump’s tariffs, as mayor appears on CNN: ‘Stop this nonsense’
Mayor Olivia Chow’s plan to counter Donald Trump’s tariffs includes deferring property taxes for struggling businesses, partnering with nearby municipalities and banning U.S. companies from bidding on some city contracts.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he will scrap the carbon levy on industrial emitters as well as the consumer carbon levy.
In video statement released Monday, Mr. Poilievre says if elected to govern in the upcoming election, his government would repeal the entire carbon price law, including the tax on Canadian businesses and industries.
This means there would not be a levy on Canadian steel, aluminum, food production, concrete and other industries, he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs — first threatened, then postponed, now applied to steel and aluminum — are a hostile act against a friend and ally.
They upend the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. They violate basic principles of the World Trade Organization and postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which itself grew out successive U.S. tariff reductions after 1934.
If Washington continues with this obnoxious policy, more Canadian goods will face punitive surcharges at a time when only 30 per cent of U.S. imports are tariffed at all.
Certified TDS.
Canada is not the 51st state. While Trump keeps talking about it, I’m sincerely hoping this is just him trolling, because I sure as heck don’t want Canada to have any say in American politics.
The last thing we need is yet another anti-gun state in the nation, especially when I’m still kind of hoping Denmark buys California.
This is the weirdest timeline ever.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh announced Sunday his party would cancel Canada’s contract to buy U.S.-built F-35s and look for companies to build fighter jets in Canada — a proposal that some defence experts say comes with steep costs.
“Purchasing from the [United] States at this time is not in our national security interest,” Singh told reporters in Iqaluit just days after Defence Minister Bill Blair said Canada is reconsidering its F-35 purchase amid tensions with Washington.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford followed up his bellicose threats on energy exports this week by quickly retreating, demonstrating the limits of electron diplomacy.
When he first announced a 25-per-cent surcharge on electricity exported to the United States, Mr. Ford said it would remain in place indefinitely. If the U.S. escalated, he would halt transfers completely. “Until the threat of tariffs is gone for good, Ontario won’t back down,” he declared on Monday.
On Monday at an energy conference in Houston, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s “irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”
He added that, “Natural gas is responsible for 43 per cent of U.S. electricity production,” and beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there’s “simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.”
In other words, as a federal election looms, once again the United States is diverging from Canada when it comes to energy policy.
Ooh, Canada!
Some Canucks are proposing the most drastic measure yet in the trade war with Uncle Sam – blocking US access to Canadian-owned Pornhub.
h/t PA Cat
