Trump's New Tariffs, Carney's Blind Budget, and Cartel Trucking | Blendr Report EP172
Once August 19th rolls around, Canada will have an additional 50% tariff applied on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, courtesy of Donald Trump.
*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*
Once August 19th rolls around, Canada will have an additional 50% tariff applied on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, courtesy of Donald Trump. There is a major difference between this round of tariffs and previous. Most importantly, CUSMA-compliant goods will be included, with no expiry date.
The legal mechanism being used by Washington is also new. After the Supreme Court ruled in February that the emergency powers law never allowed tariffs in the first place, Trump needed to find a new way of implementing his. His administration is now applying Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, becoming the first to use it. This allows a president to levy duties of up to 50% on any country deemed to be discriminating against American commerce. Notably, this does not require a trade tribunal or vote in Congress. Trump can sign a proclamation and it becomes law.
Three proclamations were signed: dairy, alcohol, and motor vehicles — which at first glance doesn’t actually contain cars. Rather, it focuses on furniture, lumber, plywood, cement, plastics, clothing, footwear, toys, machinery, cosmetics, and farm goods down to cut flowers and seeds. Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, says these tariffs are in response to provinces pulling American liquor off the shelves and European dairy getting more access to the Canadian market than American. This brings supply management into the crosshairs, which has been an untouchable policy in Canada for more than 50 years.
The second story of this podcast is about Don Drummond, who spent twenty-three years inside the federal finance department, claiming he’s never seen a lack of transparency like Carney’s. He’s been reading these documents since 1977, even helping build the thing he now says he can’t read. Typically, Drummond and his associates at the C.D. Howe Institute try to work out the deficit before the budget gets tabled. Except due to the opaqueness of this cabinet, they can’t. There is no way to tell whether Ottawa’s latest spending announcements are capital purchases, amortization, or liabilities. This includes a Pacific Coast pipeline agreement, a carbon capture package, and up to twelve submarines from a German shipbuilder that hasn’t signed a contract yet. All of this was announced without any fiscal transparency and lands on a backdrop of planned deficits of at least fifty billion a year for the next five years. Don’t worry though, Carney’s finance minister says we hold the strongest fiscal position in the G7. Meanwhile, Reuters reported last week that the loonie is now the most heavily shorted major currency in the world. Which means someone is lying.
We also cover a recent eighteen-month joint operation between Windsor police, the CBSA, and the OPP called Project Bay, which led to one of Ontario’s largest drug busts in history. Nearly 1.7 tonnes of drugs, $139 million worth of product, and seventeen firearms (including an anti-tank rifle). Twenty-one people were charged as a result. The important takeaway is the network beneath it. Sam Cooper of The Bureau reports that Mexican cartels are running a broker model inside Canada’s commercial trucking industry, with drivers knowingly hauling concealed loads. Apparently the Americans asked the RCMP to work this in 2019, except there was “no appetite” to do anything about it.
Then, for paid subscribers, we discuss recent findings by Senator Rand Paul on the link between China’s military labs and vials found at the Detroit Airport. This intersects with the Winnipeg Lab scandal from the year before the pandemic, leading to the question: just how frequently are Western nations sharing deadly pathogens with a hostile adversary?
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