Canada should not respond to potential U.S. tariffs with retaliatory tariffs, as this would primarily harm Canadian consumers by driving up prices. Instead, Canada should leverage its industrial and technological capabilities to undermine the monopolistic rent-seeking of American corporations by legalizing and promoting third-party modifications, repairs, and alternative marketplaces for technology, agriculture, and other industries. By dismantling restrictive intellectual property laws—many of which were imposed under the USMCA trade agreement—Canada could become a global hub for jailbreaks, independent app stores, and right-to-repair solutions, thereby reducing dependence on U.S. tech monopolies and fostering a new high-tech economy that directly benefits Canadian consumers and businesses.
In order to support tariffs, you must first support eliminating jobs and companies getting rid of emplyees due to lack of sales from the higher prices. Tariffs on Canadian imports means Canadians lose their jobs. Retaliating with tariffs on American imports means Americans lose their jobs.
I guess on the one hand, it wouldn’t make a material difference because the US can and would criminalize it and the American market for the product would be non existent…
But on the OTHER hand it would make very little impact in terms of dollars and cents…
But I guess on the OTHER hand it would trigger disproportional responses because Trump is heavily funded by tech bros…
I suppose on the other hand, though, we could pivot our tech sector creating a product that will need to be locally dismantled once a friendlier president gets elected…
But, on the other hand…
I’m all for FOSS, jailbreaking, owning what is yours, right to repair… Etc etc, but trying to frame this as an appropriate or meaningful response to terriffs is nonsense. It’s drawing a line between two things that aren’t connected. And nobody would give this proposal the time of day on its own merits, the only reason it’s even making the rounds on the socials is that Cory said it.
Ye and no.
Good ideas, but also the retaliation tariffs are not planned to be on everything, the last time we saw this it was things like targeting Tennessee whisky and other specific luxury goods. While they would harm consumer choice, there are tons of alternatives in many of those categories from both Canada and elsewhere.
I agree in principle. Personally, I think Canada needs to pivot hard to being much closer to the EU. However, that approach will take too much time and bear out a lot of pain before we’re done.
In the short term though, Trump is a bully so responding to tariffs with anything other than escalation is likely to attract more tariffs and economic damage.
I’ve actually been wondering if we shouldn’t approach the EU for membership. It’s probably a pretty hard sell from the EU side, but it would send a message about turning on one’s closest ally.
I mean one of the requirments is being part of Europe. And yes the council determines what that means. But it we could be very hard to say Canada is part of Europe.
Europe is what Europe defines itself to be. Definitely a stretch to include Canada, but if we also keep a trade agreement with the rest of North America we could be a back door to European goods to sell into the USA.
Again, WILDLY unlikely.
Hey, our border isn’t too far from Greenland!
In fact we have a land border.
Oh right, that funky island where we trade whiskey for schnapps.
'Any country that shares a land border with any other EU member state is considered to be ‘part of Europe’ seems like a reasonable definition to me lol.
Small groups should organize and ask the king for a letter of marque.
“O, the year was 1778”
How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now.
I haven’t finished listening, but I assume everything went well for the privateers.
Totally agree with Doctorow as usual that this would be ideal, but there is NO way the US would allow that without things getting much, much uglier. Maybe we could get away with the app store temporarily but I’m sure it would get shut down eventually… unless we can convince our other allies to back us first. Unless he thinks there’s a high chance of this, I think he’s underestimating the kind of response we would face-- especially given the current climate.
As he says in the article, we’ve won some trade disputes but I doubt any of them were under an ISDS. Either way though, we do definitely need to boost our own tech sector so we have self-sufficiency if things go bad.
Maybe we could get away with the app store
As a first step, we could strengthen any of our our data protection and consumer protection laws that are lower then the EU laws/regulations to bring them up to the higher standard.
As soon as I heard “retaliatory tariffs” I was like Jesus fuck why? Can we maybe think for longer than three seconds about this in terms of effecting the working class citizens of Canada? Retaliate in ways that hurt American citizens and benefit us. Destabilize the country instead of just making both worse.
The tariffs are being explicitly selected to avoid harm to Canadian consumers (e.g. on items for which there are available and suitably priced alternatives) and on items which create the most effective political pressure.
The classic example is a tarrif on something like Kentucky bourbon. It is targeted at a state that Trump cares about (in theory), is on something discretionary, and there’s tons of Canadian distilleries making broadly comparable products.
Personally, I’m on a Manhattan kick and am exploring the Rye Whiskey scene.
