[EBT]

Sour news for pickle lovers: Bick's pickles no longer stocked at some Canadian retailers​

From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/sour-news-for-pickle-lovers-bick-s-pickles-no-longer-stocked-at-some-canadian-retailers-1.7605005

The CBC article doesn't answer the most obvious questions. Why was production of a product only sold in Canada moved to the United States? Even before tariffs the strong US dollar would have made the product more expensive for Canadian consumers than it needed to be.

Now that there are 25% tariffs is Treehouse foods planning on bringing production back to Canada? Pickling vegetables doesn't require any special American expertise. Of course the CBC journalist didn't think to ask him.

We need to accept the fact that we are never going to go back to a tariff-free trading regime with the United States. Canada must take steps to on-shore as much production as we can as fast as we can. I am old enough to remember when most food on our supermarket shelves were made in Canada. "Free-trade" resulted in many factories closing down as the food companies that are mostly US based consolidated operations in the United States for "efficiencies".

We need a smart approach to onshoring so as not to burden Canadian consumers too much. The best approach would be phased in tariffs that would allow retailers and suppliers time to make changes in their supply chain. I would propose something like this:

Year 1: 5% tariffs on American products
Year 2: 10% tariffs on American products
Year 3: 20% tariffs on American products
Year 4: 40% tariffs on American products
Year 5: 80% tariffs on American products

In year 5 all American products will be essentially blocked from the Canadian market. There are very few things that the Americans make that we cannot produce ourselves and what we cannot make ourselves we can buy from friendly nations. It is a big world out there. BRICS is already bigger than the G8 combined. We should be applying to join that free-trade alliance. If the Americans no longer want to trade with us we don't have to trade with them.

Never again should we allow ourselves to be so intermeshed and reliant on the American economy. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me!

 

[Richard White]

The CBC article doesn't answer the most obvious questions. Why was production of a product only sold in Canada moved to the United States? Even before tariffs the strong US dollar would have made the product more expensive for Canadian consumers than it needed to be.

Now that there are 25% tariffs is Treehouse foods planning on bringing production back to Canada? Pickling vegetables doesn't require any special American expertise. Of course the CBC journalist didn't think to ask him.

We need to accept the fact that we are never going to go back to a tariff-free trading regime with the United States. Canada must take steps to on-shore as much production as we can as fast as we can. I am old enough to remember when most food on our supermarket shelves were made in Canada. "Free-trade" resulted in many factories closing down as the food companies that are mostly US based consolidated operations in the United States for "efficiencies".

We need a smart approach to onshoring so as not to burden Canadian consumers too much. The best approach would be phased in tariffs that would allow retailers and suppliers time to make changes in their supply chain. I would propose something like this:

Year 1: 5% tariffs on American products
Year 2: 10% tariffs on American products
Year 3: 20% tariffs on American products
Year 4: 40% tariffs on American products
Year 5: 80% tariffs on American products

In year 5 all American products will be essentially blocked from the Canadian market. There are very few things that the Americans make that we cannot produce ourselves and what we cannot make ourselves we can buy from friendly nations. It is a big world out there. BRICS is already bigger than the G8 combined. We should be applying to join that free-trade alliance. If the Americans no longer want to trade with us we don't have to trade with them.

Never again should we allow ourselves to be so intermeshed and reliant on the American economy. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me!

The better bet would be to remove aĺl tariffs on US products.

It may sound crazy but in reality we are paying the tariffs not the US companies when things are imported.

If you remove the tariffs, life becomes that much cheaper here. If you place a 100% import tariff, you double the price of some goods.

If anything, a 100% export levy on all good destined for the US may be better.

 

[Northern Light]

The better bet would be to remove aĺl tariffs on US products.

It may sound crazy but in reality we are paying the tariffs not the US companies when things are imported.

If you remove the tariffs, life becomes that much cheaper here. If you place a 100% import tariff, you double the price of some goods.

If anything, a 100% export levy on all good destined for the US may be better.

The object of tariffs is not to make American products cheaper, it IS to make them more expensive.

The point is to induce a Canadian to switch from buying from a U.S. manufacturer/producer to buying from a Canadian one.

Now, there are products we don't currently make or make at any scale, for which the tariff only discourages U.S. product consumption without a counter-balancing Canadian benefit.

On those products I would be cautious about tariffs.

We cannot and should not attempt to make every product under the sun in Canada, even if that is costly and results in profoundly uncompetitive pricing.

On the other hand, doing nothing results in lower government revenue (a tariff is a tax, collected by the government), sends a message of appeasement, 'please bully us' to other governments and leaves fewer jobs here domestically.

The key is strategically targeting tariffs where there is every reason to believe they can induce reshoring of jobs, and where we want those particular jobs as well; but carefully considering where these may impose
undue hardship to business or consumers.

 

[afransen]

The better bet would be to remove aĺl tariffs on US products.

It may sound crazy but in reality we are paying the tariffs not the US companies when things are imported.

If you remove the tariffs, life becomes that much cheaper here. If you place a 100% import tariff, you double the price of some goods.

If anything, a 100% export levy on all good destined for the US may be better.

Normally, I would agree with you. But with Trump, tariffs are a language he understands. We are trying to achieve a reasonable level of trade relations with the US. Not imposing counter tariffs is interpreted as weakness.

 

[zang]

The CBC article doesn't answer the most obvious questions. Why was production of a product only sold in Canada moved to the United States? Even before tariffs the strong US dollar would have made the product more expensive for Canadian consumers than it needed to be.

Because the CAD was much much closer to par with the USD around the time then-owner J.M. Smuckers made the decision to move it to the US, likely hopeful they'll save a few bucks, and not knowing that it was only a blip.

Alternatively: Decades of Liberal and Conservative governments allowing foreign ownership of Canadian businesses.

 

[Monarch Butterfly]

 

[Jonny5]

We cannot and should not attempt to make every product under the sun in Canada, even if that is costly and results in profoundly uncompetitive pricing.

On the other hand, doing nothing results in lower government revenue (a tariff is a tax, collected by the government), sends a message of appeasement, 'please bully us' to other governments and leaves fewer jobs here domestically.

The key is strategically targeting tariffs where there is every reason to believe they can induce reshoring of jobs, and where we want those particular jobs as well; but carefully considering where these may impose
undue hardship to business or consumers.

Yes, this is especially important to comprehend for a small market like Canada where the on-shoring of a manufacturing business could be easily monopolized and we end up paying even more in the long term for the same thing than at the tariff rate.

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance out there now where people are accepting of paying more to buy Canadian, but simultaneously complain about how many industry sectors in Canada operate as oligopolies or near-monopolies and they pay too much for it. We want more competition but are inviting less, and everyone seems to think there's many alternatives to source anything and everything needed for production, but for many critical inputs to make consumer goods, there isn't, unless you give someone in Canada a sweetheart government subsidy to do it, the very kind of thing they say we also don't want.

 

[Northern Light]

Yes, this is especially important to comprehend for a small market like Canada where the on-shoring of a manufacturing business could be easily monopolized and we end up paying even more in the long term for the same thing than at the tariff rate.

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance out there now where people are accepting of paying more to buy Canadian, but simultaneously complain about how many industry sectors in Canada operate as oligopolies or near-monopolies and they pay too much for it. We want more competition but are inviting less, and everyone seems to think there's many alternatives to source anything and everything needed for production, but for many critical inputs to make consumer goods, there isn't, unless you give someone in Canada a sweetheart deal to do it, the very kind of thing they say we also don't want.

Agreed on all of the above.

I think there is room for some strategic, 'onshoring' we'll call it, though that's misnomer.....but I digress.

But tariffs will rarely, if ever be the key there.

It will be things like energy-intensive industries where power here can be cheaper than elsewhere, particularly true in Quebec.

It will be industries where the cost of shipping finished product is large (cars).

Or where closeness to critical inputs (mined materials, wood, or agricultural) really matters and the time savings is monetary and accretive.

A tariff in that context, can help cover some one-time, get over the hurdle costs, (for government) or might allow for a slightly easier launch of a new factory etc. But if the tariff is necessary long term,
we're probably building the wrong thing.

****

One industry we seem to be doing really well is greenhouse grown foods, we're starting to dominate that space.

 

[afransen]

One industry we seem to be doing really well is greenhouse grown foods, we're starting to dominate that space.

A lot of that seems to be driven by cross-pollination through immigration from the world leader in greenhouse food production, the Netherlands. The trouble with this industry is that it is dependent on the US market for scale, and has few reasonable alternatives, whereas the Netherlands exports across the EU and UK and beyond.

 

[guavadelic]

Carney praising Trump after the meeting in Alaska (that didn't involve Ukraine) where he rolled the red carpet out for Putin isn't a good look...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art...eating-the-opportunity-to-end-war-in-ukraine/

 

[EBT]

Carney praising Trump after the meeting in Alaska (that didn't involve Ukraine) where he rolled the red carpet out for Putin isn't a good look...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art...eating-the-opportunity-to-end-war-in-ukraine/

I don't know how Carney praising Trump for his Alaska summit with Putin is a "bad look" for Carney. Literally the only good thing Trump has tried to do since getting back in office is end the Ukraine war although he is going about it the wrong way so this war will be settled on the battlefield on Putin's terms sometime before the end of this year.

How is it a bad thing for the leaders of the world's two nuclear superpowers to meet cordially in person in an attempt to end a war that has killed well over a million Ukrainians to date? Joe Biden refused to even pick up the phone to talk to Vladmir. We should hope for good relations between the US and Russia since a nuclear exchange between these two countries would be the end of the world as we know it.

The Ukraine war should never have happened. Biden's provocation of Russia goes back as far as 2014 when as Obama's VP Biden oversaw the overthrow of a democratically elected president in Ukraine and the installation of an American puppet. This is an American engineered proxy war intended to weaken Russia.

Just months into Russia's special military operation in the Donbass Russia and Ukraine had inked a peace agreement in Istanbul. All that was needed were Putin's and Zelensky's signature. The United States did not want an end to the war, so Joe Biden ordered Zelensky not to sign the agreement. The message was conveyed by Biden's emissary Boris Johnson who to travelled to Kiev to tell Zelensky in person that he was not to sign the agreement with Russia and that NATO would still funnel billions to him. That was almost four years ago. Tragically since then, over a million Ukranian soldiers have been killed. The Ukrainians are just being used as cannon fodder for the Americans and NATO.

A "bad look" for Carney is his recent pledge of $4.3 billion in Canadian taxpayer dollars for Ukraine. Millions of Canadians are facing dire financial situations thanks to Trump's pledge to destroy our economy a pledge Trump is making good on, and Carney is doing nothing about and yet Carney is giving billions of OUR money to the most corrupt country in the world to fund the purchase of American-made weapons to further carnage. Something very wrong with this picture.

How many Canadians support this? Even Canadians of Ukrainian heritage must be able to see that their homeland is being sacrificed in the interest of the American objective to weaken Russia. There is no debate about this in Canada. Everyone seems to be of the mind that of course we are going to send billions to Ukraine because it is "the right thing to do" "everybody in NATO is doing it".

With Carney's new $4.3 billion infusion Canada has given Zelensky almost $15 billion. Imagine what could have been done in Canada with that amount of money. We don't have money growing on trees here in Canada. We have a big housing affordability crisis in Canada. We have a big homelessness problem in Canada and yet everyone is OK with giving Zelensky $15 billion some of which no doubt will be skimmed off so Zelensky can buy another mansion in Miami or a big mega-yacht that he can sail on when he finally flees Ukraine.

 

[Monarch Butterfly]

Carney praising Trump after the meeting in Alaska (that didn't involve Ukraine) where he rolled the red carpet out for Putin isn't a good look...

View attachment 674197
View attachment 674199
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art...eating-the-opportunity-to-end-war-in-ukraine/

Carney is playing "poker" with Trump, as a tacit negotiation.

 

[afransen]

I don't know how Carney praising Trump for his Alaska summit with Putin is a "bad look" for Carney. Literally the only good thing Trump has tried to do since getting back in office is end the Ukraine war although he is going about it the wrong way so this war will be settled on the battlefield on Putin's terms sometime before the end of this year.

How is it a bad thing for the leaders of the world's two nuclear superpowers to meet cordially in person in an attempt to end a war that has killed well over a million Ukrainians to date? Joe Biden refused to even pick up the phone to talk to Vladmir. We should hope for good relations between the US and Russia since a nuclear exchange between these two countries would be the end of the world as we know it.

The Ukraine war should never have happened. Biden's provocation of Russia goes back as far as 2014 when as Obama's VP Biden oversaw the overthrow of a democratically elected president in Ukraine and the installation of an American puppet. This is an American engineered proxy war intended to weaken Russia.

Just months into Russia's special military operation in the Donbass Russia and Ukraine had inked a peace agreement in Istanbul. All that was needed were Putin's and Zelensky's signature. The United States did not want an end to the war, so Joe Biden ordered Zelensky not to sign the agreement. The message was conveyed by Biden's emissary Boris Johnson who to travelled to Kiev to tell Zelensky in person that he was not to sign the agreement with Russia and that NATO would still funnel billions to him. That was almost four years ago. Tragically since then, over a million Ukranian soldiers have been killed. The Ukrainians are just being used as cannon fodder for the Americans and NATO.

A "bad look" for Carney is his recent pledge of $4.3 billion in Canadian taxpayer dollars for Ukraine. Millions of Canadians are facing dire financial situations thanks to Trump's pledge to destroy our economy a pledge Trump is making good on, and Carney is doing nothing about and yet Carney is giving billions of OUR money to the most corrupt country in the world to fund the purchase of American-made weapons to further carnage. Something very wrong with this picture.

How many Canadians support this? Even Canadians of Ukrainian heritage must be able to see that their homeland is being sacrificed in the interest of the American objective to weaken Russia. There is no debate about this in Canada. Everyone seems to be of the mind that of course we are going to send billions to Ukraine because it is "the right thing to do" "everybody in NATO is doing it".

With Carney's new $4.3 billion infusion Canada has given Zelensky almost $15 billion. Imagine what could have been done in Canada with that amount of money. We don't have money growing on trees here in Canada. We have a big housing affordability crisis in Canada. We have a big homelessness problem in Canada and yet everyone is OK with giving Zelensky $15 billion some of which no doubt will be skimmed off so Zelensky can buy another mansion in Miami or a big mega-yacht that he can sail on when he finally flees Ukraine.

Other than parroting Russian talking points, I'm not sure what your aim is. Canada's support for Ukraine is part of our 2% of GDP military spending commitment, and not being diverted from other uses.

Weakening Russia is a worthwhile goal in an of itself. Putin is expansionist, and the next war could be against a NATO member like Estonia or Latvia. It is better for Russia to be weak and spent rather than emboldened, as a direct conflict with NATO would be much riskier in terms of nuclear escalation.

 

[nfitz]

The unpaid labour is shocking. No pay until doors are closed?!? FAs are doing lots of work during boarding or any delays while still at the gate

Increasingly they are working long before doors of closed given Air Canada's excessive delays.

It's unfortunate to see the government order the union back to work. And not surprisingly the union has refused. A dangerous game given the federal anti-strike legislation is built on a constitutional house-of-cards, and the successful constitutional challenge to Ontario Bill 124 last year, and the November 2022 near General Strike that caused the Ontario Government to cave.

 

[nfitz]

The better bet would be to remove aĺl tariffs on US products.

Which would destroy the dairy industry, with the very cheap industrialized dairy production there.

If we had across-the-board tariffs against the USA, then you might have a point. But we don't. It's very targeted. If you go for sectors where there's enough non-USA supply to not impact Canadian pricing much then why not tariff the USA? There seems to be a lot more Mexican and Central/South American produce in the grocery stores. How much more expensive I don't know - but perhaps cheaper for the grocery stores than the rotting US produce on the shelves.