Tag: Canada

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free trade & free markets international affairs

The 51st State?!?!

Canada, United States, border, trade, economics

“What I’d like to see?” confessed the president. “Canada become our 51st state.”

Why?

“We give them military protection,” he offered. 

Then things got weird.

“We don’t need them to build our cars,” Donald Trump added. “We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need them for anything.”

Shocking? Yes. But not just for the disrespect shown to our northern neighbors. 

What’s most shocking is our president’s ignorance of economics. While we don’t “need” Canada for any of the things Trump mentioned, we’re better off trading with Canada than not. The sending of “billions of dollars” up north is neither charity nor waste; the gains both sides make are apparent in the voluntary trades themselves. 

It’s as if he thinks if “we” must pay anyone, it should be to ourselves, that is, to our fellow countrymen.

Behind this is that old crank notion, protectionism: “we have big deficits with Canada, like we have with all countries.”

Now, it’s true that Canadians send more raw materials to the U.S. than we send to them, and that we send them more dollars than they send us theirs: that’s what “trade deficit” means. 

But how is this bad for us? 

Trump doesn’t explain. “I look at some of the deals made and I say, ‘Who the hell made these deals?’ They’re so bad.”

Mr. Trump identifies no specific trade rules or agreement; he doesn’t say which are unfair, or why; nor does he say who made them. But the trades that pile up to that overall deficit, each was made by Americans and Canadians who thought the deal best for them.

Trump’s seemingly goofy idea of adding Canadian provinces to the U.S. as new states would have one great benefit: more trades with these good people than ever. This belies Trump’s far, far more troublesome notion that we need nothing from Canada. We need everything. As Canadians do.

That is, freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture international affairs

Exit Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, Covid, vaccines, economy

America’s far-​north (and far-​left) autocrat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is resigning.

His resignation may pertain to the fact that opposition parties promised to vote no confidence in Trudeau’s Liberal Party when the Canadian parliament meets in March.

Associated Press says that critics complained of Trudeau’s efforts to “strike a balance between economic growth and environmental protection,” i.e., sacrificing economic growth to environmentalist hobbyhorses. 

Critics have many other complaints too.

What’s the worst of Trudeau’s conduct and policies? Tough call. But his treatment of the Canadian truckers who launched a Freedom Convoy to protest Canada’s ludicrous COVID-​19 mandates has to be near the top of the list. Among other measures, Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protestors — and even those of some supporters.

GoFundMe cooperated by blocking donations to the truckers and even, briefly, declaring that blocked donations would not be returned to donors who failed to make a special appeal but would instead be redistributed to “credible and established charities.” The outrage over the planned theft, even if perfectly in sync with Trudeau’s hooliganism, was too great, though, and GoFundMe reversed itself.

Trudeau is also one of many Canadian politicians who leapt into inaction as the Chinese Communist Party tested the limits of its ability to interfere in Canadian elections and politics and engage in transnational repression. I have discussed the problem here; and the sister site of Common Sense, StopTheCCP, has touched on it here and here and here and here.

Trudeau’s exit is good news for Canada and the free world. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly

Crime Fighters Give Up

Canada, Toronto, police, crime, prevention

Fight crime — give criminals all your stuff today!

This isn’t my view. But it’s the apparent view of some — I hope not many — Canadian police officers.

At a recent public meeting about coping with crime, a Toronto police officer told people that to reduce the chances “of being attacked in your home, leave your [car key] fobs at your front door. Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

To reduce the risk to you personally, give up in advance.

Are you following the reasoning? Because I’m not. And I am very disinclined to leave my car keys and cash and my Taiwanese history library in a heap near the front door to buy off home invaders.

Instead, perhaps everybody in high-​risk neighborhoods should install a trap door in their vestibule, rigged in such a way that anybody who forcibly breaks into the home is immediately dropped into a vat of starving piranhas.

AIER’s John Miltimore sees an “obvious problem” with the policeman’s helpful advice. The problem is that he is asking people to encourage burglary and theft, to make it “easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.” If a lot of people follow the advice, this would tend to increase car thefts.

It all reminds Miltimore of the movie Robocop and its crime-​ridden landscape. “There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence.…”

To avoid dystopia, let’s defend ourselves instead.

And our cars. And car keys. And …

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom judiciary too much government

The Vaxxers’ War on Truckers

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, vaccine, Covid

It’s always good when a federal court tells a federal government that it shouldn’t have done some horrible autocratic thing.

Much better had it never been done in the first place — but at least now there is official acknowledgement and, hope against hope, a chance that it won’t recur. 

Hey, a guy can dream.

According to a ruling by Canadian Federal Court Justic Richard Mosley, although truckers’ protests a few years ago against insane pandemic mandates “reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order” (he seems to be forgetting that the government unacceptably broke things first), invoking of an Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.”

No, it doesn’t bear those hallmarks. There “was no national emergency justifying invocation of the Emergencies Act.”

The truckers were clogging traffic to bring attention to a plight caused by the government. That’s it. The truckers weren’t nuking cities or anything. But in reply, the government nuked the rights of truckers by, among other things, freezing their bank accounts and even penalizing people who had donated five bucks to help the truckers out.

Truckers were protesting the fact that they were not being allowed to decide for themselves whether to risk an experimental vaccine. The government banned them from crossing the Canada – U.S. border unless they got the shot.

Luckily, Canada’s federal government has announced that it has seen the error of its ways and — ah, who am I kidding? It is appealing the decision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall international affairs

Sikh Freedom First

Sikh Soldiers, unity, God

If I get gunned down in a hail of bullets … well … who done it?

The genocidal Chinese Communist Party, furious at my new website, StoptheChinazis​.org? 

Perhaps. But what about the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India? 

I’m a member of the Punjab Referendum Commission, an international group advising and monitoring the non-​governmental referendums being organized among the worldwide Sikh diaspora by U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice. Recently, I stood at the entrance of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, outside Vancouver, where Canadian intelligence agencies say agents of Modi’s government assassinated Sikh leader and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, back in June, spraying him with 30 bullets. 

Then, last week, U.S. prosecutors indicted an Indian national for, according to The Wall Street Journal, “working with an Indian government officer to pay a purported hitman $100,000 … to murder a prominent advocate” on U.S. soil.

“The court filing did not name the victim,” The Washington Post reported, “but senior Biden administration officials say the target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-​based Sikhs for Justice.…”

My mouth’s suddenly a bit dry; I’ve been on the same stage as Mr. Pannun several times. 

There’s a long history of political unrest and violence between Sikhs in the Punjab region and the central Indian government … leading today to roughly one-​fourth of Sikhs living outside of India. 

What can we do? Well, though I take no position on whether — YES or NO — the Punjab region should secede from India, I very much like that Sikhs for Justice is resorting to the opposite of violence — democracy — by asking Sikhs around the world to cast their vote.

If they dare.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency insider corruption international affairs

Northern Disclosure

Justin Trudeau, airplane, China, India, Sikh

Oh, Canada. 

My wife and I visited our northern neighbor just a week ago, while its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was stuck in India … with plane trouble.

“Trudeau’s presence at the G20 summit … came against a backdrop of tensions between his government and host India over Ottawa’s handling of rightwing Sikh separatists,” U.K.’s Guardian reported. “New Delhi accuses Ottawa of turning a blind eye to the activities of radical Sikh nationalists who seek a separate Sikh homeland in northern India.”

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I served as a member of the Punjab Referendum Commission, an international group with some know-​how about direct democracy. We’re advising and monitoring the referendums being organized around the world by U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice. Nearly a million Sikhs live in Canada.

Mr. Trudeau should wear the Indian government’s scorn as a badge of honor, of course, for upholding the Sikhs’ basic rights to speak out in his putative free society. 

But that’s not the only billion-​being nation-​state brouhaha this scion faces; Trudeau’s Liberal Party controls the Parliament but “after months of demands from opposition parties” just finally agreed to an official public inquiry into foreign (read: Chinese) interference in their political affairs. 

“Canadian news reports earlier this year, citing anonymous Canadian intelligence officials and leaked classified documents, alleged that Chinese intelligence officials had funneled donations to its preferred candidates,” explains Axios, “all members of Canada’s Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Worse than plane trouble.

I hope Canadians will get to the bottom of it and hold their politicians accountable in ways that we in the U.S. did not 30 years ago when Washington was first awash with Chinese cash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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