Trump’s rebranding of Lake Ontario was just the beginning of multi-day effort to provoke Canada
Donald Trump sought to escalate his trade war with Canada on Sunday afternoon and issued a demand on Truth Social that Canadian companies wanting to do business with the U.S. reshore their headquarters within its borders.
His latest remarks come as Canadian officials warned that the country was prepared for an extended dispute with the U.S. after trade talks collapsed and Trump announced tariffs as high as 50 percent on some Canadian goods including dairy products and lumber. Canada has levied reciprocal tariffs against U.S. steel, aluminum and other exports.
On Sunday afternoon, the president said Canadian companies should move their headquarters and production facilities to avoid newly imposed tariffs. The duties are set to begin in 2027.
Even with tariffs, employing Canadians remains cheaper as wages are lower overall, and you don’t need to pay for obscenely expensive medical insurance for your employees in Canada.
I don’t think Americans grasp how uncompetitive their labour market is specifically because they don’t have single payer healthcare.
Companies have figured out that you can move to economically ravaged conservative hellholes and just not offer any benefits or sick time at all!
These same hellholes recently made it so even if you are completely broke and on government funded healthcare, you must work or volunteer for little or nothing to keep it! The labor force is shifting to folks working for minimum wage or less to keep up long term care, and prisoners working for third world wages, with the rest just trying to keep from joining the first two groups.
I mean… that’s why manufacturing moved oversees in the first place.
Yep. I remember as a teenager listening to Clinton blather on about how American workers can compete with any other workers anywhere in the world, and everyone cheered. No one had any doubts at all. Even as a stupid kid I knew that was a completely insane idea. Globalization was the start of the end for the US. We really arent a smart people at all.
Healthcare is almost always paid for by 1) the individual which is expensive, 2) the employer which is expensive or 3) through taxes which is expensive.
If I had a business in Canada the trade-off I see here is substituting high taxes for having to provide employee medical benefits, and how long I think the tariffs would stay in play.
That being said, tariffs on the Canadian side are focused on US production that happens in swing states. So the further escalation here is going to be politicized as geopolitical, in addition to economical, warfare. Who really benefits? Nobody. Who pays? Average people on both sides of the border.