Summary
Ontario will impose a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota starting Monday in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods.
Premier Doug Ford warned U.S. governors and vowed to maintain the surcharge until all tariffs are lifted.
Canada has already imposed $30 billion in retaliatory tariffs, with more planned.
Ford also threatened to cut power to the states by April and banned U.S. firms from bidding on Ontario contracts. A $100M SpaceX deal for rural internet was also scrapped in response.
Based Doug Ford was not on my 2025 bingo card.
Not enough, it should be 100% and another thing if we have a surplus that we sell, why the fuck is electricity so expensive in Ontario!?
Why is electricity so expensive in Quebec? Because fuck the people that’s why 😑
I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of commerce but I do know Canadians are also getting fucked by Canada. Electricity, lumber, construction materials are artificially expensive as fuck. Since covid the price skyrocketed because of price fixing and no-one did shit and they stated high.
Same with food prices, telecom… I love Justin standing up to Trump, but it’s also true that he’s failed protecting the average Canadian. Corporations have run amok and no-one has stood in their way.
Glad Canada is sticking to I because they’re sending a message Trump that they’re not going to fuck around with him flipping the on/off switch on tariffs
I think the damage is done. I hope to never see American liquor in stores ever again.
I’m American I agree. Your country doesn’t deserve our businesses if we have a dictator running our country
We will be happy to come back as soon as America enacts stronger protections to prevent this from happening again and dumps Trump. Nothing wrong the the American people, it’s just one American and one south African than are ruining everything for everyone.
Unfortunately, the dumbest ~70 million Americans got together and ruined it for everyone.
Trump is just one guy, but he’s the fart filled turd floating on top of a long stream of raw sewage.
You’re forgetting about the 70 million folks who voted for him. Terrible hateful folks
Add that to the eleigble voters who abstained and you have a sizable proportion of the adult population.
What kind of protections though he is in violation of
NAFTA2erm… USMCA that he negotiated himself. Technically what he is doing is illegal, but Republican Congress is letting him do it.There’s definitely a lot wrong with a large portion of the American people.
Where necessary or convenient, sure. But alcohol for example has so many other options that I see no reason to give them business ever again. Maybe in a few decades.
I haven’t been to BCLs recently but I’m really hoping taking American liquor out means they’ve brought a better selection of our local stuff in cause we have some really great breweries and distilleries in BC and it’s hard to find their stuff.
Exactly – the threat of tariffs – and annexation! – must not only stop, but be refuted forever by a new treaty, signed by the US. Promising both will stop, for good, is the only remedy now.
Trump himself signed the treaty that he now claims is unfair. The US doesn’t have respect for honour, the law, or even reality anymore. They voted in a criminal to be their President, they have no respect for anything except money now.
There is no promise or treaty that will bring this to a conclusion forever.
Why are mostly blue states getting punished for shithead? They should be focusing on red states. They’re the ones who voted for this nonsense.
USA is USA.
People outside of the USA will treat you the same as you treat any other nation. Does trumps tariffs only target the liberal provinces?
Because, it turns out, that blue states and red states are part of the same country. I think it’s a stupid way to do things, but that’s what you guys have settled on.
I wonder if ON can impose a 25% surcharge solely on Michigan? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. Plenty of people from Minnesota (47%) and New York (43 %) voted for this nonsense.
Eh, upstate NY is probably all red, save for perhaps part of Albany. NY State and NY City are very, very different.
Unfortunately they are the ones getting power provided to them from Ontario.
I don’t know all the facts but maybe if more people.votrd in the first place Donald wouldn’t have won? Maybe not… But Americans should be pushing back and they haven’t done anything yet but complain online. Pushing any single one of them to take action is better than only attempting to punish the ones who don’t even care.
Canada can’t exactly cut off power to Texas
Texas handles their own outages perfectly well.
However, we’re willing to export our Arctic Vortices to Texas free of any additional levies.
In addition to the other answers, there are still red districts in blue states, such as NY-21 currently held by Stefanik and has a large border with Canada.
When Trump said “America is back!” did he mean in the back of the line? Cause that’s where we’re at fellas.
In healthcare, we’ve been back of the line for decades.
Ironically, while Ford might be doing a pretty good job staying tough against Trump, he’s doing his level best to try to drive Ontario right to the back of that healthcare line as well. So save us a spot?
What’s he doing? I’m ootl.
Just the usual conservative tactic of underfunding public healthcare to push brake healthcare practitioners and patients into privatised healthcare services, which leaves public healthcare services understaffed and just further snowballs into worse staffing issues at public healthcare services and leaves the state of access to healthcare in the province in an abysmal state.
And Trump cares that these blue states will be cut off why?
Maybe a state like NY votes blue in state wide elections, but they vote in a lot of Republicans for the House in districts outside if NYC
We are blue in cities… a lot of house support for Trump comes from those red NYS districts.
Michigan is a blue state?
No, but the other two are, and New York in particular is a very notable blue state.
It’s too bad they can’t just do 50% on MAGA households and non voters. Somewhere in NY there is someone who actively campaigned to prevent this and continues to protest and they’re getting a 25% price hike anyway.
At least we can target businesses and billionaires more directly, although unlike the average voter they need a lot, lot more pain before they change.
Yeah, you simply can’t micromanage policies to effect another country to that granularity. It’s why people should think carefully about who they elect to represent their country to the rest of the world. The US elected a criminal to represent them, so they have to expect they’re going to feel some pain by their association with that criminal, whether they voted for him or not.
Can they get the Fed to drop the F35 contract for a European platform?
Heres to hoping! Not if peepee gets in
No offense but Trump would welcome these on highly liberal Minnesota and New York and be impartial to Michigan. These are not affecting conservative states.
Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a very blunt instrument. The rest of our tariffs have been ultra-targeted, but Doug Ford really wants to do something and this is the main tool he has provincially.
There’s enough rural, conservative areas within those states that would be affected I imagine he’ll have some blowback. How much is hard to say at this point, especially given that he’s still adding and removing his own tariffs all the time.
I’m not entirely sure he would care either way to be fair, but you do raise a good point.
Makes you wonder if this is the first phase of what he meant about “blue states completely disappearing off the map” next year.
The states as a whole are liberal, but the rural northern parts are fairly conservative. It’s the northern parts that consume the bulk of the electricity imports
removed by mod
It will affect the customers, who are rural. The states are blue, because of their cities, but the cities aren’t reliant on Canadian electricity. The rural areas are, and they vote red.
Do you really think the Trump supporters will connect the dots?
JD Vance showed how much he cares about rural communities in Hillbilly Eulogy. Rural Americans are just impressionable pawns to Trump and his ilk.
Do you have a source on that? I’d really expect they’re all on the same grid.
Of course they’re on the same grid. Most of the US is interconnected. The Eastern interconnect connects everything East of the rockies, excluding Texas
Prices are fairly localized depending on the cost of production at the plant nearest to you. Much of Southern Minnesota is fed by the Monticello nuclear plant, for example. It’s the northern areas where Canadian power generation isblargely used because it’s closer. It’s those places that will have try to get power from elsewhere in the upper midwest grid (if there isbany capacity), or pay the additional 25% tax
In the past when he refuses emergency assistance for blue states his advisers struggle to make him understand that the affected areas voted for him. Seems to struggle to understand or care beyond how an entire state voted.
To be fair, does it matter if it’s a blue state either way?
Well they are more closely allied with Canada than whatever the federal gov is doing by this point.
I’m waiting for him to tear up the gd damn Starlink contract that he keeps threatening to do, but hasn’t done.
Drug Fraud isn’t known for keeping his word.
It’s a Brand New Ford!
Ontario has already ripped up a $100-million deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring Starlink’s high-speed internet to rural and northern communities and remote First Nations.
Article claims it’s already happened!
Hopefully they actually killed that contract and not just saying it for clout. They better have a plan to still provide better Internet services to these communities.
My wife’s family had to deal with shitty xplornet services for years while living in the sticks. They literally had no internet for weeks and xplornet was like “we don’t see any issues on our end”. It took multiple calls to actually get a tech to finally come out, but then said nothing’s wrong and left it at that, despite no internet still. Xplornet just eventually started ignoring their calls. They got starlink and haven’t had an issue since. It sucks that it’s owned by Elon “the man-child Nazi” Musk, who could just decide to cut off services in Canada. Doesn’t help our own telecoms are dog shit in their own way either. It’s long overdue getting the rural and remote communities access to Internet in Canada.
Thanks for the correction. I’d only seen news that he promised to do that, but not that he had.
Drug Fraud is hilarious 😂. I’m gonna use this later.
I’m certain he’s doing it for the wrong reasons, but it’s nice to see the angry raging conservative attacking a genuine asshole for once.
Honestly he’s even doing it for the right reasons. His country has been economically attacked. Not to respond would just make it worse.
I suspect he’s playing it up for the camera in order to differentiate himself from American conservatives now that they’ve begun turning on Canada. It’s something I imagine we’ll see out of Poilievre as well, because otherwise they’ll quickly become unelectable.
Just remember that they were chums all up until this point, and that’s still damning. Ford supported American conservatives all the way until the leopards turned to eat his face. Yeah, it’s cool that he’s going above and beyond to fight back now, but he still wants Ontario to act like Texas.
I’m not so sure about Poilievre. Imo he’ll take a more moderate stance against MAGA if any at all. He’s changed his stance recently, similar to Ford, but it felt a bit later and a bit weaker.
Yeah Ford is a raging asshole so he’s loud and combative. PP genuinely just seems like a little bitch puppet so even if he turns on MAGA, I don’t think it will be as loud as this.
Not disagreeing at all. It’s the standard right wing mode of operation, nothing matters until it affects them personally. It should be studied as a developmental disability.
Kudos to the Canadians and Canadiens! I ordered another pair of Baffin boots, Made in Canada, last week.
Hold up - if there is already a 25% tariff - IE tax - on Canadian electricity, does that mean that there is now another 25% tax on that electricity?
And wouldn’t this have a slight compounding effect on the second us tariff?
Yes, but us postponed their tariffs another month.
Thing that sucks tho, is at this point it doesn’t matter if there’s tariffs or not, since people have started preparing as if there will be. Worse, tariffs get integrated into an economy and are next to impossible to un-do. God 45 is so stupid
The era of US-Canada being brothers in arms is over. I doubt US will be receiving any favors in the future without something in return. And if Canada chooses to expand their supply chains outside of the US, which they 100% should, there’ll be no coming back to a scale of trade as it exists today.
I cut off a Canadian guy I was friends with recently, this guy agreed with everything Trump was doing.
Told him I don’t associate with Trump supporters, even weirder you’re Canadian.
He said he didn’t support trump, but reads all the policies front to back and agrees with them.
I said ok, bye and blocked his ass.
Wtf is going on?? He had some bullshit reply to everything like he was Canadian maga.
Reich wing populism is on the rise, globally.
So, he might hate Trump, but he love the Canadian version.
Someone I know just keeps telling me he disagrees with every policy that’s bad, while also saying he agrees with Trump for 50 things per the 5 he disagrees with.
Anyway that relationship is very sour as you can imagine
They’re the Austrian who likes Hitler.
Living in rural Alberta, I am actually fairly amazed how little I encounter Trump supporters since he’s been elected. If they are around, they keep their stupid fucking mouths shut.
I know at least 3 that vocally supported him during the election and have nothing good to say about him now, and the fact that Smith seems like she’s in bed with him has caused them to re-evaluate their UPC support. Polievre is probably still safe because nobody is voting Liberal, but people talk about how he didn’t push back against the tariffs, and it didn’t reflect well on him.
I know they’re still out there, but there’s an Oh Canada streak that’s pretty deep in rural areas countering Trump’s bullshit.
The same forces that created Trump are at work in Canada. And they are supported by US organizations. Have you noticed that suddenly even second tier US politicians have opinions about Trudeau, Carney, and Pollievre? It is the same as Musk in Germany. We are under attack.
I’ve met people like that here in the UK too. Trump has this incomprehensible charisma for arseholes the world over.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, Canada was well on its path to elect a right leaning government. Trudeau has already resigned and his party was in the gutters. So that tells you how majority of Canadians have been feeling. There is extreme false-facts-driven anti-immigrant sentiment going around, imo, propagated by the same media that is doing so in the US.
Luckily, Nazi musk and his orange monkey’s moves have taken off the veil for some Canadians so there is still some hope for sanity prevailing in their upcoming elections.
Eh Canada was on track to elect the conservatives because the liberals have been in 10 years and fptp trends to a two party system.
That’s a problem we have globally. Although it might seem like Trump style populism vs Canadian neo-liberalism(with all it’s pros and cons), we’re both purple. You guys just have a bit more right wing red in the dye mix. It’s plausible that Canada elects our own Trump then we can both be stupid.
The only ideology that has a chance at stopping the populist wave is Sanders style social democracy because it addresses the same core issue of wealth disparity. But it doesn’t look like anyone is electing that anytime soon.
John Stewart agrees with some of the DOGE objectives.
John Oliver agrees with some of RFKs beliefs.
And I agree the US penny should have ended in the 90s, but fuck everything else the orange turd says.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But believing these thieves at face value is dumb. RFK plays into whatever grift gets him more attention and money.
Everyone feels that the government can be more efficient, but literally firing 100k employees without even knowing what they do and they having to try and get them back due to the massive fuckup? And the childish emails they’re sending employees? All within 30 days?? This is amateur hour man, you have to start to think what is their game, how are they benefiting. Crashing the economy so they can buy up more property cheap like in 2018 and COVID years? There is a game plan and we’re not even being thought about, were just fucked
Cant fix stupid!
You can replace Canada with any other country! Europe and the US aren’t really friends anymore these days.
This read as downplaying Canada’s significance for a moment, and then immediately circled back to the US being the isolationist Pariah state it is becoming
I just hope everyone is learning how easily your country can be owned and controlled by outside interest - if your country is filled with uneducated, incurious, and indoctrinated citizens. We have no one to blame but ourselves as we ask The Kremlin to take the wheel.
There is no greater enemy than a friend betrayed
Canada - America trade amounts to a little over $920B https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12595
Canadian GDP is a little over $2.1T https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CA
We’re talking nearly half of their GDP. In addition, half of Canadian foreign investment comes directly from the US. They will continue to be integrated into the US economy, even if Trump doubled the tariffs tomorrow.
And that’s because Canada, and Mexico to an even higher extent, are completely reliant on US trade. They both have no real choice but to grin and bear it. They will of course speak out publicly for the domestic audience but things will continue more or less status quo for the foreseeable future.
canada and Mexico are not “grinning and bearing it” though
Yes, they are. There will be no meaningful response because they have no leverage. Any meaningful change from status quo would mean an immediate economic crisis.
Ignore what they say on camera because they are speaking to their domestic audience.
Right now, Canada has placed a 25% tariff on $30B worth of imports. That’s 7% of US imports. Whereas Trump has placed 25% on everything that Canada exports to the US.
And 80% of Canadian exports go directly to the US.
So just for reference.
Canada retaliatory tariff -> $30B which represents less than 1% of total US exports
Trump’s tariffs -> ~$550B which represents nearly 80% of total Canadian exports
Ignore the rhetoric, look at the numbers. Canada and Mexico have no choice. They signed their economic autonomy away a long time ago. It’s sort of like when Greece went through their debt crisis and couldn’t do jack shit because they signed away their autonomy to Brussels (and really Germany).
There are trade-offs to every decision. Canada got easy access to the American market and a nice way to exploit their natural resources. But it also gives Washington an absurd amount of leverage over them.
Mexico is even more screwed.
I’m not disagreeing with you that free trade with the US was a very stupid thing for Canada to agree to, but back in the day it was shoved down our throats by the conservative government of the day. Canada is experiencing the consequences of that poor decision right now. That being said, as an export heavy, raw materials-heavy country we have a lot of options. In the first Trunp presidency we signed CETA with the EU, we already get a lot of food imports from Mexico (that won’t change) and since a trump was elected the 2nd time we’ve signed trade deals with Ecuador, and new military agreements with Brazil and the Philippines on top of all our existing allies. There will be more deals that Canada makes, unlike the US, our signature on international agreements actually means something. Canadians aren’t at all like Americans, we are united and we will do anything and everything it takes to protect our sovereignty and our country. Again unlike Americans, we are prepared to go without. We’re a smaller economy and therefore more nimble. We’re doing all kinds of things internally as well. Barring military action by the US on us, I am not that worried and have full confidence in all Canadians to stand up for ourselves and do what we need to do to rid ourselves of the US fascist protectionist isolationist scourge.
All countries are sovereign but some countries are more sovereign than others. If Canada’s priority was protecting sovereignty then they would not be in this position to begin with.
It’s something that has been decades in the making. It will take decades to reverse course. It isn’t going to meaningfully change in the upcoming 5-10 years.
You say Canadians are ready to “go without” but we’re talking about millions of people losing their jobs. A historic spike in poverty. Collapse of many industries. No sane leadership would ever cut off trade with America. National pride doesn’t feed a family.
Long term, sure, maybe there will be a realignment. I doubt it, but it’s possible. The near future is a chaotic one where Canada and Mexico are going to need the economic value from America. We’re headed for troubled times globally.
Unlike the US we don’t hate, despise, and distrust the federal govt. No matter which party is in power. Even our Conservative Party supports gay marriage, trans & LGBTQ rights, equity, gun control and legal weed. Our govt has already put in place supports for those who will lose their jobs due to the US being a bag of dicks. We believe there is a role for federal govt and that it has responsibilities to uphold. We’re much closer ideologically to most European countries so we’re going to continue fostering our excellent relationships with France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, etc. The US is free to cut down its own national parks for lumber. Enjoy!
Trump doesn’t want Canada as a friend. They will just try and stop him from deals with Russia.
