Read, Seen or Heard -- August 2025 (p) (updated September 4)
Fourteen items
What Kids really want — Defending Trump’s trade policy — Odyssey Theatre: The Girl with no Hands — What survived from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — The Cowichan Tribes case — “CUSMA-compliant” explained (updated) — Kurosawa: Throne of Blood — Local Climate Action is highly effective — The Misinformation Ecosystem — Kurosawa: High and Low — Ukrainians beat NATO (updated) — Kurosawa: Ikiru — Anne Applebaum talks with Paul Wells — Pensions and climate risk
What Kids really want
August 4. An article in The Atlantic reports on a Harris poll of 500 children aged 8 to 12 across the US. “A majority reported having smartphones, and about half of the 10-to-12-year-olds said that most or all of their friends use social media.“ What kids really want comes through quite clearly:
Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.
The article notes various efforts around the country to rebuild a childhood “rooting it in freedom, responsibility, and friendship.“
What we see in the data and from the stories parents send us is both simple and poignant: Kids being raised on screens long for real freedom. It’s like they’re homesick for a world they’ve never known.
Granting them more freedom may feel uncomfortable at first. But if parents want their kids to put down their phones, they need to open the front door.
In Defence of Trump’s Trade Policy
August 7a. Probably the best rationale we’ll ever see of the Trump regime’s trade policy, in the New York Times, by Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.
Re the EU “deal” (Turnberry, the Scottish golf course resort, is portrayed as heralding a new era in world trade policy, the “Trump Round”):
…by using a mix of tariffs and deals for foreign market access and investment, the United States has laid the foundation for a new global trading order.
The previous system rejected tariffs as a legitimate tool of public policy, meaning that the United States sacrificed tariff protection for critical manufacturing and other sectors.
…
The bulk of global manufacturing shifted to jurisdictions such as China, Vietnam and Mexico where companies could exploit vulnerable workers or benefit from expansive state support while the United States ran up what in absolute terms is the highest trade deficit in the history of the world.
…
Many of these deals also come with significant investment commitments into U.S. productive capacity, such as $600 billion in the case of the European Union and $350 billion by South Korea. These investments — 10 times larger than the inflation-adjusted value of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II — will accelerate U.S. reindustrialization.
…
It took over 50 years from that first meeting at Bretton Woods [in 1944] until the creation of the W.T.O. [in 1995.] It has been 30 years since. Fewer than 130 days from the beginning of the Trump Round, the Turnberry system is by no means complete, but its construction is well underway.
Comment.
Besides the pretentious grandiosity of vision, the beliefs underlying this defence are remarkable:
+ the belief that manufacturing is what makes a nation;
+ the belief that broad-based tariffs are effective in reshoring business;
+ the exclusive focus on the trade deficit in goods, ignoring the surplus in services;
+ the illusion that EU and Japanese investment commitments will accelerate re-industrialization of the US.
Odyssey Theatre: The Girl with no Hands
August 7b. Much enjoyed this year’s offering from Odyssey Theatre, The Girl with no Hands, loosely based on the Grimm Brothers’ Tale.1 Written by OT’s artistic director Laurie Steven, it involves the devil, silver hands, marriage to a king, falsified letters and a happy ending as in the Grimm tale but not much else. Above all, unlike the sweet, obedient girl in the folk tale, this version’s powerful opening scene portrays an angry and desperate girl (very ably played by Erin Loretta Mackey) who is on the verge of suicide. A silph (spirit of the air) convinces her to enter into a fantasy world to find healing. Much ado with the devil (in several disguises, forcefully portrayed by William Beddoe), the king, his mother and many other characters follows. In the end the girl lands back in the real world and is quite happy, as in the tale.
This was an elaborate production. All characters have commedia dell’ arte masks, rendered more beautiful and complex than ever, an original sound score, fast scene and costume changes, excellent acting and solid dialogue.
On till August 24. Go see it! In Strathcona Park, under the stars.
Did anything survive from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act?
August 7c. In a podcast epidode of Energy vs. Climate,2 Jason Walsh, Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance,3 talks about what survived of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, post-Trump’s Big Beautiful [they propose Ugly] Budget Bill. He speaks of a “complete failure of leadership,“ on the world stage, and asserts that
from a US more parochial standpoint, what it means, very concrete, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of lost jobs. It means big electricity price spikes at a time when we are seeing demand for power grow for the first time.
And it will continue to grow for the first time in like 20 years. And it means ceding manufacturing leadership, particularly clean manufacturing leadership, to China. I mean, we had started to bend the curve. We saw more investment in EVs in the United States last year than in China. That was an enormous deal.
Trump is “doubling down on the US being a petro-state in perpetuity.” Some tax credits survived but can be effectively turned to nothing on advice from Treasury officials:
...probably the biggest tax credit, certainly in terms of of dollars and scoring was a technology neutral tax credit, an investment tax credit and a production tax credit. ... It was agnostic on technology, all based on emissions reduction. Basically they continued that for everything except solar and wind.
The 10% labour standards bonus and the 10% domestic content bonus were also preserved. But if the underlying investment disappears, then that doesn’t do anything. As well:
...there were also a set of provisions added in the [OBBA] bill, the foreign entity of concern, fiat provisions that basically put a set of restrictions on any manufacturer’s product or component coming from a foreign entity of concern, which is just a handful of ... countries, North Korea, Russia, but most importantly, fundamentally, China. And without going into great detail about those provisions, which are enormously complex, our fear is that they are so complex that they will choke off investment in a wide range of projects, even where the tax credit survives and our advanced manufacturing production tax credit survives and, critically, they will rely on guidance from the US Treasury. ... In the Trump administration, they have a), gutted the federal workforce of any expertise, and b), are openly hostile to clean technologies of any kind. So I suspect they'll use that to choke off what they don't like and they're already making moves toward that actually, in a pretty significant way.
Private Property Rights do not extinguish Aboriginal Title
August 7d. The Cowichan Tribes court case, decided in B.C. Supreme Court, promises to become yet another key marker for Indigenous rights in Canada. At issue was land “south shore of Lulu Island, across from Tilbury Island, in Richmond, British Columbia“ (747 ha). “The trial commenced in September 2019. There were a total of 513 trial days.”
The Crown grants of fee simple interest did not displace or extinguish the Cowichan’s Aboriginal title.
The court directs federal and local authorities which had granted fee simple interest in these lands “to negotiate in good faith reconciliation … in a manner consistent with the honour of the Crown.“
As both Andrew Coyne in the G&M [paywalled] and Adam Olson in The Tyee state, this decision does not extinguish private property, it strengthens it. In contrast to anguished cries from the likes of the Fraser Institute and the National Post, Olson notes that “The Cowichan case was never about seizing private homes. In a 2017 pre-trial ruling, the court noted “the plaintiffs... do not seek to invalidate or render defective the fee simple interests held by private landowners.”“
As Coyne writes:
The case is the third to declare aboriginal title, first defined by the Supreme Court in the 1997 Delgamuukw case, to a specific parcel of land (the first was the Tsilhqot’in decision in 2014), and the first to find that it applied to privately owned property.
…
Under Article 13 the [1871 ]BC Terms of Union admitting the territory to the federation, the province was enjoined from selling Indian settlement lands. Only the federal government could extinguish aboriginal title.
Law firm MLT Atkins notes:
Cowichan Tribes v. Canada is a landmark decision in the evolution of Aboriginal law in Canada. It addresses issues left outstanding in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Tsilqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, particularly with respect to the interaction between Aboriginal title and fee simple interests.
The federal government has said it will appeal.
What does “CUSMA-compliant” mean?
August 8. For a few months now newspaper articles regularly talk about “CUSMA4-compliant exports” but never explain what it amounts to or else quote greatly varying percentages. Thanks to a reference in Justin Ling’s article in today’s Toronto Star, I come upon a Featured Insight of RBC written by Salim Zanzana (dated April 25, 2025) that clarifies the matter.
The clue is found at the start of the article:
…only about 38% of U.S. imports from Canada were traded under CUSMA provisions in 2024. We believe this low percentage was largely due to the administrative burden of meeting its rules of origin requirements.
…
…about 38% of total U.S. goods imports from Canada valued at US$156 billion were traded under CUSMA in 2024. But a much larger share of trade could be compliant relatively quickly.
The U.S. product list of zero tariff rates in the 2020 CUSMA agreement covered about 94% of Canadian exports in 2024 by our count—including most energy products and potash fertilizer. We believe the reason CUSMA/USMCA tariffs were not used in most cases last year was, because many Canadian exporters rely on U.S. general tariffs that were already very low or zero under World Trade Organization rules without the administrative burden imposed by CUSMA’s rules of origin.
Of course, not to be forgotten is that “product specific tariffs have also been imposed, including a 25% duty on steel and aluminum products, and 25% tariffs on the non-U.S. content of auto exports.“
Justin is completely justified in calling on the Carney government to, among other things, “help small businesses manage the regulatory complexity brought on by this trade chaos“ (and not sign bad deals).
Summing up:
Steel and aluminum products (4.1% of Canadian exports to the U.S.), non-U.S. content of finished motor vehicles (4% of Canadian exports to the U.S.), and our estimate of roughly 1.2% worth of total exports from softwood lumber products already facing significant duties due to a longstanding trade dispute brings the total share of Canadian exports to the U.S. not covered by zero-duty trade under CUSMA to just under 14%5.
Update - October 18 2025
Maurice Obstfeld, in conversation with Paul Krugman on October 16, updates the degree of CUSMA compliance by Canadian businesses:
Obstfeld: Prior to Trump the tariff rate then was more like 2.4%, if you weren’t compliant. So it didn’t pay for companies. So many Canadian exporters just didn’t bother. But now, with the very high tariffs on Canada, that for stuff that’s not USMCA compliant in just a few months, Canadian trade has moved from about 50% USMCA compliant to over 90% USMCA compliant as all the firms have done this paperwork. But that also means we’re getting less tariff revenue, from our very large trade with Canada.
Krugman: It also means that the firms in Canada or the importing firms in the US are spending a lot of resources. They’ve had to hire a lot of accountants to basically do this.
Obstfeld: Absolutely. Yeah.
Throne of Blood (1957)
August 9. Following Ran, the Bytowne offers three more restored Akira Kurosawa movies this month, the first of which we saw today. Throne of Blood is based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The equivalent of Lady Macbeth, Asaji (played by Isuzu Yamada) is impressive in her Noh-like expressionless acting, embodying evil. All the men, including Washizu (the equivalent of Macbeth, played by Toshiro Mifune) talk in short bursts of shouted dialogue.
Impressive as the acting and cinematography is, there are also moments where the action slows down or is endlessly repeated: When Washizu and his comrade Miki get lost in the forest, they appear from the fog and disappear again at least ten times! It made us fidget in our seats.
Local Climate Action is highly effective
August 13. Via CNO and Grist, I learn of a July 21 report by Red Stone Strategy Group showing, based on 15 case studies in the US and Canada, that local action to reduce emissions can be highly effective at very low cost per ton of emissions avoided.
A more detailed table (including costs) is displayed in the Executive Summary.
The Misinformation Ecosystem
August 15. Arno Kopecky in CNO reports: Jeff Evily attracted a $24K fine for walking in the woods of Nova Scotia, violating the ban issued by its (Conservative) premier. His video
“quickly drew over 4 million views on X. Virtually every far-right commentator in Canada has shared it, often with the hashtag #climatelockdown. Rebel News’ Ezra Levant interviewed Evely, comparing him to the Freedom Convoy leaders, who have also been posting about it.“
“What’s remarkable is the degree to which this belief in climate change being a fraud spills over to other things,” Frank Graves, president of the polling firm Ekos, told Canada’s National Observer. Over the past five years, Graves’ polling has revealed a stark correlation between climate denial, anti-vax conspiracies and a whole host of other demonstrably false narratives, all linked to Conservative voting. “It spills into, like, Russians aren’t committing war crimes in Ukraine,” Graves said. Support for Donald Trump, another example, is 25 times higher among Conservative voters than the national average. “These are unheard of relationships that we’ve never seen before.”
All of these influencers were fixtures of Pierre Poilievre’s election campaign; they attended and broadcast his rallies and posted daily pro-Conservative videos to millions of Canadians. A few weeks after the election, Poilievre personally called many of those influencers to thank them for their help. … A massive partisan asymmetry is at the heart of this story, one that [Marcus] Kolga [the founding director of DisinfoWatch], Graves and other experts Canada’s National Observer reached out to for this story all emphasized. Namely: You don’t see far-left influencers at a Liberal election rally. At Pierre Poilievre’s rallies, influencers were everywhere. The federal Conservative Party has enmeshed itself with them and their false narratives in a way that no other Canadian party has.
The good news, says Graves, is that only about seven per cent of Canadians are so deeply radicalized as to be beyond the point of no return. “We know that people who are moderately disinformed exhibit a fair bit of plasticity,” he said. “They can be brought out of that state of disinformation.” Meanwhile, after 150 days in office, Carney’s approval rating is a sky-high 64 per cent – almost exactly the proportion of Canadians who reject online conspiracies, says Graves. “There’s people who don’t trust the legacy media,” he allows, “but 65 per cent do.” Even the CBC, the most pilloried of legacy media, is trusted by roughly half of Canadians; by contrast, only five per cent trust information they get off Facebook, and just one per cent trust X (formerly Twitter).
Even those numbers, though, are roughly three times higher than they were before the previous federal election, said Graves.
High and Low (1963)
August 17. Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is a superb film in all respects. The dialogues are crisp throughout, the plot moves along in a steady pace, the suspense is maintained from start to finish, the black & white6 cinematography, the acting, the music score — all are excellent (though the choices of O sole mio and Schubert’s Trout Quintet are a bit puzzling) . The sprinkling of humour among the large contingent of police agents offers a sense of realism and momentary relief from the suspense. I want to especially remember the many moments of facial closeups — finely chiseled as one could enjoy in some of the old silents.
We see Toshiro Mifune again, as the hard-hearted business man7 Kingo Gondo, a cool and polite Tatsuya Nakadai as Inspector Tokura, Yutaka Sada as the groveling chauffeur Aoki, a quiet but in her own way forceful Kyōko Kagawa as Reiko Gondo, and many others, not to forget the kids, Toshio Egi as Jun Gondo and Masahiko Shimizu as Shinichi Aoki. The kidnapper, played by Tsutomu Yamazaki, actually does not have a major role except in the latter part of the film and in the final scene in prison when he bursts out in hysteria.
The underlying theme of the movie is inequality — Gondo’s magnificent, airconditioned house on top of a hill in contrast with the squalor and raw heat down below. It’s what motivated the kidnapper and gives the movie its title. The scene in drug addicts’ alley was the most difficult to watch.
Ukrainians teaching NATO a lesson
August 23. From an interview of military historian Phillips O’Brien by Paul Krugman:
O’Brien: I've been told that NATO did a maneuver with a Ukrainian drone unit and the Ukrainian drone unit destroyed a full NATO armored brigade in a few hours because they simply had no way to respond to what the Ukrainians were doing. They didn't have any equipment, didn't have any hint, it was an intellectual hinterland. So the Ukrainians were just flying their drones all around them, destroying whatever they wanted, and the NATO unit failed. So they're not used to this kind of war. They're going to have to learn it, but right now they don't know how to do it.
And also this, about drones connected to fibre-optic cable (“fly-by-wire”):
…it seems to be that they can operate them in large numbers. A lot of it is that the area of fighting has been so blown up that it’s like operating on a bit of a moonscape which allows, I think, the fly-by-wire to work. But they've been extraordinary because all of sudden it took the teeth out of electronic warfare, which everyone had been talking about. Everyone worries about electronic warfare. Well, this is their way around electronic warfare.
Update - September 4, 2025
Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo, in the Globe and Mail, sheds further light on drone warfare and first-person view (FPV) drones in particular. (There will be a “Sandbox” competition in Ottawa in November, for detecting small drones at four height levels.) A variant is tethered to a fibre-optic cable that can be as much as 30 km long.
Drones, rather than heavy artillery, have been responsible for inflicting nearly 70 per cent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties since the war erupted in 2022.
Kurasawa: Ikiru (1952)
August 24. Another masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru (“To live”)8 tells the story of Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura), a city bureaucrat who in spirit has been “dead” for decades and is diagnosed with stomach cancer; he is given six months. A wild romp through Tokyo’s nightlife does not provide relief but a very vivacious young subordinate, Toyo Odagiri (played by Miki Odagiri) inspires him to yet accomplish something in his life: Against all odds he succeeds in turning a local cesspool into a park as a group of neighbourhood women had demanded.
The latter part of the movie shows the wake after Watanabe dies. As his colleagues get increasingly drunk they come to see (for the viewer through a series of flashbacks — their alternation with the evolving discussion is a marvel of editing and script writing) that indeed Watanabe, through sheer obstinance in fighting the bureaucracy, was the driving force to get the park built. They vow to follow his example. However, back at the office, they revert to the old habit at the first opportunity. One of my favourite moments is when the one colleague who at the wake had most forcefully come to the defence of Watanabe, stands up when he sees the new boss sliding back, wants to say something in protest, but then sinks back into his seat and becomes invisible behind a wall of papers. Bureaucracy wins.
Watanabe quietly singing "Gondola no Uta" (Life is brief)9 at the nightclub (sadly) and again as he sits on a swing in the new park (contentedly; it’s where he is later found dead) is very touching.
A tad long at 143 minutes and too often and for too long showing the sad face of Watanabe (the few moments when he smiled came as a relief) , it is nonetheless a film to remember. The cinematography was marvellous throughout.
Anne Applebaum
August 27. In conversation with Paul Wells, interesting comments from Anne Applebaum about Trump’s regime, Ukraine and what other democracies can or should not do. My key takeaways (text edited from the machine-generated transcript for clarity and to avoid duplication):
On gerrymandering:
So in the past, both the red states and blue states have sought to alter election borders to give whatever ruling party the advantage. This is something that was a little bit different from that. This was the president of the United States asked the governor of Texas to gerrymander his state in such a way as to help out in a federal issue, a federal problem. … And so we saw a Texas governor interrupting the normal flow events. Normally, boundaries are redrawn when new censuses are taken. This was done out of turn. And we saw him, as I said, a governor taking orders from the president to change the way elections work in his state in order to benefit the president at the federal level. And I don't know of a precedent for that.
On kleptocracy in the US today:
Most notable and most striking is the the scale, the really astonishing scale of kleptocracy that we now see in America, which is, again, something that is happening on a level that's never happened before. I mean, we've had corrupt presidents in the past. I mean, I don't know, Ulysses S. Grant was said to have granted some contracts to his brother-in-law, you know, stuff like that before. But we now have a president who has set up a cryptocurrency company whose sole purpose is is to enable the paying of bribes to the president.10 So there, you know, you buy Trump coins, they can't be traded, they can't be sold. The only reason to buy them is to … have made an anonymous contribution to Donald Trump. And presumably somewhere, either he or someone in his company knows who you are. And that's a new level. There was a New Yorker piece a few days ago that touted up the various different ways in which Trump and his company are making money off of being president. And they calculate [that] the last six months, I think it was $5 billion is the amount of money that's made.11 And as I said, the scale and the nature of those payments are stratospherically different from anything we've seen before so we have … American foreign policy being sacrificed to the whim of the President and his family … the government in Vietnam offering land to the Trump company to develop a golf course in exchange for a better tariff agreement with the United States. So that's … a direct bribe going to the President, to his family, in the open, we all can see it, in exchange for US policy — that is different. And this … has become even clearer in the last few months, especially also as Trump seeks to have the same kinds of relationships with big CEOs of American companies.
And we see there something that just looks a lot like Putin's Russia or Xi's China, where both foreign and domestic companies compete for the favor of the leader and for his personal blessing.
On the long-term damage caused:
Whoever is president next time, whether it's President Gavin Newsom or President J.D. Vance or President Ocasio-Cortez, … whoever is the next president will not... experience the same level of cooperation and friendship, for example, from Canada or … from Europeans or indeed from former American allies in Latin America and Asia, will not experience that again. And … maybe not in our lifetimes [will] there … be this sense of automatic trust and faith in the United States that people used to have. I do believe actually that's gone. You know, that's … gone and it won't come back. … Certainly I can speak for Europeans who are in a kind of stunned shock … and they're not going to snap out of it three years from now, even if the best, conceivable most pro-European most … liberal person wins the election, it's … not gonna change … that level of trust is gone … but that doesn't mean that … Trump is forever, it doesn't mean that people won't try to reverse what he did, it doesn't mean there won't be a reaction in the United States…
On Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries:
…the refineries are causing huge fuel shortages all over Russia. And so … not in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in the east and elsewhere, there are reports of many hour-long queues for … petrol at gas stations. There are shortages. The army is experiencing shortages. Transport of fuel around the country is beginning to falter.
On the strategy of flattering Trump:
I actually do believe that the best route for Canada and for Europe is to work together and to begin to create new trade links that don't go via the United States. People have differing views on this, and I've had this argument with Europeans who disagree with me. I am not sure that the policy of flattering Trump and sucking up to Trump and telling Trump how great he is, which a lot of people believe is the right way to go, is useful or helpful. I don't know that it gets us anywhere. ... He respects people who … , as he would say, have cards, who push back, who have other ideas. And I don't know that this kind of suck-uppery… achieves very much.
… getting on with business and finding ways around [the US] and being creative about what else you can do and achieve is more useful than trying to flatter and cajole the President, because sometimes that works, but sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it even backfires.
Pensions and Climate Risk
August 28. Ecojustice and Shift have sent a 10-page, 53-footnote letter to Canada’s Chief Actuary, arguing rather persuasively that their reports significantly underestimate climate risk. (See also CNO of August 28.)
Wikipedia has an extensive article about the tale and its many variants. When my wife was born she was given a book of the Grimm Brothers’ Tales in Dutch translation, with illustrations by Anton Pieck (1940). Though tattered, the book survives so we had the pleasure of reading Tale # 31 in old-fashioned, charming language. An English version is here.
Quotes are from a machine-generated transcript, slightly edited for clarity and to eliminate duplications.
"The BlueGreen Alliance (BGA) unifies labor unions and environmental organizations into a powerful force to fight climate change, protect the health of people and the environment, stand against economic and racial inequality, and create and maintain good-paying, union jobs in communities across the country.“
CUSMA = Canada-US-Mexico free trade agreement = USMCA. And for my European readers: RBC = Royal Bank of Canada, Canada’s largest.
The article’s footnote: “There is some uncertainty in our estimate that 4.4% of Canadian exports are not covered by CUSMA. This figure was based on the original 2020 USMCA U.S. tariff schedule. However, updates to the U.S. harmonized tariff schedule in 2022—including renumbered and newly added product codes—have affected coverage. For example, about 2.1% of this “non-compliant” share consists of aerospace products listed under HS code 88. The total share of exports not covered by CUSMA falls to 2.3% after adjusting the original USMCA tariff schedule to account for renumbered products and new additions.“ It’s complicated.
Except for the plume of pink smoke when the briefcases are incinerated.
We had an extra chuckle because the business in question was a shoe factory and the debate was about the quality of women’s shoes: beautiful and durable vs. cheap and dispensable. I loved the scene where Gondo rips a cheap shoe apart to show how shoddy it is. These are debates that must have taken place in Gert’s family.
The screenwriters were inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
"Gondola no Uta" is a 1915 romantic ballad. Full text at the link.
Actually, in an August 11 entry on her Substack, she wrote: “David Kilpatrick at The New Yorker has done an outstanding investigation, estimating that between real estate deals, his media company, financial firms, and primarily cryptocurrency, Trump has made around $3.4 billion from the presidency just five months into his current term.“
Kilpatrick has a 21-minute video on YouTube detailing his findings.
Applebaum has a Kleptocracy Inc. project at John Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute: “The Kleptocracy Tracker is a public log of political decisions that benefit private interests.” In launching the project in April 2025 she wrote: “For the past decade, American government and business alike have slowly begun to adopt the kleptocratic model pioneered by countries such as Russia and China, where the rulers’ conflicts of interest are simply part of the fabric of the system.“
Her book, Autocracy Inc., published last year, just came out in paperback, with a new preface. Read it here — a sum-up of what changed since January 2025.
In Canada, we allow big business lobbyists way too much influential access to governmental decision-makers and -making — all without a truly independent news-media willing to investigative and expose corporate lobbyists' corrupting overreach. This also applies to decisions made about our bulk/raw/unprocessed natural-resource exports.
Yet, our governments consistently refuse to alter this practice, which undoubtedly is the most profitable for the corporations extracting and exporting en masse our natural resources.
After almost four decades of consuming mainstream news-media, I cannot recall a serious discussion on why our national and provincial governments will not insist upon processing all of our own oil (and lumber) here at home in Canada, instead of exporting it bulk raw abroad and purchasing it back processed at a notably higher price (as we do with the U.S., for example). That is, without the topic discussion strongly seeming to have already been parameterized thus the outcome predetermined. And I’m not talking about just on the one and same day, open and closed topic, as I’ve witnessed two or three of those insufficient efforts.
The salt on this open wound is that the U.S. has used these raw-log bulk exports to justify its anti-dumping duties (recently increased to 35%) on Canadian softwood lumber, since the American lumber industry processes their logs for value added. Processing our own lumber would dampen this justification/excuse — while also adding lumber-processing jobs and other economic gains up here. Is this not a no-brainer?
As for American tariffs, ever since the U.S. (under both Democrat and Republican party administrations) began applying tariffs on B.C. softwood lumber imports in (I believe) the early 1990s, the international trade tribunal has consistently ruled that there are no grounds for the tariffs under the trade agreement between the U.S. and Canada (albeit not much of it is now still intact).
Yet, U.S. governments have to this day disregarded those rulings, perhaps in large part due to the formidable lobbyist influence of the American big lumber industry.