🇨🇦 CUSMA on paper, shakedown in practice

More than 500 Canadian products now face 50 per cent U.S. duties, including hockey sticks, liquor and cement, even when they qualify under CUSMA. So much for the sacred rules-based order our managerial class keeps worshipping. The reported reality is simpler: Washington uses trade law like a blackjack, and Ottawa keeps showing up with a process memo.

This is what dependence looks like after decades of Trudeau-era hollowing out, globalist supply-chain dogma, and elites who treat sovereignty as tacky nationalism. Trump is leveraging tariffs to crack open dairy supply management, provincial liquor rules, and anything else Canada still controls domestically. And our answer is that maybe lawyers will save us after August 19. Brilliant. If your economy can be kneecapped by a White House mood swing, you do not have resilience, you have a vassal arrangement dressed up as free trade. Canada needs less worship of supranational paper and more hard-nosed national leverage, domestic production, and leaders who understand that allies also extort weak states.

🍁 Maple Chronicles