Derek Foster: Trump has announced 50% tariffs on specified Canadian goods. So it's all gonna become a question of like who can take this pain longer, right? Is Canada going to be able to withstand 75% of their exports being tariffed at such a level that it doesn't really make it feasible to sell them here? Or are Americans gonna get so pissed that their gas prices go up if Canada shuts off their oil wells that Donald Trump bends the knee and says, hey, you know what? Up with a deal. We don't need to continue this trade war any longer. The Canadian American trade war is now in full swing. It keeps getting worse. Everything seems to just keep getting worse. ⁓ the stage was set actually in 2022, though, when Trump wasn't even in office. Canada was found to be in violation of the USMCA, the free trade agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. And what Canada's doing is they're tariffing dairy products nearly 300%. Canada's got this dairy industry that's pretty powerful actually in terms of lobbying. And they get a lot of protectionist policies passed. So it protects butter, cheese, milk, all that kind of stuff. There were also a lot of trade barriers put up by Canada to protect their alcohol industry. So American whiskey was being tariffed. There are bunch of discount bans, regulations. Alcohol sales are controlled by a bunch of local committees. So it's just really hard to sell American alcohol in Canada. Not nearly as hard for them to sell their alcohol here. If you like Crown Royal, you know what I'm talking about. Also, they passed this three percent digital revenues tax where if you were ⁓ Passing off digital services in Canada, you were subject to this 3% tax. So that was in violation of the USMCA. Trump came in in 2025. He ends up passing his 10% tariffs across the board, ends up having a bunch of more targeted tariffs because he feels like if we have a trade deficit with a country, that that's a bad thing and it has to be stopped, that we're getting ripped off. Whether that's true or not, no, not. ⁓ it's definitely more complicated than that. People try and oversimplify it and they'll say, well, it's like, you know, if I have a trade deficit with Walmart, that is akin to us having a trade deficit with Canada. That's that's a little overly simplified, obviously. Us having a trade deficit as an individual person with Walmart is a really small sample size where and when you're talking about two countries, that's a lot of industry going back and forth and a trade deficits indicative of something a little more systemic than just a family having a trade deficit with Walmart. So it's a complicated deal. ⁓ but it ended up sparking this trade war after Trump retaliated. It's been heating up. So here's the battlefield essentially is it's about eight hundred and seventy two billion dollars in twenty twenty five was the amount of goods and services traded between the United States in Canada. That's a lot. I mean it was three hundred and thirty three billion roughly was ⁓ the US exports to Canada. The rest of it was ⁓ imported from Canada to the United States. So nearly twice as much is coming from Canada into the US as vice versa. So Trump sees that as a problem. He sees that as getting ripped off. We're buying a bunch of Canadian goods and they're not buying stuff from us. So We have this big trade deficit with them. And Canada, here's another interesting stat. Canada sends three quarters of its exports to the United States. 75%. So Trump sees this and thinks, man, we've got a lot of leverage over them. We could get a much better deal because if we put a bunch of tariffs on Canada, that's gonna cost them a lot of money. We're their number one trade partner by far, nobody else. is even close. So Trump sees this and he decides to go for it. He's gonna put a bunch of tariffs on Canada. Trump has announced fifty percent tariffs on specified Canadian goods after negotiations failed. I mean the the affected goods he put this fifty percent tariff on were roughly twenty billion dollars. So that's a ten billion dollar tariff on twenty billion dollars of goods. Ouch. That's that only accounted for though it's a it's Five and a half percent of Canada's exports to the United States. So it doesn't hit a ton of products, but fifty percent is a damn big tariff. So Canada got pretty pissed off, understandably. They said, okay, fine, if you're gonna put this, you know, ten billion dollar tariff on us, then we're going to put a ten billion tariff roughly on you. That's what they just announced. And the US is putting the Tariffs on alcohol, dairy, and motorcycles for some reason. I don't know why why motorcycles are really important if there's a big Harley factory up there or something. But the reason that Trump chose alcohol and dairy is because that's what Canada was tariffing ⁓ on the United States. So your Crown Royal might get a little bit more expensive here in the short term. But Canada says okay, they're gonna retaliate. They throw the billion dollar ten billion dollar tariff On us, and this whole thing is just continuing to spiral out of control. Which we've always said, nobody wins in a trade war. It's not a good thing. We hope that the trade war is short-term pain to result in freer markets so that we can trade with the Canadians cheaper. But if you think about the net effect of Canada and the US just trading billions of dollars worth of tariffs, is it makes all of our goods more expensive? That's a bad thing. We want to be able to trade with Canada. We don't want to get ripped off, but at the same time, countries are allowed to protect their industries if they want to. If they want to protect their dairy industry, they have every right to do that. But then we've got the right to retaliate. We just don't there there's gotta be a balance here. We can't let it get out of control because Canada's got a pretty big weapon too. They've got the energy exports. So in 2025, Canada Exported 137 billion dollars in energy, so that's gonna be oil, natural gas, etc., to us, which is a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. If you're doing the math, just you know, rough estimates on the math there. I mean, that's fifteen to twenty percent of all exports to the United States from Canada was energy, so that's a big deal. And Trump's not gonna put tariffs on Canadian in ⁓ energy. Because the Iran war, all the issues, supply chain issues we're having with the Street of Armoods has made gas prices go up, it's made energy prices go up here in the United States. So Canada's got an idea. They're saying, okay, how about we limit the amount of energy we send into the United States? That will drive up prices and put a lot of pressure on Trump in this whole trade war. Which, not a bad move by the Canadians. That's a smart one. Their economy is so much smaller than ours, but they've got a lot of leverage and so they're going to use it. And it seems like crude oil is going to be the big big one. A lot of our oil refineries are integrated with Canadian oil, so we have pipelines going from the US to Canada. W the oil is brought up from from wells in Canada. It's then sent into US refineries. So if Canada shuts those wells off and says, no, we're not going to send you any oil, we're going to have a really, really, really big problem. And Canada hasn't shut off the valves yet. They haven't said that they're going to do this, but they are well, I should say, they've said they're going to do it. They haven't actually started to do it yet. But if they did, it would have a huge effect on gas prices here, which I was just going down the street the other day, they're over six dollars a gallon for gas. Now diesel was eight seventy-five. So ouch. So it's all gonna become a question of like who can take this pain longer, right? Is Canada going to be able to withstand 75% of their exports being tariffed at such a level that it doesn't really make it feasible to sell them here? Or Are Americans gonna get so pissed that their gas prices go up if Canada shuts off their oil wells that Donald Trump bends the knee and says, Hey, you know what? We can come up with a deal. We don't need to continue this trade war any longer. Which neither of those scenarios are good. Like both sides are gonna suffer the entire time. This was a really bad idea for Trump to start engaging in this d trade war with Canada at the exact same time. We're having oil issues in the Strait of Hormuz and with Iran. Really bad idea on Donald Trump's part. Canada has a lot of leverage here, despite being a way smaller player than the United States. The United States just keeps it seems like we keep getting outplayed by countries who are a lot smaller than us, like Iran. They have leverage over this little choke point. They seem to be taking pretty big advantage of us. Canada, a lot smaller of an economy. They export a lot to us. You'd think that would give us a lot of leverage, but they've got this big energy sector that they're going to hold over our head. And just seems like time and time again, Trump is getting outplayed. Things are going really poorly for him already. His approval ratings, I saw the other day. There's one poll that had him at 25%. So it's bad. Things are bad for Trump. But the the midterms, it looks like, are gonna go pretty poorly for the Republicans. It's not good. And it's not good for Canada either. So The other reason that there's this big fight between Canada and the United States is Kearney, the Canadian PM, he's the leader of the leftist party in Canada. He was going to lose his election, which w happened in twenty twenty ⁓ five, shortly after the American elections. And Donald Trump, after he won, was talking about Canada being the fifty-first state, blah, blah, blah, blah. That swung the Canadian elections away from the conservatives, and Canadians ended up electing a left-wing leader because the right wing leaders were closing up to Donald Trump, who was just talking a lot of shit, and it pissed the Canadians off. So it's really Trump's fault that we have this left wing government in Canada, anyways. He could have had a right wing government there that would have worked with him a lot more. Instead, we have this left-wing government, and it's ignited this trade war, and it's just become a real, real shit show. And it's not again, not good for Canada either. Their economy grew like 1% or something last quarter, which is really bad because they can't export their goods to the United States at a reasonable price anymore, which really hurts their country. Not something we want to do. But Canada did violate the USMCA. should have punished them with some fines or something, but just igniting this trade war is such a bad idea. And then you've got the whole immigration issue with Canada too. Because they ended up electing this left wing government, they ended up bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from other countries. They said they accidentally their estimates were off of how many immigrants they brought in by three hundred and seventy thousand. Which was they only planned to bring in three hundred and eighty five thousand. They ended up bringing in an extra three hundred and seventy thousand by accident or something like that. So ⁓ hats off to the incompetence of the Canadian government there. I wish they were as good at controlling their immigration as they were at ⁓ controlling their energy sector and their tariffs, which they seem to be pretty adept at. So trade war Canada, bad thing. Gas prices could go up quite a bit more, unfortunately, if this trade war keeps going on. Trump's better off making a deal here with Canada, getting this one off his plate, making a deal with the Iranians, getting the strait back open again, and just walking away from that whole situation, bringing gas prices down and taking the pain off the American people. Donald Trump has said I wish I had this video queued up. He said he didn't care about the midterms. He said that wasn't going to be a point of leverage that he was gonna let the Iranians hold over his head. He said he's not gonna let the Canadians hold it over his head as a negotiating chip that he doesn't care. So it seems like Trump thinks the midterms are a lost cause, that he's gonna lose at least the House, maybe even the Senate too. And he's not even really gonna try. He's just going to let it happen. He's gonna say that, you know, it was the Iranians' fault or the Canadians or something. He he's gonna blame other people. And it's too bad that Trump has fallen this far and made this many missteps because this is just an unforced error. We didn't need a trade war right now, but Trump decided this was a good thing, that we needed to have this fight now. Right? He just gave the Canadians all the leverage. Like if we had low gas prices, we had to deal with Iran, we were drilling all over the United States, he might be able to get away with this. Canada wouldn't have this much leverage. But since he decided to do this right now when he's absolutely the weakest, now Canada's gonna pull pull a a tough one on us. Which it's unfortunate, man. I really wish Trump was doing better. I hate that we pushed, ⁓ we want Trump elected. He ends up winning, we feel great about it, and then he just doesn't deliver anything we wanted. He ends up delivering more for the neocons who didn't even like him. Then he ended up delivering for us. All we got were higher gas prices, wars in Iran. I mean, housing prices aren't any better. Gas prices are through the roof. And what do we get? We get Donald Trump delivering the House of Representatives, at least back to the Democrats. And then probably blaming us because we called him out for his wars in the Middle East or something. So awesome guys. There you have it. ⁓ remember if the gas prices and grocery prices are bothering you, it's just because you're an asshole who didn't believe in the president. It's not his fault at all. And when the Democrats win, that'll be somebody else's fault too. Probably ours for calling out what's obvious reality instead of trying to gaslight people and tell them the economy ⁓ is actually better than it is and they're just too dumb to notice. That's like what Joe Biden was doing. If you remember when ⁓ he was president the left wing media would just try and be like, no, no, I g you know, the economy is actually great. You're just too dumb to notice. You're just a partisan. You just don't like Joe Biden. That's why you want to say the economy is that now Trump is just doing the same shit. And JD Vance is coming out saying, no, the economy is actually great. Yeah, we understand gas prices are up little bit, but it's worth it to liberate the Iranian people or something, which of course is just not gonna happen. Anyways, but you gotta believe You gotta it's it's like ⁓ Beetlejuice. If you just say it three times, then maybe it'll just magically appear. But it's all just lies, of course. So that's it. We're out of here, guys.