News roundup, 24 Aug 2026

- Trade talks between Canada and the US, which showed signs of going somewhere at one point, collapsed at the last minute, with the US slapping 50% tariffs on a wide range of products. Mark Carney says that he suspended talks after the Americans brought in new conditions that Canada considered unacceptable in the final hours before the deadline. Reportedly these conditions included relaxing the laws concerning French-language requirements for appliances and instruction manuals, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed agreement, which may be a factor. Carney says that the tariffs will be matched dollar for dollar; his full speech following the collapse of negotiations may be found here. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy responded to Carney's vow to match tariffs by saying that this was "foolish" because "Canada doesn't have a military".

- This year's El Niño appears set to be the strongest in living memory, and next year is likely to be the hottest in recorded history as a result. Panama is already limiting transits through the Panama Canal as the lakes that replenish the canal aren't getting enough rainfall.

- Russia is experiencing fuel shortages as a result of Ukraine's recent strikes on oil refineries. People are crossing the border into Kazakhstan to fill their tanks; Kazakhstan has prohibited exports of gasoline but their border guards have found hundreds of attempts to smuggle gasoline back into Russia in everything from jerry cans to tanker trucks. Kazakhstan is relatively fortunate in having their own oil reserves. Other central Asian states have a bigger problem - Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have been heavily dependent on Russia for their fuel supply, and are now facing severe shortages.

- Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1505, which represents Winnipeg Transit drivers, is again calling for full shields after a someone threatened a driver with a hatchet for not going fast enough. The city has promised to install full shields, but has been slow to implement this; meanwhile 64 drivers are currently on stress leave, amounting to 225,000 hours of lost time.

- Research from China indicates that the batteries in electric vehicles last considerably longer if you drive reasonably than if you always accelerate aggressively. Worth noting that the kind of people who tend to hate EVs also tend to drive in the latter way.

News roundup, 9 April 2025

- Many economists now think a global recession is almost inevitable unless the US changes course on tariffs. Of course, that probably won't sway the MAGA crowd; they'll just look for some outsiders to blame.

- UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves are considering doing something that was unthinkable in the neoliberal era even for the Labour Party - renationalizing British Steel. Of course, steel is a key strategic material for running any modern society, and when knockoff effects from the Trump regime's tariffs threaten to possibly end domestic production of the stuff in a newly uncertain geopolitical climate, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. It would be interesting to see if they go ahead with this, and if so, whether other social democratic parties in places like the EU, Canada, and Australia might follow suit. For instance, it wasn't long ago (well, 54 years actually, but...) that the Manitoba NDP government under Ed Schreyer directed the Manitoba Development Corporation to take over a struggling bus manufacturer and keep it afloat, then rather controversially sold it (creating what is now known as New Flyer) after it became profitable. Soon they might want to consider doing that again, only maybe without that last part.

- A suspect has been charged in the case of the woman who was run down and severely injured while crossing Osborne Street last month. Curiously, they have only been charged under the Highway Traffic Act, despite the fact that leaving the scene of an accident is a Criminal Code offense as well. Her family expressed a suspicion at the time that it wasn't an accident at all; even if it was, though, it's interesting that they didn't use that obvious charge. The police did specify that the suspect is definitely not a cop; the fact that they went out of their way to say that while saying little more about the suspect's identity is rather telling.

- US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sees a lot of opportunities to bring manufacturing back to America without the problem of having to pay those pesky factory workers by replacing the latter with robots.

- Traffic at the border crossing between Emerson, Manitoba and Pembina, North Dakota has declined 17% compared to the same time last year. Once we get into times when there's more leisure travel the drop may well be considerably more, and people in the tourism industry in border states are getting worried. An odd footnote - an industry group, the Travel Health Insurance Association of Canada, conducted a survey that's mentioned in the article. Of the possible answers to a question about reasons people don't want to travel to the US, 57% of respondents cited tariffs as a factor, 51% cited political leadership, and 34% mentioned the low Canadian dollar. The fact that nobody cited the orange monster's threat to take over our country as a reason to not want to visit seems only explicable if that wasn't listed as a possible reason; that seems like a strange thing to leave out of such a poll.

- Donald Trump has signed several more executive orders aimed at increasing coal production in the US, mostly reversing the policies of previous administrations but also one that allows the Justice Department to "investigate" states that are "discriminating" against coal for energy production. One interesting quote comes up here:

The president said coal miners want to mine coal, not work in high-tech jobs or other fields. 

"You could give 'em a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of job, and they'd be unhappy," Mr. Trump said, with the miners behind him. "They want to mine coal. That's what they love to do."

The thing is, there's actually an element of truth to that. There is a fairly large subset of the population that is so contrarian that they have made their backwardness and nastiness a huge part of their identity. These are the same kind of people who think that "environmentally friendly" is tantamount to "unmanly". And their response to society moving on is what Hunter S. Thompson called "an ethic of total retaliation". Unfortunately, most of those people can't be reasoned with; the best you can do is defeat them. Whether the latter is possible remains to be seen.