“Goodbye, America.

It’s been nice knowing you.

Goodbye New York, and your Jewish delicatessens with corned beef sandwiches stacked as high as your skyline.

Goodbye Detroit, my boyhood neighbour, and so long to Tiger Stadium, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Motown.

Goodbye Bellingham, Seattle and Portland — how I’ll miss my Cascadian cousins with our shared Pacific sensibilities. And while I’m at it, goodbye to the cheap gas and shoreline cottages of Point Roberts, America’s appendix dangling just below the border not a mile from me. What was once so close has never been so far.

Goodbye Stag Leap’s Pinot Noir, Maker’s Mark bourbon, and Hebrew National hotdogs. My tastebuds mourn.

Goodbye to the cowards on both sides of the border who have demonstrated that whatever fidelity to democratic ideals they profess to have extends only so far as their self-interest. They should get a real job, say, in a chain gang.

Goodbye to anyone, again on both sides of the border, who bends the knee to Trump, rather than standing up to him, as any self-respecting person would and should, and telling him to piss off.

Goodbye to a culture that demands we bend the knee.

Goodbye languid vacations in Maui and Palm Springs. My next winter vacation will be in a sunny climate other than any America can offer, and preferably in a country the U.S. has treated as disdainfully as mine. I’ll have more than a few to pick from.

Most painful of all, goodbye to my American friends, some of whom I have known all my life, and some of whom I’ve collected along the way. I can cross your border but no longer wish to: Your Narcissist-in-Chief has decreed that my countrymen and I have the choice of becoming destitute, vassals or enemies. I’m choosing the latter

Meanwhile, your silence and the silence of all Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you.
Goodbye to the image of America I once held dear — the America of Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley and James Brown, of George Gershwin and Aaron Copeland, of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, of Martin Luther King and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Does not include our DU friends.

Goodbye to what I envied as the country that prided itself on encouraging unparalleled innovation in science, art and business. Any good that remains of it has been overshadowed by rapacity, cheap commercialism and egotism.

Goodbye to that ever-present sense of inferiority I once had when considering the relationship between Canada and America. What doubt I had of our own greatness is gone, and in its place is a certitude that Canada is superior to the U.S. in all the ways that matter. I look across the border now and see a violent, burgeoning autocracy now ever on the edge of civil war, and a population that is either cheering on this new brutalism or quaking in fear from it.

Goodbye to tepid patriotism. If Trump has done us any favour, it is awakening us to the fact that we can no longer take Canada’s existence for granted, that the bad actors in the world have begun to look covetously upon our improbably vast land that is laden with riches, that they want those riches and that niceness as a national character is not enough to dissuade them from taking them.

Schoolyard bullies don’t want to be buddies. They want your lunch.

And after a long era of living a geopolitical life of convenient economic and military subservience, we’ve awakened to the fact that we are going to have to relearn our independence and fight any way we can to keep it.

Goodbye to living under the American nuclear umbrella, or any form of American hegemony. Goodbye to negotiation, wheedling, genuflecting or feel-good hands-across-the-border fairy tales. The American government has shown that established alliances mean nothing to it now, and so cannot be trusted. In Trump’s new world order, all the old verities are off the table, so let us make new ones.

Do levy tariffs, as we have promised to do, and do grit our way through the inevitable economic pain that will come. Re-arm as if we were on a war footing, because we are on a war footing. Conduct the mother of all public relation campaigns that let Americans know how badly they are perceived in the world, that they’ve gone from the shining city on the hill to just another empire with the same tired territorial ambitions as Russia or China. Do anything to impress upon Americans that their government is without real friends or allies, and that they, in essence, are alone.

So, goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore. I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy”

At a G7 press conference yesterday, Carney took a range of questions. To me, these two stand out.

JP Tasker, CBC News asked Carney: President Trump says tariffs are simple, and what you're proposing to resolve the trade dispute is complex. What's he talking about? What have you pitched that's complex?

Carney thinks, then says: Complexity is in the eye of the beholder, sometimes.

HIT: Trump stable genius notion falls like a big, fat, orange sitting duck.

https://www.youtube.com/live/UZGoW4oGf5g...

Justin Ling, Freelancer asked: I wonder what you make of [Trump's] comments suggesting that it was personally offensive to Vladimir Putin to kick him out of the G7 after the invasion of Crimea.

Carney replied: With respect to... personally offensive... to put it mildly... the citizens of Ukraine and the inhabitants of Crimea when Russia invaded, in 2014 -- was the cause of their ejection from the G8.

HIT: Trump's factually incorrect support for Putin is blown away, and the bullseye is moved onto Trump's loving allegiance to Putin.

https://www.youtube.com/live/UZGoW4oGf5g...

In the press shooting gallery, Carney is a marksman.
-- Jim Miles

The reality is that over 97 per cent of U.S.-Canada trade in agricultural goods and over 99 per cent of trade in manufactured goods occurs under a zero-tariff rate, as Canada's Ambassador Kirsten Hillman now spends much of her time patiently explaining.

The numbers often cited by the White House are in fact penalty tariffs that are only incurred when trade in certain items exceeds a certain volume, and rarely or never charged in practice. Most trade between the U.S. and Canada is not subject to any limitations of volume, but a small number of products are. The attention is often on dairy, explained Al Mussell, research lead and founder of Agri-Food Economic Systems, Inc., but the quota list goes wider than that.

"You could talk about other supply-managed products [chicken, eggs] in Canada, you could talk about sugar and peanuts in the United States," he said.