CBC anchor gobsmacked

@JohnGormleyShow @sunlorrie @joe_warmington watch the @CBCNews, @CBCPolitics anchor be completely thrown off guard by Frank Buckley’s brutally honest truth about Chrystia Freeland & the PMO’s handiling of the #NAFTA negotiations. #cdnpoli #Trudeau #cdnmedia pic.twitter.com/FcfwxZyQaL

— Saskawinner (@skwinner1) September 6, 2018

Canada's trade with the United States is so politicized that it's crippling when coming to trade negotiation.  One wonders if they bring all these special considerations and demands to all of their trade agreements or just the negotiations with the United States because we're so big and because we're so culturally domineering and because we're so close. Or is it because Canada is genuinely schizophrenic to an even greater extent than the total schizophrenia of the United States. Or is it because the French portion is always culturally threatened.  That is their state of being. Have you noticed how Trudeau and Freeland both sound a heck of lot better in French than they do in English? 

It must be that.

They're finding negotiating with U.S. extremely difficult. They have to keep going back and polling for Canadian public sentiment.

Trump said privately off the record (to known cockroaches, so actually publicly) that his terms will not be negotiated so Trudeau had to say the same thing for his domestic audience. They're come up with a new term: Their "Cultural Industries" must and will be protected.

And what are those cultural industries, that without special protection will have Canada become American if not protected?

“It is inconceivable to Canadians that an American network might buy Canadian media affiliates, whether it’s newspapers or TV stations or TV networks,” 

There will be no interference with Canada's state-run propaganda broadcasts.

Total control over communication. How progressive. Because without that control, the party has nothing. Whether, authoritarian control over social media or direct state control over broadcast and print media, it's all the same typical progressive authoritarianism. While it's everyone else who is HitlerStalinMao. The term "Cultural Industries" is intended to cloud and conceal the hypocrisy between their stated values lauding liberty and freedom and the truth of their authoritarian rule.

Dealing with Trump and crew requires profound reexamination and complete reevaluation about which things are more dear. Some countries have an easier time with this than others. Some see the light, the value in dropping their layers of protectionism, their own tariffs on US production, their limitations on our access to their markets, their VAT, their layers of non-tariff costs; import quotas, subsidies, customs delays, technical barriers, import licensing, rules for valuation of goods at customs, pre-shipment inspections, rules of origin and trade prepared investment measures, packaging and labeling requirements, sanitary and phytosanitary rules, food, plant, and animal inspections, import bans based on objectionable fishing or harvesting methods.

Trump said so himself in last few speeches, he had only to threaten tariffs on automobiles to match the tariffs put on the US for certain countries and economic blocs to cave to demand because that difference in cost would change US demand such their auto industry would be ruined and so would their entire economy. He says this amusingly. The light bulb went on immediately with some of the quicker negotiators, their situation so clear. They have only to treat us fairly and that fairness will be returned. Better to open their own domestic market to US production then lose their own protected production altogether by Trump shrinking US demand by making those autos less competitive in this market. A simple threat of manipulating the import market the way they've manipulated theirs toward us and boom freer more open markets for both just like that. And all it took was Trump being a butthole.

But the Canadians just can't even. Poor dears. This is their fear. If their markets were opened to US. industry, truly free, we'd both have cheaper cost for essential things between us but the Canadians would cease to exist as Canadians. They'd loose control of themselves and end up being Americans.

Charming as they are generally, and usually amusing, they're still very touchy and informed politically by their media. (Just like my friends.) I learned this immediately at age twenty-one on my very first interaction. I was charmed by their colorful currency at a state exchange right there at the railroad station,  and said so. The official-looking lady in a brown uniform snapped defensively and not at all charmingly, actually rather snidely "Well at least you can tell them apart."

Yeah. We do that by reading the numbers and knowing the faces and buildings. But point taken.