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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   774 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 9, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Despite being your largest trading partner, we subsidize our own industry to billions of dollars a year, then dump product on you and hope you will see it as benign enough to let the con go on for another year.

This is not being a shitty trading partner. This is beneficial to the US and we should stop doing it for our own sake. The US does the same thing by the way.

We let spies from the "near-Arctic" state cruise around the Northwest Passageway and scout out our (few) military installations.

What are you referring to? Under international law, we don't have the right to prevent foreign ships from accessing the Northwest Passage.

But instead of just resigning and letting an immediate election happen, our PM has prorogued Parliament, nakedly to buy time for his party to regroup, meaning that we have no actual functioning government for the next two months and he stays in charge nominally, with no credibility to actually negotiate on our behalf.

We do have a government. The government is not the same as the Parliament. The Parliament shuts down all the time. It doesn't normally sit for the whole year. This just means they can't pass legislation.

This is not being a shitty trading partner.

Tell that to the WTO. Yes, the US does it too to some extent.

Under international law, we don't have the right to prevent foreign ships from accessing the Northwest Passage.

According to Wikipedia, the status of the Northwest Passage is disputed (mostly by the US). Seems we could assert a lot more control over the Northwest Passage if we put the resources into it, I'm mourning that we don't do this.

We do have a government.

Yes but this is veering into semantics. With the legislative branch handcuffed and with a lame duck executive, no one is steering the ship at the federal level.

It's disputed by the Canadian government, but based on my understanding of international law, we're clearly in the wrong.

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