How to win a trade war
Canada has huge reserves of oil, natural gas, minerals, timber. Americans need that.
Canada doesn't need anything americans sell
Adobe Photoshop 👉 Use GIMP or Affinity.
Adobe Illustrator 👉 Use Inkscape or Affinity.
Word and Excel 👉 LibreOffice is better. No AI shit and it won't spy on you.
Microsoft Windows 👉 Use Linux. It's more secure anyway.
General Motors, Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, Tesla 👉 We don't need shitty american cars. Buy Hyundai, Toyotas, Honda, Volkswagen.
Apple iPhone 👉 Buy a Samsung
Starbucks Coffee 👉 Just drink local coffee.
McDonalds 👉 Buy from A&W or Harveys
Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Four Seasons 👉 Go to Canadian hotels
Amazon 👉 Fuck Jeff Bezos. Buy from your local stores.
Maxwell House Coffee 👉 Balzac's Coffee Roasters is Canadian
Tourism 👉 Visit Quebec, Banff National Park, Niagara Falls, Vancouver Island, Johnstone Strait, Yoho National Park. Go north to watch beautiful Arctic landscapes. At least you won't be shot and killed.
Boeing 👉 Buy Airbus. At least they won't crash.
What do americans sell that Canadians actually need? Nothing. They just sell convenience. Their products are often substandard
73 replies
Why not use this chance to go full EV?
Please, no. Samsung phones are the worst Android phones in the world. Use anything else before those.
You actually have your own aircraft maker.
Access to the US dollar / banking system and protection of your merchant ships. That's what you will need to find alternatives for.
I am very happy with my Kia EV6.
I would add some digital recommendations. While not entirely canadian, does help for leaving usa’s ecosystem.
gmail/outlook -> protonmail (switzerland) cosmetics and health -> well.ca (canada) private messaging -> signal app (swiss) laundry & dishes: Nellie’s clean (canada)
The biggest lie is that we needed them. We've become addicted to the lifestyles that they've exported via their gross culture. All their movies and fucking "reality" tv (which is so far from actual real life that it's almost a case study for nominative irony). Look what it's wrought on them though. The putrid apathy of the pitiable, American public is a LESSON for us. We need to stop taking their drug, or we're going to get as sick as they are now. While we still have any agency left!
Amazon is really really hard to avoid if you need something the local stores don't sell. I'm going to give AliExpress another try, but it wasn't promising the last time.
There's no streaming category here, as well. Crave and Gem can probably keep you going between them.
Yeah, that's what I did. Most of the junk on Amazon is the same stuff anyway.
I realize it's a "lesser of two evils" thing, and I'm not a huge fan of giving alibaba my money, but I want to give my money even less to Bezos.
There's lots of Canadian stores that deliver.
OP was probably including anywhere in driving range as "local", and that did too. If you mean by mail or similar, that can be an option, but there's several barriers.
If I want some obscure radio part, it's probably not anywhere in Alberta, and might not be for sale anywhere in Canada.
Britbox as a non-American option to supplement CBC Gem and Crave too.
Almost all Hyundai's sold in North America are made in Alabama
And a lot of Fords are built in Canada, and a lot of parts in whatever car from elsewhere in the US. It's kind of an ABUSA edge case.
And most Toyotas are built in the US.Edit: some production is starting in Kentucky.
Carolla's and Camry's are made it Mexico. The moved them from Cambridge ON, and started making Lexus' at that plant.
Corollas and camrys. I had to look because the apostrophes looked weird.
http://www.grammarunderground.com/nissan-leafs-or-nissan-leaves-plurals-of-irregular-proper-names.html
yeah, in no way did pluralizing make sense the way I did it.
I appreciate your acknowledgement. Sometimes autocorrect does weird stuff, sometimes our brain glitches, sometimes we simply don't know; but I'm personally grateful when someone teaches me a thing, so when I offer correction, it's never in malice.
You got two upvotes from me because of this comment.
Can you buy BYD EVs in Canada?
Soon. They are in the process of setting up 22 dealers here.
https://energynow.ca/2026/04/byd-to-open-20-car-dealerships-in-canada-this-year/
Although it's probably going to be only the high-end models, unless dropping the quotas on Chinese cars becomes part of the trade war.
I hope that's not part of the 50k quota of Chinese made vehicles of which half was gobbled up by Tesla.
I didn't hear about the Tesla part, but I guess it makes sense. If you only can sell a few thousand cars, why wouldn't it be the ones with the largest margin?
Yes, BYD would have been exactly the vehicles in mind when that policy was set up.
I suspect Stellantis builds in Canada.
They have essentially closed their plant in Brampton and moved production to the US.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stellantis-brampton-assembly-plant-unifor-9.7307672
Apparently the plant is going up for sale now.
RAV4 is built here as are the Lexus NX and RX.
A large portion of RAV4 production is moving to Kentucky.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/news-blog/toyota-begins-u-s-production-of-top-selling-rav4-hoping-to-sate-red-hot-demand-45135583
Due to US demand. Canadian dealers will still source from Canadian plants. Obviously this is information is current as of today who knows what changes could come about in coming weeks
Source: wife works at Toyota in Cambridge.
Ya, we used to make them all for the US as well.
Samsung phones are better than iPhone, but in the meantime only slightly. Their bootloaders have become pretty much impossible to unlock, meaning you're stuck with Android (Google). At the moment Linux is not particularly workable as a daily driver for most people, but it's good to think ahead in hopes that we might be able to rid ourselves of the Appl-Google duopoly some time in the future, and being able to unlock your bootloader is one of the keys to that, since it is a precondition to installing a different operating system.
Buy a used pixel and put Garphene OS on it. WAY better experience.
Yup. Some of the Chinese brands are decent and unlockable if anything American is off the table.
Learn some French
Yes. It seems like a little thing, but I think we really need to strengthen our cross Canada relationships. Those with indigenous communities as well.
To start with, check out Mauril. It's an app put out by CBC-Radio Canada. It uses bits of archive videos with vocab and comprehension questions. It's not going to make you fluent by any means but it's a start.
Introductory French by Language Transfer, the best language learning system you'll ever find (and it's free too!)
Payment 👉 Use Interac instead of credit card.
Seriously that should be #1. They charge 2-3% transaction fee to the vendor, give you 1% back as a "reward" to give you the impression that you're not being screwed over and pocket the rest. Meanwhile Interac charges only 1/10th of that and it is Canadian.
Paying with a credit card is like playing a 1-2% tax to the US. I'm sure if someone did the math they'd be horrified by his much of a drain it is on our economy while it boosts theirs.
Also Krita has become extremely capable and easier to approach coming from Photoshop than GIMP IMO. If should at least be listed along it as an alternative to Photoshop.
Cash. Cash is life.
I second Krita. There also used to be CorelDraw... but they were acquired by private equity earlier this year :(
Interac sucks though, we need a nationalized instant payments mechanism.
Also I don't understand why business owners don't push harder for Interac given the blatant fee difference
Never found a place that interac doesnt work. TF are you doing wrong?
When Interac is an option, it does work. But I often come across transactions that Interac isn't the most convenient option.
Debit Instant payment should always be first place as most convenient option. If it isn't, we're doing it wrong.
Interac is all across Canada, for purchases or sending cash direct to a buddy. How does it suck?
Thanks for the detailed reply. Some good points for sure.
I've gotten around that by using Email aliases, so my interac is not my direct email.
They are free at my Credit Union, its one reason I left TD Bank...they tacked fees onto everything
Do people still use (non bank) ATMS in this era? I havent used one in 15 years maybe. I haven't handled cash in so long that when somebody gave me a fiver or ten for a Craigslist exchange that I didn't recognize it. Looked totally foreign to me.
It is. Its why most people have chosen direct deposit that skips the security question.
Yeah there are workarounds to most of these, it's possible to get by. But it leaves much to be desired, and it's a legacy system that has evolved very little over the years. It's kind of like we live with the instant payment system built for the 2000's and in my point of view, it sucks that we have missed the most of the last 20 years of development in the space.
I wouldn't say sucks, but there are benefits that credit cards have that Interac doesn't. But why cant we have a Canadian credit company?
Yes I think we should have both. A nationalized instant payment platform, and a Canadian credit card provider. Both have their uses, both are critical infrastructure.
I guess Bombardier was a casualty before the war was declared.
Also stop buying Google Pixels. Wait for the Motorola phones that support Graphene if you have to use that OS or buy a Samsung.
No, Samsung sucks from a FOSS point of view. Go Chinese before you touch those cursed things. Buying a used whatever is also an option.
I implied if you don’t care about FOSS go Samsung. I’d never buy a Chinese phone personally but you do you. They’re also expensive and many don’t have band 13 which is needed for most carriers Canada ( I won’t use Rogers or its subsidiaries and Freedom Videotron Telus and Bell all use band 13 in rural areas - I’m in a rural area)
Okay, sure, if you don't care, Samsung would work. If you care at all, they use program-once SoCs from hell. (You mentioned Graphene, but there's also Lineage, and Motorola is American FWIW)
I too am a rare rural Lemming, and I have a used Chinese phone running a custom ROM. It looks like the export models tend to have a full compliment of bands, and 13 is listed for all of them. If you literally get a domestic Chinese phone model custom imported, sure, you've made your bed a bit, and might have to sleep in it. I'd be shocked if they all cost more new than Samsung, as well.
If you don't like China either, yes, you do you. There's a case for it. They're kind of like America geopolitically, and not just becoming authoritarian. Sony also had something Lineage-compatible, as of last I checked.
Think most mazda's are made in Japan still
Ford owns Mazda
Ford never owned Mazda outright, they had a large stake in them for awhile (never majority), but I just searched it and apparently they've been completely divested since 2015
One of the best things to happen to mazda.
And then a million people all around the world own Ford.
We're better served focusing on where the production happens, not the branding.
Natural resources.
Canada relies on the US for oil and lumber. That's why we've been trying to get out of free trade agreements ever since the US forced them on us.
I don't doubt you but why do we rely on them for oil and lumber? You'd think we produce enough here. But maybe we're sending it all south to be processed into something usable.
We sell crude oil to the US to be refined and buy it back. We sell whole logs to the US (California) to be turned into dimensional lumber or furniture and then buy it back.
This is done to ensure that the Americans have more jobs but also has the added effect of them making the majority of the money off of these resources.
From what I understand Canada doesn't produce many value added products. We sell lots of dimensional lumber and crude oil, but not much gasoline and furniture. We even started selling whole logs, to be produced in China and elsewhere.
California mills our logs for us. We don't produce much dimensional lumber.
Unfortunately, your currency is tied to the USD. Urge your government to join BRICS, and it may matter.
The CAD is correlated to the USD for macroeconomic reasons mostly, and BRICS isn't an economic trade agreement that has a "join" process. It's just a popular term for the largest non-US/EU centered economies. (But sure, let's continue expanding the partnerships with Asia and Mercosul)
BRICS is an international organisation, and it does have a joining process. Canada can apply for membership, but Russia and/or Iran might veto.
I stand corrected, the thing did evolve indeed into an organization that has a formal membership process, and it now consists of 10 countries. TIL, and thank you for the link.
But then again, it is really not an economic trade agreement, and I don't know if there'd be much benefit for Canada joining it, as we are enticing enough as a market for investments without getting BRICS funding for infrastructure projects.
It's more a geo-political organisation than an economic one, closer parallels to G7 than NAFTA or ASEAN, but there are certainly economic agreements between its members.
The point however is that you're basically correct that is not at all the organisation that the original comment implies it is.
Edit. There is no "BRICS funding" it's not the EU. It's a loose collective of countries who claim some alignment, although it's really just more like Bender from Futurama saying "fine, you won't let me join your club, then I'll make my own with Blackjack and hookers"
This thread has shown that my understanding of BRICS is very outdated but, as far as I remember, one of the main things that come out of BRICS is direction on who's getting infrastructure funding, like China, Brazil and India making investments on port building and logistics, which helps streamlining trade between them. That's what I mean with funding, I don't suppose there's a "BRICS bank" but it's the forum where you can convince China that the next port expansion project they pay for is yours.
BRICS is a joke, and no, that's not how money works.
Joining the Euro might kinda make sense (only if Canada joined the EU, but why would you hook yourself up with an economy in a tailspin like Russia ?
I'm telling you the entire Western Bloc currencies are tied to the USD. These states can dump bonds, but other nations selling theirs has already decreased bond worth and USD worth. USD is fiat, backed by debt. Now I'm not an economist, so you'd have to ask someone like Jeffrey Sachs or another seasoned economist what, exactly, that may look like, if there's a bond run.
My first degree was economics & finance, I know how it works. Yes the dollarisation of international trade and economics is something China has been trying to break for decades. They'll succeed in a decade ir so too I expect, but it won't look at all like you seem to think from these comments, and you certainly can't flip the underpinnings of an economy like flipping a coin.
In really simple terms your key export markets determine the construct, Canada has a massive percent in trade with the US and EU (vast majority of exports). This dictates a lot of things.
The only BRICS member a sane person would consider aligning themselves economically with is China, and that is happening organically as a function of trade balances and their economic rise. Eventually the yuan will eclipse the dollar but Canada (and Europe) are not there yet.
Thanks for sharing!