"Your entire nation has a lower GDP than Texas"

"Your entire nation has a lower GFP than Texas". Not Donald Trump this time, but US Representative Brandon Gill of, well, Texas.

And his point? Er, not sure.

Canada goose 1 : American Eagle 0

I should know better than to respond to Trump's nocturnal ramblings on social media. But worth mentioning that I already dealt with this one long before it even happened.

In this episode... Trump has cherry-picked part of a photo sequence by a Canadian photographer of an encounter in Burlington, Ontario between a bald eagle (symbol of America) and a Canada goose (kind of a symbol of Canada, for our sins).

The photo seems to show the eagle dominating and savaging the goose. The rest of the photo sequence, though, shows very different outcome: after a protracted scuffle, the goose survives, rallies and threatens back against the shocked eagle. As I posted many months earlier, a different cherry-picked photo from the same sequence shows the goose rampant and a rather sorry-looking eagle.

Be careful with your source material Mr. Trump (or Ms. Harp, or whoever comes up with this guff).

Meet the ultra-cute leaf sheep

Part 52 in my series of cute and improbable animals, meet the leaf sheep.

You probably guessed that it's not a sheep at all. In fact, it's a kind of tiny sea slug (about the size of a gain of rice), Latin name costasiella kurashimae. It lives in shallow tropical waters near Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. 

Unusually, it absorbs chloroplasts from algae and uses sunlight to generate energy in a process similar to photosynthesis (actually called kleptoplasty). It is also a hermaphrodite, possessing both male and female reproductive organs, although it does need another leaf sheep in order to reproduce.

Most of all, though, it is impossibly cute, with those tiny cartoon eyes, little horns and succulent-luke leaves branching off its back.

Does Canada have any alternatives to retaliatory tariffs?

As Canada invokes dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs on the USA, one can't help but lament how Canada is getting dragged into Trump's own silliness. On both sides of the border, prices will go up, plants will close, and jobs will be lost. As one journalist put it, this is "fighting stupid with stupid". Protesting that "we didn't start it" doesn't change that.

I mean, think about it: Canada now has tariffs on the same exports to the US as the US has tariffs on its exports to Canada. How daft is that? We may as well just keep those products and use them here in Canada, rather than making them more expensive, exporting them to the USA, and then importing the same products back again from the USA (after they have made them more expensive). Franz Kafka would have had a field day with this stuff.

There again, what choice do we have? Doing nothing would signal surrender, and give Trump carte blanche to extend or ramp up his tariffs. Hardly anyone is advocating that.

Some - including the Alberta Federation of Labour, much to many people's surprise - have suggested levying export taxes on our exports to the US. After all, that would put the financial burden on American importers, not Canadian exporters, right? The problem is, export  taxes raise the prices for importers, who would probably then look eslewhere for their imports. It would reduce the attractiveness of, and demand for, Canadian products, and probably result in scaled-back production and job layoffs. 

Predictably, others - the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, for one - have strongly counselled against such a move. Oh, and export taxes are also explicitly prohibited under the CUSMA/USCMA agreement with the US (although, arguably, Trump has flouted the spirit if not the letter of that agreement many times).

Which leaves us with retaliatory tariffs, or some other non-tariff option. BC Premier David Eby has called on Mr. Carney to consider other strategies, like reconsidering the plan to buy American F-35 fighter jets, and to levy export taxes on exports of coal to the US, but only in adddition to retaliatory tariffs, which he says he fully supports.

Canada nonplussed by Trump's threat to change Lake Ontario name

Family overseas are asking us how Canadians feel about Donald Trump threatening to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. (Could he not think of anything more creative?) Well, the word that springs to mind is "nonplussed". Generally speaking, we have learned to ignore Trump's bloviations and his childish outbursts as much as possible.

Besides, he just can't do it. Even a US president can't unilaterally change the name of a bi-national lake. Any change he proposes (assuming he is serious, which is far from clear) would only apply to US federal government publications and maps. The current name is recognized internationally and appears in federal legislation on both sides of the border.

Lake Ontario (an Indigenous name that predates the country, incidentally) is governed jointly by Canada and the USA, through a whole series of treaties, commissions and bi-national agreements. To change the name, Trump would first need to go through the US Board on Geographical Names. Assuming he could cajole, browbeat and threaten them to go along with his childish prank, it would then need to be ratified by the Geographical Names Board of Canada and Ontario's Ministry of Natural Rreources and Forestry and Indigenous Communities, which is consulted on culturally significant names.

So, not going to happen.

Doug Ford tries to out-Trump Trump

It's pretty instructive to see Ontario Premier Doug Ford's contribution to the ongoing debate on American tariffs and their perpetrator, Donald Trump.

Following up on "He can kiss my ass as far as I'm concerned", Ford called Trump a "loser", a "dictator", a "bully" and the "king of bankruptcies". Ouch! Then, "I have more courage, more brains in my baby toe than he has in his whole body". Kapow! 

Predictably, Trump fired back very much in the same vein, calling Ford "the less charismatic, intelligent and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great Rob Ford". Zhang! And, to cap it all, he says he is "giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontatio to Lake America in that we don't expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer". So there!

Ford: "You think an insult from him hurts me? Well, bring it on buddy, I am read ready. Bring it on!" Kraak!

The next day, in a CNN interview, Ford admitted that, "Things got a little heated, it got a little personal yesterday". Yuh think?

They're two of a kind, aren't they? Neither of them have any filters or any off switch. Neither considers consequences or engages brain before speaking. How either of them got to where they are today is a mystery. They are supposed to be leaders of large and important regions, and they continue to talk like naughty schoolkids. I'm embarrassed by the pair of them.

Also like Trump, though, the more daft things he says and does, the more Ford's support increases (although while that was true at one time, Trump has shown that there are limits to this kind of counter-intuitive popularity bump - his popularity is now at an all-time low).

Canada-US trade talks fall through

Well, the Canada-USA trade talks fell apart at the eleventh-plus hour.

Prime Minister Mark Carney blamed the Americans for "last-minute changes in US proposed terms [that] were unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal". That sounds about right from past experience.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, of course, blamed the Canadians for "new demands and walk-backs of other commitments by Canada [that] have upended the careful balance reached in the past days". That sounds less convincing.

So, the 50% Section 338 tariffs on about $28 billion of Canada's exports to the US (about 5% of total exports) are set to go ahead forthwith. That sounds pretty bad, but an RBC analysis estimates the fallout at just 0.4% of Canada's GDP, and a separate Capital Economics study puts it at 0.6% of GDP. So, not good, but not disastrous, in the scheme of things. The burden would not fall evenly on the economy, though, with apparel and electrical goods being most badly affected (20% of production and jobs in those sectors could be hurt).

Canada has vowed to retaliate "dollar for dollar", Trump has vowed to up the ante should Canada retaliate, and we now have an all-out open-ended trade war. And we haven't even started negotiation on the renewal or otherwise of the CUSMA/USMCA free trade agreement!

But, I'll tell you what, it actually pretty good to be standing up to the bully to our south. The only other country that has stood up for itself in this way is China. Although, granted we are much more in a David and Goliath situation.

Elbows up, anyone?

Solar energy bails out a baking Europe

It's common sense, but still worth remarking on: Europe only got through this summer's successive heat waves and droughts due to its investments in solar power.

Nuclear, g as and coal plants reduced their output as cooling water sources dried up. Wind turbines struggled to produce in the stagnant, airless conditions resulting from heatwaves. But solar farms and rooftop arrays yielded record amounts of power, which, when called with battery storage, helped electricity networks cope with the abnormal demand levels Europe experienced.

Of course, under different circumstances, solar would not be the saviour. In times of abnormal rainfall, hydroelectricity would come into its own while solar struggles to produce. During periods of high winds, solar panels may still produce good output, but wind farms will really shine. Which is why a judicious mix of renewables is needed backed up by sufficient battery storage capacity. So, that people like Donald Trump can't smugly say, "The wind doesn't always blow, you know?.The sun doesn't always shine." Duh!