• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    75% of Canadians supported Carney backing out of the trade deal. This is despite the fact that it will cause massive economic hardship to Canada to accept these tariffs.

    Canadians are pissed, and are willing to accept economic hardship in order to stand up to a bully.

    For decades Canada has just accepted whatever the US has demanded. For example, Canada has aligned its copyright laws to match US laws, which Hollywood was demanding. It has accepted that Canadians installing a Canadian-made app on their phones have to pay a 30% cut to an American company.

    This was because the US, in exchange, was giving Canada free access to the American market. Canadian potash, lumber, energy, etc. could all be sold to the US without tariffs. Now Trump has reneged on that deal.

    Carney has promised counter-tariffs, but I want to see a real trade war. Fuck the US copyright laws. Fuck the DMCA. Fuck American printers that won’t allow you to use your own ink. Fuck US tractors that can only be repaired by their US manufacturer. Canada should not only refuse to honour US intellectual property, I want Americans to travel to Canada to get their phones unlocked, to pay Canadians online for software to de-DRM their printers. What’s the downside? The US will counter with tariffs? Done that. The US will try to cut Canada’s access to Netflix off? We have bittorrent here.

    Americans keep talking about this being a David vs Goliath fight, but for an ultra-religious country, they sure don’t seem to remember how that bible story ended.

    Edited to add: In the early days of the USA it was a pirate nation, in many ways. There were Americans acting as privateers, basically pirates who were protected / supported by the US. The US also was infamous for ignoring copyrights on authors from Europe.

    I don’t think it’s very likely that Canada is going to be brave enough to repeal the copyright laws that the US forced Canada into adopting. But, maybe, a 21st century “privateer” is possible. What if Carney walked over to the head of the RCMP and off the record put the word out that the RCMP was to stop cooperating with the FBI on any actions against Canadians accused of violating US IP laws. What if the government decriminalized laws against circumventing copyright protection.

    For a long while before marijuana was legalized, it was decriminalized. It was pretty common to see people smoking pot on the street, which was technically illegal, and a cop would just walk by and ignore it. But, that was all done in an above-board way. I think it’s entirely possible something like that could be done through back channels with nothing written down.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        And many Americans would love Canada if Canadians would sell them those drugs at costs far below what the American Pharma industry was charging.

        That would be a great move, piss off the US pharma companies while getting on the good side of individual Americans.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          if Canadians would sell them those drugs at costs far below what the American Pharma industry was charging.

          The mail order pharmacies were charging Americans less than they would pay at home - and It caused a few shortages of some medications for Canadian patients.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            21 hours ago

            Yeah, in a trade war there are casualties. Maybe the Canadian government could do more to increase supply to those privateer mail order “pharmacies”, or something.

            • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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              7 hours ago

              Or cut them off.

              Make Americans fix their own system instead of leeching off ours.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          And many Americans would love Canada if Canadians would sell them those drugs at costs far below what the American Pharma industry was charging.

          Oh thats so fiendish.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            Easy to do too. Probably the easiest thing on this whole wishlist. Canadian “pharmacies” that sell products shipped by mail into the US already exist. I’m sure they’d happily sell even more stuff that was freely available in Canada patent and license free.

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The religious people here don’t actually read their book, they get told what to think.