Donald Trump privately considers taking U.S. out of CUSMA trade pact

border_humper

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The president has asked aides why he shouldn’t withdraw from the agreement, which he signed during his first term, though he has stopped short of flatly signalling that he will do so, according to the people who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. An official in U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s office said that a rubber-stamp of the 2019 terms was not in the national interest and the administration intended to keep Trump’s options open and negotiate to address issues that had been identified. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity and declined to directly address whether Trump was musing about an exit from the trade pact. Greer said Tuesday that the administration would hold separate talks with Mexico and Canada, arguing that trade ties with Canada are more strained. He did not say whether Trump would approve an extension.
Thanks, cottage cheese.
 
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The main thing Trump is asking for is the ability to sell US dairy products in Canada. The dairy cartel hates that.

Idk how many Canadians actually support the dairy cartel - and that could change if it becomes widely known how much milk is dumped to keep prices high. Or how much cheaper milk and cheese could be. With the food cost problem it could be a huge benefit to people.

I don't support the dairy cartel and buy dairy from small farms.

Of course, the elbows up, buy Canadian people would hate it and call it derogatory names like Trump cheese.
 
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The more research I did into the dairy cartel the more disgusted I became. Trump is 100% right is trying to break this cartel. Canadians are actually suffering from it, not gaining. I used to have this debate with leftists but they have too much TDS to reason with.

From a pure economic perspective, you do want to protect your domestic industries BUT you don't want to protect the industry so much that you actually stifle innovation and cause significant inefficiencies. To try to put it into layman terms, imagine you sold a product, let's say orange juice. When you first started hundreds of years ago you paid laborers to literally hand squeeze oranges. Then a mechanical squeezer was invented. In order to be competitive, you needed to buy these mechanical squeezers because the companies who owned them were able to layoff a lot of their employees and produce even more orange juice cheaper. Thus, you had to do the same to be competitive. The problem is that it takes a lot of upfront capital (money) to invest in the mechanical squeezers which you don't have. Thus, you go out of business and the businesses who could afford the mechanical squeezers stay in business. The net result though is that orange juice is more efficiently produced and the customers now have access to cheaper orange juice. Now imagine instead, the government said that it would tax everyone in society to pay you enough money such that you could continue to pay enough laborers to squeeze the orange juice by hand but the government would only pay you what you needed to be paid to stay competitive meaning if you bought the mechanical squeezers, the government wouldn't give you even more money. What do you do? Well, you don't buy the mechanical squeezers and continue to sell orange juice. All the people who bought mechanical squeezers can't compete with you because they need to repay the costs of the mechanical squeezer, which you don't have to, so you stay in business selling orange juice for the same price and now everyone pays higher taxes. So the efficiency of orange juice production didn't improve but the cost went up for the consumer all thanks to the government's protection.

That's essentially what's going on in the diary industry.

Now, there's some good reasons for wanting to protect certain aspects of our dairy industry. The USA uses rbST (a type of hormone to increase dairy production) whereas Canada does not but this can 100% be handled by simply banning the sale of milk where rbST is used. We don't need to give the Canadian producers money to compensate for their lack of use of rbST. If we don't want rbST in our milk then we ban milk in which cows had this used on them. We actually don't really need to do this either because with proper labeling, Canadians can choose. I for one would pay 15% more on my milk for milk made in Canada without rbST but some poorer people might not and they ought to have that option.
 
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Another reason is that the US is subsidizing their dairy famers and thus they are able to sell milk below production cost. That wouldn't be a fair fight for our dairy farmers.
 
How about we remove all the subsidies for all of the foreign invaders and give some of that cash to dairy farmers? I hate taxes but at least it's supporting CANADIAN businesses.
 
@RightOfSask Probably time for a rethink. Supply management wastes a tremendous amount of milk, creates barriers for new dairy farmers, and results in crazy prices for consumers for milk, dairy, eggs, chicken too maybe?
 
@border_humper
The subsidies in the US also lead to farmers dumping milk in even larger quantities than in Canada. We can drop the tariffs on the US and remove supply management, but then you will have to pay higher taxes to subsidize Canadian dairy farmers so that they can compete with US subsidized dairy farmers.
 
If Canadians don’t stop and ask themselves why is milk and cheese so expensive despite there being cows all over Canada… that’s a Canadian problem.

And a pattern.

Most Canadians don’t question shit. They just blame everyone else cos muh we aren’t muh like the Americans muh or elbows up or whatever is the current thing that gives you brownie points and raises your social credit score.
 
I do agree that the Canadian dairy cartel needs to go, but there are two major problems with just allowing US dairy into Canadian markets. Firstly, the US government heavily subsidizes its own dairy farmers so that they can sell their products much more cheaply than Canadian dairy farmers could. We would lose our own domestic dairy sector if this happened.

Secondly, the US allows producers to put all sorts of obnoxious and even carcinogenic chemicals into their dairy products, and even to feed their cows with chemicals that we don't allow up here. As far as I know, RFK hasn't actually done anything to stop that yet. You can't trust food that's produced in the US because it's not really food. Until Trump's government actually does something about that problem, you really don't want your kids drinking American milk.
 
Grok says that dairy products that substantially originate in the USA (meaning primarily U.S.-sourced or heavily reliant on U.S. imports) represent approximately 3-6% of total dairy consumption in Canada, and approximately 15-20% of all food consumed in Canada substantially originates from the USA. Hope you’re reading labels so you don’t get poisoned. I hear Indian pickles are tasty.
 
Bro, even Trump and the MAGA leadership know the chemicals in American food are a problem. Otherwise he wouldn't have made RFK his Health Secretary.

Shooting ourselves in the foot by siding with Trump just to spite Carney makes no more sense than Canadian Boomers screwing their own kids over just to spite Trump.
 
He’ll also want a graduate the US can build military bases in Canada's part of the artic. that is what the Greenland thing was about land rights to parts of Greenland. They want the same for Canada and the parts of the artic they control.
 
Why? He negotiated it and called it the best trade deal of the universe...
 
Deal was good, but a lot of back door action since.
 
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@RightOfSask Here’s the thing deals can change. Maybe it was good before, but Trump wants more now, and that’s his right by the deal itself. It’s like my job: my pay was fine when I started, but not anymore with all the things I do and fix here. I want more now, and I told them as such.
 
@TOPDAWG

Man Canada really loves that dairy.

There isn’t a single, uncontested answer — who “broke” the USMCA first depends on interpretation and perspective, and each country accuses the others.

Here’s the polished, factual breakdown:

  • Canada was accused early on (by the U.S.) of not fully opening its dairy market as required under the USMCA. This led to formal dispute panels, and Canada later had to adjust some policies after losing a ruling.
  • The United States was later found in violation over steel and aluminum tariffs and in some cases automotive rules of origin interpretations, which panels ruled against.
  • Mexico has also faced accusations, particularly around energy policy favoring state-owned companies, which the U.S. and Canada argue violates the agreement.

### Bottom line

  • Canada is often cited as the first party accused of non-compliance (dairy).
  • The U.S. was the first to be formally ruled against by dispute panels.
  • All three countries have been found in violation at different points.

So politically: everyone claims the other side broke it first.
Legally: multiple violations occurred, by all parties, at different times.
 
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