Trump has already put 26 percent tariffs on European steel and aluminum, and he is now adding a 25 percent tariff on European cars and car parts.

[chris@fedi.chris-macleod.ca]

Canada did have tit-for-tat tariffs. We were the first to be targeted economically and one of the first to have our sovereignty challenged. We immediately responded by retaliating and by seeking diplomatic support from our European allies.

In February 2025 then-Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly went on a tour through Europe to that end. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the CBC following that tour:

Journalist:
Can you talk about why Canada's international allies have not been speaking up to oppose the U.S.' 51st state talk? If you asked them to speak up publicly or if you had or if you got an explanation from any of them about why they're radio silent?

Joly:
Based on my conversations with many European colleagues, many of them are not necessarily completely aware of what is going on, first in the U.S. and second in Canada. Every country in the world is looking at its own reality. And Europe has its own challenges. But I think we have had very productive meetings over the past week. It was necessary for me to be in Europe to tell them exactly what's going on, to make sure that we would co-ordinate on any form of response to tariffs, and that we would be together defending our national security and sovereignty.

A couple weeks later, Starmer infamously dismissed us when pressed by a journalist from the Independent about the matter during a meeting with Trump.

Another month later was Trump's so-called Liberation Day. Despite what Mélanie Joly said about co-ordinating a response, other countries all folded like wet paper and sought to strike deals that would net them reduced tariff rates, typically in exchange for investing billions of dollars in the U.S.

In fact, the only other country to meaningfully retaliate was China.

We dropped most of our tariffs when it became clear that we were standing alone. The reasoning, it went, was that the resulting damage to our own economy would make it more difficult to build up our sovereign industrial capacity and diversify trade away from the U.S. Nation building is our only viable strategy in the absence of a united front.

It wasn't until almost a year later, in January 2026, after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela lent credibility to the renewed threat of the U.S. seizing Greenland by military force that we started to see some actual coordination.

This is all to say that, yes, we should do that. We should have done it a year ago.

[glutto@mastodon.social]

@randahl

Meanwhile, China's zero-tariff policy covers nearly every single country on the continent of Africa.
So much winning.

[drajt@fosstodon.org]

@cstross @marjolica @martinvermeer @Inidox @ij @randahl

The ICAO sets the rules for passports. You can make them any colour you want, as long as it's photostable for ten years, i.e. a dark colour. So dark blue, green or red are the obvious choices or black.

Most but not all EU countries use the dark red/burgundy colour but there isn't any rule saying you have to.

The so-called blue passport for the UK is virtually black as was the one before the modern soft one was adopted.