Monday, August 24th Edition

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Today’s Big Story

Canadian Tariffs

 

Trump says Canada wants ‘benefits’ of being U.S. state after trade talks collapse

 

Fifty percent U.S. tariffs on scores of Canadian goods took effect over the weekend, right after trade talks between the two countries collapsed. President Donald Trump's read on the breakdown, delivered on Fox News: Canada wants “the benefits of being a State, without being one.” He also called Canadians “foolish.”

The list is long and oddly domestic—wine, dairy, cement, clothing, honey, furniture and hockey equipment (including some products previously protected under the USMCA). The levies cover roughly $20 billion in trade, about 5% of Canada's annual exports to the U.S., according to BBC and PBS NewsHour. Prime Minister Mark Carney put the figure closer to $28 billion, ABC News reports.

Carney isn't absorbing it. He called the tariffs a “miscalculation” designed to “hurt and divide us,” said Canada had been attacked and pledged to match the U.S. “dollar-for-dollar” starting Sept. 8the. Canada's targets? Steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics.

The legal architecture is the strange part. Trump is invoking Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a provision never before used to raise tariffs, which makes court challenges all but certain. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said no further talks are scheduled. Economists expect the cost to land where it usually does—on consumer prices.

What's still unclear: which Canadian goods escape the tariffs beyond oil, gas and potash, and what the U.S. counter-retaliation Greer floated actually looks like. Sept. 8 is the next real date on the calendar. So buy that Canadian whisky now.

 
The Fine Print:

The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at what products are getting that 50% levy.
 

Visa Ban Was Illegal, Judge Rules

 

Trump administration's 75-country visa ban discriminates on the basis of nationality

A federal judge in New York has thrown out the Trump administration's suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, ruling that the policy discriminated on the basis of nationality in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee, found the ban “contrary to law and was issued in excess of Secretary Rubio's statutory authority,” reports to NPR.

The policy itself dates to January, when the State Department paused immigrant visa issuance for nationals of countries it determined were likely to become public charges. The list ran to Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Somalia and Yemen, among others. Basically 40% of the world's countries.

Vargas's core objection was structural. The ban stripped consular officers of the "exclusive authority and discretion" Congress handed them to weigh applicants one by one, she wrote. Blanket nationality screens, in other words, aren't a substitute for actually reading the file.

The ruling vacates the ban outright and sets aside visa denials issued solely on its basis, sending those applications back for case-by-case review. The government can appeal, and given this administration's track record, probably will. The State Department hasn't said either way.

 
Dig Deeper:

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. is the group that filed the lawsuit challenging the policy.

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The End of the European Summer?

 

They’re racing to transform themselves for a climate that they were never built to withstand

There are few things more glamorous than summering in Europe, right? But more and more, it seems like few things are as hot. Europe is no longer the refreshing seasonal getaway it once was and they’re not exactly sure what to do. And climate change is not something you can be laissez faire about.

The truth is Europe is on fire. This summer the European Union has seen more than 1,750 wildfires. The flames have forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate across France and Spain. Belgium is currently battling its worst wildfire in a century. And in some parts of Greece, fires have forced tourism to come to a screeching halt. Some 1.5 million acres have burned so far—and the season isn’t even over yet. Worse still, this is just a taste of what’s to come.

The New Yorker points out that Europe’s heat has become too lethal to ignore: an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, and sixty-three thousand in 2024. This June—Western Europe’s hottest on record—at least ten thousand excess deaths were recorded as Paris topped a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, Bordeaux hit 108.5, and Gascony reached 111.7. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre closed early, the museum explaining that its building is “not sufficiently adapted to climate change.”

 
FYI:

France has a long-standing cultural and political resistance to air conditioning, with only about 25% of households owning a unit.

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