The second-hand TEMU Vice-Presidunce JD Vance, a bloke who looks like someone fed "Don Draper" into a knock-off 3D printer that shat itself halfway through the face, stood up in Maine this week and said the quiet part so fucking loud it needed its own security detail. "We have to remember Canada is a state," he told the crowd, before catching himself like a pisshead grabbing the towel rail. "Sorry, Freudian slip. That was actually an accident."
Mate. Pull the other one, it plays the national anthem. A Freudian slip is when you say “I love you” to your boss, or call the new missus by the old one’s name at Christmas lunch. When the Vice President of the United States calls a sovereign G7 nation a state, on camera, mid-speech about economically kneecapping that same nation, while his boss spends every second Truth Social post frothing over a 51st star for the flag like a staffy at a butcher’s window, that is a policy announcement wearing an accident costume. And a shithouse costume at that, grabbed from the servo bargain bin at 4pm on Halloween. He didn’t slip. The mask did.
And once he’d wrestled the mask back over his dial, Vance spent the next three minutes laying out the official case against Canada, delivered with all the conviction of a work-experience kid reading the fire evacuation plan. It went roughly like this: Canada is one of the two worst trading partners on Earth, Canada rorts dairy farmers with a 250 percent tariff, Canada bludges off American military protection, and Canada runs a sneaky back door for Chinese goods. Stirring stuff, if you’re a pot plant. Also wrong, wrong, wrong and mostly fucking wrong, in that bullshit order, and we’re going to take each claim out behind the shed and deal with it the way your pop dealt with a brown snake in the chook pen.
But first, the deficit. Because the whole dummy spit rests on it, and it folds quicker than a two-dollar camp chair under a olympic donut tester.
Here are the actual numbers, ripped straight off the US Trade Representative’s own website, which at time of writing is still legally permitted to publish arithmetic, give it a month. Last year Canada sold America $382 billion in goods. America sold Canada $334 billion back. Gap of $48 billion in Canada’s favour. That’s the entire fucking scandal, and that’s the number Trump waves around like he’s found Hunter Biden’s laptop stuffed up a maple tree.
Now watch what happens when you ask one follow-up question, which is one more than anyone in that administration has managed since the inauguration: what’s actually in the gap?
Energy, that’s what. Oil, gas and electricity, the holy trinity of keeping America’s lights on. America bought roughly $124 billion of Canadian energy in a single recent year while flogging about $27 billion back the other way. That one category covers the whole deficit and then some, with change left over for a pie and a sauce. Strip energy out of the ledger and the United States runs a fat surplus with Canada, tens of billions deep, year after fucking year. Scotiabank, hardly a nest of commie agitators, put the 2023 figure at a $63 billion American surplus once energy comes out. On everything else on the shelf, from tractors to textiles to computers, Canadians buy more American than Americans buy Canadian, and they’ve been doing it with a smile the whole fucking time.
And here’s the detail that upgrades the whole thing from garden-variety stupid to cosmically, telescope-required stupid: America buys that Canadian crude on purpose. Great swathes of US refining capacity, especially through the Midwest, were purpose-built to process Canadian heavy crude. That’s the feedstock the machines were literally built around. The refineries drink Canadian oil the way your Hilux drinks diesel, and nobody in recorded history has ever fixed that by standing at the servo screaming at the bowser.
One commentator put it better than every economist in Washington combined, replying to some poor bugger named Mark who’d wandered into his comments like a tourist into a bikie funeral: did it ever occur to you that the gap exists because America buys one and a half billion barrels of Canadian oil a year? Then he dropped the stat that should be tattooed across the forehead of every trade negotiator in DC: the average Canadian spends about 7.2 times more on American goods than the average American spends on Canadian goods.
Run the arithmetic yourself, it holds like a Kelpie on a sheep. Forty million Canadians buying $334 billion of American gear works out to roughly $8,300 per Canadian per year. Three hundred and forty million Americans buying $382 billion of Canadian gear comes to about $1,100 a head. Per person, Canadians are the best customers America has on this planet, seven times over, the kind of customers a functioning business sends a Christmas ham. And the White House response to the best customers they’ve got is to drag them out the back of the pub for a punishment beating. That’s the strategy. Genius stuff from the finest minds the shallow end of the gene pool could spare.
▶️ Mr Global
Now this is the part of our rant where anyone with two functioning neurons reads on. MAGA faithful, this is your stop however. Thanks for coming, the comic books are thataway, mind the gap on your way out.
Righto. The Maine dairy farmer paying 250 percent to flog butter into Canada. Vance told that sob story to a room full of actual farmers, looked them dead in the eye and everything, so let’s go find this poor bastard and buy him a beer.
We can’t, because he doesn’t fucking exist. He’s the Bigfoot of dairy, the Yowie of the butter aisle, plenty of blurry sightings and not one verified specimen. Canada’s high dairy tariffs are real numbers sitting on the books, sure, but they only ever apply if American dairy exports blow past agreed quota volumes. Inside the quota, American dairy rolls into Canada at zero percent. Nothing, zip, duty-free butter as far as the eye can see. And American exports have never come within cooee of filling those quotas. FactCheck.org pulled the whole thing apart after Trump started reciting the same fairy tale: in 2024 the US shipped over $1.1 billion of dairy into Canada, up nearly 55 percent since 2020, and not one dollar of it copped a triple-digit tariff. Not one. Canada is the second biggest buyer of American dairy on the entire planet, and the thanks they get is a Vice President inventing fictional victims of their generosity.
Now for the part that should end careers, and in a country with a functioning press gallery would’ve ended two by lunchtime. Those quota levels, the entire framework Vance is blubbering about, were negotiated and signed under the USMCA. Signed by Donald J. fucking Trump. First term. He held a ceremony, got the big pen out, and called it the greatest trade deal in the history of trade deals, possibly in the history of paper. So the Vice President is barnstorming Maine campaigning against his own boss’s signature achievement, the crown jewel of season one, and neither of these geniuses appears to have noticed. You couldn’t pitch this to a sitcom. The network would send the script back with “too fucking dumb, even for us” scrawled across it in red texta, and that’s an industry that greenlit Celebrity Big Brother.
Vance’s next brainwave was the classic: Canada underfunds its military and would quite literally get invaded if it weren’t huddled under America’s protective umbrella. The rent-a-crowd nodded along like showbags in a breeze.
And here’s where the man’s grasp of the world map goes from shaky to full Etch A Sketch. Canada is a founding member of NATO, the alliance where an attack on one is an attack on all, and that clause has been triggered exactly once in seventy-odd years: by America, after September 11. Canada answered it. Canadian soldiers fought and died in Afghanistan for that clause, and when American skies shut down that morning, a little Newfoundland town called Gander fed and housed thousands of stranded Americans without being asked. Canada is also a Commonwealth realm, meaning its head of state is the King, the same King as Britain’s, the same King as ours, and the wider family runs 56 nations covering 2.7 billion people, a third of every human being currently drawing breath. So the fantasy where somebody invades Canada is the fantasy where the invader picks a blue with NATO, the Crown, and every country that stands for God Save the King, simultaneously, on day one. And JD, mate, since you raised it: there is exactly one country on Earth currently musing out loud about absorbing Canada, and you’re the Vice President of the fucker. Your boss has managed to threaten one of exactly two nations on Earth holding membership of the G7, NATO and the Commonwealth simultaneously, and the other one is the King’s own gaff, so that avenue’s shut too. Fifty-six relatives, and this genius picked on the kid whose entire family shows up. The only weather Canada needs protecting from these days is coming off the umbrella itself, so you can take the freeloader routine and shove it somewhere the Secret Service won’t follow.
Doug Ford has an answer to the military bit too, and Ford is not a man you want an answer from when you’ve had a go at his province. Sixty-five percent of the high-grade nickel feeding American military manufacturing comes out of Ontario. The tanks, the jet engines, the armour plate holding the whole arsenal of democracy together. The bludger hiding under America’s umbrella is the same country supplying the metal the umbrella is made of. Some protection racket, where the bloke being protected quietly hands the standover man his equipment and sharpens it first.
And Ford was just warming up. Asked about Trump’s personal attacks on him, the Premier of Ontario, a conservative, mind you, a man who’d be a Republican if you shifted him three hundred kilometres south, delivered the following character reference for the President of the United States: a bully who’d take your lunch money one day, your toque the next, then come back for your running shoes. He said he won’t take advice off “the king of bankruptcies.” He said Trump is “tariffing his own people, taxing his own people.” Then he looked down the barrel of the camera at the man himself and told him guys like you all become losers, “because you’re a loser.”
Remember, this is the polite country. This is the country that apologises when you step on their foot. Trump has achieved the diplomatically impossible: he made Canadians stop being nice, and he managed it in under a year.
This is the one that should have seen Vance laughed clean out of the state, chased to the airport by blokes in flannel pelting lobster shells, because of all fifty states he could have picked for the poor-us routine, this galaxy-brained fuckwit chose the single most Canada-dependent state in the union.
About 80 percent of the petrol, diesel and heating oil burned in Maine comes across the Canadian border, most of it from Irving’s refinery in New Brunswick. Half of Maine’s homes heat with oil through winters that would make a Blue Mountains cold snap look like a day at Bondi, and Maine has fossil fuel reserves of exactly fuck-all. Parts of northern Maine buy their electricity straight off the Canadian grid. The lobster, blueberry and timber industries are stitched into Canadian supply chains so tightly you couldn’t slide a durrie paper between them, and the state’s own governor went on the wireless warning that these tariffs will hammer Maine families on everyday essentials. Her state. His party’s tariffs. Governors don’t issue warnings like that for the fun of it.
And housing? Ford again, receipts in hand like a bloke who’s been waiting all week for someone to ask: a third of all homes built in the United States use Canadian lumber, and Trump has whacked a tariff on it. Ran his entire campaign promising cheaper housing, then taxed the actual timber the houses are made of, which is the economic equivalent of promising cheaper beer and slapping an excise on water. The man either doesn’t understand that a tariff is a tax his own people pay, or he understands it perfectly and doesn’t give a flying fuck, and honestly I can’t decide which is worse, because one makes him a fool and the other makes him a fraud, and thirty years of casinos, steaks, universities and bankruptcies says why not both, at no extra charge.
So there stood the Vice President, in a state that would freeze in the dark within a fortnight if Canada ever woke up genuinely spiteful, telling those exact people that Canada is taking advantage of them. It’s like standing in a lifeboat abusing the ship that lowered it, while the ship is still holding your rope and the crew are quietly wondering why they bothered.
The last claim gets partial marks for effort, the way you’d give a kid partial marks for spelling his own name with only one letter backwards. Vance reckons Canada operates as a sneaky back door for Chinese goods. Reality check: Canada matched Washington’s China tariffs blow for blow in 2024, whacking Chinese EVs with a triple-figure slug and belting Chinese steel and aluminium for good measure, and the two countries signed transshipment prevention measures on steel back in 2019, complete with the forensic ability to trace where the metal was actually melted and poured. You can’t sneak Chinese steel through a system that fingerprints the fucking furnace. And when Brookings went hunting for genuine tariff circumvention, torch out, magnifying glass, the full Sherlock kit, the trail ran overwhelmingly through Mexico, with Canada a distant footnote in a hi-vis vest waving from the margin.
Is the file completely empty? No, and King Carney’s negotiators would tell you exactly that with the ice-cold central banker stare of men who have not only read the file but colour-coded the fucker and indexed the appendices. But a footnote is not a back door, and a country that taxed Chinese steel specifically to protect North American industry is a bloody strange choice of villain in a story about protecting North American industry. That’s like doing your mate for theft because he installed your security cameras.
So tally the fucker up. The deficit is an energy bill America runs up voluntarily because its own refineries were purpose-built to drink Canadian crude. The dairy tariff exists only in a hypothetical universe where American exports triple overnight, under rules Trump himself signed with the big ceremonial pen. The military freeloader supplies the nickel in the actual military. The bullied state of Maine is kept warm, fuelled, housed and employed by the very country it’s being taught to resent. Four claims, four belly flops, and not one journalist in the room asked a follow-up, because apparently that costs extra now.
Canada is the umbilical cord, and there’s no politer way to put it. Oil down the pipelines, gas across the border, electrons into the northern grid, timber into the housing stock, potash into the food supply, nickel into the war machine, every single day, quietly, without a parade or so much as a fucking thank-you card. And the American government’s grand strategy for 2026, cooked up by the finest minds ever to bankrupt a casino, is to punish the cord for the crime of feeding it.
Ford asked the only question that matters, and I’ll leave the floor to him. He’d love to see Trump run cars without oil and grow food without potash. So would I, mate. Front row, popcorn, stubby in the holder, the lot. Because the countries on the other side of this shakedown have something Trump has never once budgeted for: adults, institutions, and smart cookies who’ve met a conman before, who know the first rule of dealing with one is that you never negotiate with the con, you pour a drink, check your watch, and wait for the thing to collapse under its own arithmetic. It always does. Ask the casinos.
Canada will never be the 51st fucking state. Not by invasion, not by tariff, not even by Freudian slip.
Donald Trump can lob distraction grenades until his flubbering fucking arm falls off. Tariffs on allies, invasion fantasies, midnight Truth Social meltdowns about maple-flavoured trade deficits, all of it is smoke, and smoke is the point. Because underneath the noise sits a record that no tariff can tax away. A jury of ordinary Americans heard the evidence and found him liable for sexual abuse, and when his own lawyers whinged that the word rapist was unfair, a federal judge looked at the file and ruled the word was substantially true in the plain English every one of us speaks. His best mate of fifteen years ran a trafficking operation preying on girls, and when the country demanded the files, this bloke spent actual political capital keeping the lid screwed down. Those are the facts, sworn, ruled and on the record, and they will outlive every distraction he ever throws.
History doesn’t remember the smoke. History remembers what the smoke was hiding. The tariffs will be a footnote, the rallies will be landfill, and the name Trump will sit in the index next to the only words that stuck: the man the court said you could fairly call a rapist, who guarded a dead trafficker’s secrets like they were his own. Probably because some of them were.
IFLA ~ Gman
THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK WORD WIZARD: ENGLISH, BUT UPSIDE DOWN
A quick geography lesson before the vocabulary. Australia is roughly the size of the continental United States, except we run it with 27 million people, which is fewer than Texas, and roughly the population of greater New York spread across an area where most of the middle is actively trying to kill you. Canada, meanwhile, is BIGGER than the United States. Look it up, the gap is a couple of Tasmania’s wide, and yes, Tasmania is a real place. So this entire saga is a bloke trying to annex a country larger than his own, which is like a caravan attempting to tow the truck. Anyway, since our two great landmasses insist on using the same language differently, here’s your translation guide:
Servo: petrol station. The place Americans call a gas station and Canadians call the reason Maine functions.
Hilux: the Toyota ute that outlives empires. If your pickup drinks diesel, it drinks diesel, and no amount of yelling changes the fuel.
Whacked / slugged: hit with, as in a tax or tariff. Nothing to do with the mafia, although in this administration the line blurs.
Rent-a-crowd: an audience assembled to nod on cue.
Toque: guest entry, Canadian. The woolly beanie Canadians wear while out-negotiating you. Pronounced “toohk.” Doug Ford’s schoolyard bully steals yours on day two.
Mate: friend, stranger, adversary or Vice President, depending entirely on tone.
Pull the other one: I don’t believe a word of it. The full version says the other leg has bells on.
Pisshead: a committed drunk. The towel rail is load-bearing infrastructure.
Dial: face. As in, wrestled the mask back over his.
Arvo: afternoon. Where you sleep in the car after the Christmas lunch incident.
Cunt: in Australia, a unit of measurement for character, calibrated entirely by tone. Here it describes whoever hired the costume before Vance did, and yes, that’s the polite usage.
Rort: to rip off through a dodgy scheme, usually while insisting it’s all above board.
Bludge: to freeload. A bludger contributes nothing and complains about the catering.
Chook pen: chicken coop. Where brown snakes go to meet your pop and, briefly, their maker.
Dummy spit: a full-blown tantrum. The dummy is what Americans call a pacifier, and spitting it is the whole foreign policy.
Prop forward: the biggest human in a rugby team. Camp chairs fear him.
Bowser: the petrol pump itself. Screaming at it has never once lowered the price.
Pie and a sauce: the Australian national food group. Change left over for one is the true measure of surplus.
Bikie: what Americans call a biker. Their funerals are poorly suited to tourism.
Kelpie: an Australian working dog that grips a task the way these numbers grip Trump’s ankle.
Flogging: selling, usually with enthusiasm exceeding quality. No whips involved, mostly.
Yowie: Australia’s Bigfoot. Same evidence base as the Maine dairy farmer paying 250 percent.
Within cooee: anywhere near. A cooee is a bush shout, and American dairy exports can’t hear the quota from where they’re standing.
Texta: a marker pen. The red one is reserved for scripts and Vice Presidents.
Bondi: Sydney’s most famous beach. The opposite of a Maine winter in every measurable way.
Fuck-all: precisely nothing, measured to Australian tolerances. Maine’s domestic fossil fuel reserves, for instance.
Durrie paper: cigarette rolling paper. The thinnest object in the Southern Hemisphere, and it still won’t fit between Maine and Canada.
Wireless: the radio, in the older Australian vernacular. Where governors go to deliver bad news gently.
Hi-vis: high-visibility workwear. The Australian national costume, here worn by a footnote to prove it isn’t hiding.
Doing your mate: charging him with a crime, not helping him move house. Context is everything in this country.
Stubby holder: the foam sleeve that keeps a beer cold. Essential viewing equipment for watching an empire argue with arithmetic.
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