A full-on trade war, the prime minister says.

As of 12:01 this morning, Canadian products from honey to hockey sticks with a total export value of roughly $28 billion slammed up against a new 50-per-cent tariff wall imposed by the Trump administration.

It’s unlikely that any of those products will make it over the wall. That’s the immediate foreground. As many as 50,000 jobs may be at stake, according to the Toronto Star.

“You are at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Prime Minister Carney told reporters. “That’s fine. We’ve got the reserves. We’ve got resilience. We’ve got the plan.”

The plan, among other things, is to reinstate Canada’s retaliatory tariffs that were lifted last year and impose new dollar-for-dollar tariffs on American products, and to focus on assisting the businesses hit by this new American vandalism. All will be unveiled after Labour Day.

For some businesses in the various categories subject to the new border tax, it’s game over. Or it would be if the border tax were to stay in place. With U.S. President Donald Trump’s erratic disposition being what it is, and with the U.S. courts tending to find the president’s fixation with tariffs to be in violation of U.S. trade law, and brinksmanship being a game both sides will play in any down-to-the-wire negotiations. . . you just never know.

We’re meant to understand that President Donald Trump’s new trade blockades are going up because Prime Minister Mark Carney withdrew his negotiators from Washington late Friday owing to a last-minute “fracture” in what President Trump had only hours earlier called a done deal to reconfigure the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.

There’s good cause to be skeptical in the extreme about absolutely everything that comes out of this president’s mouth, and no one who attributes this skepticism to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is entitled to be admitted into the company of reasonable grownups. There’s much to be said for the school of thought that holds that what’s really going on here is that President Trump, or perhaps his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, is just being a belligerent jackass. I offer no opinion.

There’s also a good reason to be at least somewhat skeptical about the way Prime Minister Carney has explained the impasse, and by all means, be skeptical about the spin put about by sources close to the talks and various Liberal-friendly sock puppets. Peter Menzies, who has spent a lifetime in journalism and media policy, has noticed the ubiquity of “strategic leakers” informing reporters assigned to the trade talks. Menzies advises vigilance.

So do I, and I don’t mean just about the “legacy media,” which isn’t the mass media anymore.

Here’s a disturbing example. It’s an 18-minute speech by former U.S. president Bill Clinton, commenting on the “fracture” that erupted in the Canada-U.S. relationship on Friday night. It’s dramatic and persuasive, if you overlook the odd an occasional lapses into incoherence and the former president’s promotion of the newsletter that purports to have hosted or commissioned or produced the speech.

Clinton is damning of Trump’s policies, and quite friendly to Canada. The speech appeared on Youtube yesterday. By this morning it had already garnered 995,000 views. For all I can tell it’s entirely the product of Artificial Intelligence. There is no thebuebill.com website. There is a readbluebill.com newsletter, which may or may not be affiliated, and purports to serve “people
who'd rather understand governance than argue about it.”

I have found no evidence of Clinton having given this speech anywhere. If you look hard enough you’ll find a Google 'Made with AI' caution appended to the video’s notes: “This indicates that a video contains content that has been meaningfully altered or synthetically generated.” I invite my paid subscribers to weigh in. Maybe somebody can track this down. Maybe Clinton did give this speech, or something like it, somewhere.

What follows is the cause of my skepticism about what has been reported, on the record, and what the Carney government has said, with an observation about a gaping hole in the news coverage and what hasn’t been reported at all.