I’m mostly familiar with the Canadian situation due to my locale.
What I’d say on this front, is that the government of Canada has generally taken preformative steps so far in regards to the issues in the USA. There’s a lot of chest thumping and pageantry. Our largest province, Ontario, recently re-elected a fairly hard right Conservative politician – one who is well known for doing things against the public interest (like selling off what little green/parkland exists around toronto, to his developer buddies)… he was re-elected because he draped himself in pro-Canada trappings. He’s the guy who made the “Canada is not for sale” hats more popular. Branding yourself as captain Canada works for elections currently – which is why, for example, its very likely we’ll see a Liberal party returned to power federally, even though until very recently they were looking at a significant routing (that, plus them changing to Carney, who is probably the most right-wing/conservative leader of the Liberal/“centrist” party in history).
When I say preformative, I mean things like… there have been no explicit calls from our government to businesses/industry to follow suit on untangling supply chains or shifting trade relationships explicitly – they’ve taken some steps to try and lay ground work for further diversification of international trade, but haven’t pushed any levers, outside of allowing market forces to do their thing. Our banking regulators, for example, happily remain within Microsoft’s cloud ecosystems – and they have seemingly no interest in the financial industry outsourcing all of their websites to foreign countries / the USA. Many of our levels of government have made overtures of “buy local” procurement policies, but when you ask for details they’re all just “planning/reviewing/considering”, without direct action on the table. It’s not what you’d expect, given the ‘rhetoric’ of it being an existential threat / crisis. Our politicians are full of sound and fury, but they aren’t bothered enough to take direct action at this point.
If you rely on concrete / verifiable data points from our government, trade and relations are deteriorating, but there’s no overt cautions/warnings/mandates to take action. Media posts that hype up the fear by changing words feed into the public paranoia, and ignore the relative calm seen in our government agencies.
There might be a big difference in how Canadian government deals with this and how western-european governments do. Sounds like far-right is hijacking the subject, where as here the far-right used to be pro-trump and pro-putin and now have to stay quiet in order to keep their voters from walking away.
Our government is being realistic (If you ask me) about changes in defense, but only the opposition is questioning things like the government being dependent on American cloud services and American financial systems. Nobody in the government seems serious about supporting EU initiatives over the status quo. That’s why I’m ‘happy’ these at least these warnings/updates are being released.
I read something like the travel (or air movements?) between us and Canada decreased 70%, so issueing some kind of warning/update wouldn’t make much sense anymore anyways
Yeah, the drop in travel and drop in spending on American stuff is sharp – not sure the specific %, but it’s definitely up there. What’s interesting is that it’s a “spontaneous” reaction from many Canadians, not so much a result of leadership. Like, yes, Trudeau made a speech or two that were fairly clear on the sentiments, but people’d already been booing at hockey games / cancelling trips etc before that. Sorta like our armed forces reserve applications going bonkers / crashing the website frequently due to volume, without any specific reason.
But these things are still driven by what seems like mass paranoia / potentially media trends, to some extent - especially as there’s been few ‘real’ controls/measures implemented. Canadian media is heavily skewed/oriented towards the USA, so we’ve seen a fairly constant blast of negative Trump/American perspectives. Social media makes it really easy to fan those xenophobic flames – like you’d just need a small batch of bots/agents upvoting/downvoting posts to shift the herds perspective on sites like reddit, as, if they catch posts ‘early’, that’d essentially allow control of which comments are visible, allowing for control of the discussion. The anti-american stuff feels a lot like a social media trend in this respect – like people ‘spontaneously’ recording themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads, or taking photos of ‘planking’, or some random dance move, or stealing stuff from public washrooms, etc. Those sorts of things were basically coordinated through algorithms on social media, moreso than people rationally/objectively deciding to do them. It’s not like people across the country woke up one day and all thought “I know how to support ALS research, I’ll film myself dumping a bucket of water on my head!”. It was a nonsensical behaviour pattern spurred on by oligarch controlled algorithms, demonstrating the power of those algorithms to manipulate the masses.
True. Probably the sentiment is based on real feelings of real people, but I see this easily could be used to by a foreign power to further push the divide. There’s reason to look out for that.
I’m mostly familiar with the Canadian situation due to my locale.
What I’d say on this front, is that the government of Canada has generally taken preformative steps so far in regards to the issues in the USA. There’s a lot of chest thumping and pageantry. Our largest province, Ontario, recently re-elected a fairly hard right Conservative politician – one who is well known for doing things against the public interest (like selling off what little green/parkland exists around toronto, to his developer buddies)… he was re-elected because he draped himself in pro-Canada trappings. He’s the guy who made the “Canada is not for sale” hats more popular. Branding yourself as captain Canada works for elections currently – which is why, for example, its very likely we’ll see a Liberal party returned to power federally, even though until very recently they were looking at a significant routing (that, plus them changing to Carney, who is probably the most right-wing/conservative leader of the Liberal/“centrist” party in history).
When I say preformative, I mean things like… there have been no explicit calls from our government to businesses/industry to follow suit on untangling supply chains or shifting trade relationships explicitly – they’ve taken some steps to try and lay ground work for further diversification of international trade, but haven’t pushed any levers, outside of allowing market forces to do their thing. Our banking regulators, for example, happily remain within Microsoft’s cloud ecosystems – and they have seemingly no interest in the financial industry outsourcing all of their websites to foreign countries / the USA. Many of our levels of government have made overtures of “buy local” procurement policies, but when you ask for details they’re all just “planning/reviewing/considering”, without direct action on the table. It’s not what you’d expect, given the ‘rhetoric’ of it being an existential threat / crisis. Our politicians are full of sound and fury, but they aren’t bothered enough to take direct action at this point.
If you rely on concrete / verifiable data points from our government, trade and relations are deteriorating, but there’s no overt cautions/warnings/mandates to take action. Media posts that hype up the fear by changing words feed into the public paranoia, and ignore the relative calm seen in our government agencies.
There might be a big difference in how Canadian government deals with this and how western-european governments do. Sounds like far-right is hijacking the subject, where as here the far-right used to be pro-trump and pro-putin and now have to stay quiet in order to keep their voters from walking away.
Our government is being realistic (If you ask me) about changes in defense, but only the opposition is questioning things like the government being dependent on American cloud services and American financial systems. Nobody in the government seems serious about supporting EU initiatives over the status quo. That’s why I’m ‘happy’ these at least these warnings/updates are being released.
I read something like the travel (or air movements?) between us and Canada decreased 70%, so issueing some kind of warning/update wouldn’t make much sense anymore anyways
Yeah, the drop in travel and drop in spending on American stuff is sharp – not sure the specific %, but it’s definitely up there. What’s interesting is that it’s a “spontaneous” reaction from many Canadians, not so much a result of leadership. Like, yes, Trudeau made a speech or two that were fairly clear on the sentiments, but people’d already been booing at hockey games / cancelling trips etc before that. Sorta like our armed forces reserve applications going bonkers / crashing the website frequently due to volume, without any specific reason.
But these things are still driven by what seems like mass paranoia / potentially media trends, to some extent - especially as there’s been few ‘real’ controls/measures implemented. Canadian media is heavily skewed/oriented towards the USA, so we’ve seen a fairly constant blast of negative Trump/American perspectives. Social media makes it really easy to fan those xenophobic flames – like you’d just need a small batch of bots/agents upvoting/downvoting posts to shift the herds perspective on sites like reddit, as, if they catch posts ‘early’, that’d essentially allow control of which comments are visible, allowing for control of the discussion. The anti-american stuff feels a lot like a social media trend in this respect – like people ‘spontaneously’ recording themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads, or taking photos of ‘planking’, or some random dance move, or stealing stuff from public washrooms, etc. Those sorts of things were basically coordinated through algorithms on social media, moreso than people rationally/objectively deciding to do them. It’s not like people across the country woke up one day and all thought “I know how to support ALS research, I’ll film myself dumping a bucket of water on my head!”. It was a nonsensical behaviour pattern spurred on by oligarch controlled algorithms, demonstrating the power of those algorithms to manipulate the masses.
True. Probably the sentiment is based on real feelings of real people, but I see this easily could be used to by a foreign power to further push the divide. There’s reason to look out for that.