Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly called President-elect Donald Trump on Monday night, just hours after Trump threatened to enact tariffs against Canada for border security issues.
“Shortly after Trump’s post, Trudeau contacted Trump and the two leaders spoke by phone,” said Bloomberg News reporter Brian Platt.
h/t patthedog
The incoming Trump administration plans to send families to internment camps, deport 12 million undocumented people, and to end temporary protected status (TPS), a designation for migrants who cannot safely return home. Some of these people will have well-founded refugee claims and will look to Canada.
As refugee lawyers, we heard countless stories from clients during the first Trump administration who initially arrived in the U.S. but did not remain there. Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric and policies propelled them to cross into Canada, many at Roxham Road.
Must be worried they’re going to lose business if Canada cooperates with Trumps sensible plans.
Amazon will never be neighbourly
“You have to be a neighbour to have a neighbour.” That’s Mark Jamison’s mantra — and he should know. Until he retired, after all, the 68-year-old was the postmaster in Webster, a small town enveloped by the mist and hollers of North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. And while he surely dealt with letters and parcels, townsfolk brought Jamison their troubles too. The title of postmaster, he says, “gives you some heft” in a quiet place like Webster, where he was the only representative of the federal government. Between sorting mail, that authority meant he also wrote money orders for people who couldn’t read, or else deciphered tax statements. Sometimes, he just offered advice to the downtrodden or simply loosened the jars of old ladies driving home from the store.
Donald Trump has levelled his most severe threat against Canada in years, warning that on his very first day on office he might impose punishing economic sanctions across North America.
The U.S. president-elect threatened Monday evening to slap a 25 per cent import tariff on all products entering the country from Canada and Mexico on Jan. 20, 2025, his inauguration day.
He delivered the warning via his social media platform Truth Social, in a post that began with a complaint about migration and drugs spilling across both the northern and southern border into the U.S. Then he foreshadowed a damaging import fee that would drive up costs for Canadian and Mexican exporters, making their products less attractive while also potentially raising costs for American consumers.
In October, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) sent a chartered flight carrying Indian nationals back home, marking a growing trend in deportations to India.
This was no ordinary flight – it was one of multiple large-scale “removal flights” carried out this year, each typically carrying more than 100 passengers. The flights were returning groups of Indian migrants who “did not establish a legal basis to remain in the US”.
According to US officials, the latest flight carrying adult men and women was routed to Punjab, close to many deportees’ places of origin. No precise breakdown of hometowns was provided.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly called President-elect Donald Trump on Monday night, just hours after Trump threatened to enact tariffs against Canada for border security issues.
“Shortly after Trump’s post, Trudeau contacted Trump and the two leaders spoke by phone,” said Bloomberg News reporter Brian Platt.
h/t patthedog
A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators say they expect Canada and the U.S. to work collaboratively on shared issues of defence and the border, but suggested Ottawa’s policies on military spending need to change to speed up progress.
The first woman to command Canada’s military called out a U.S. senator on Saturday for questioning the role of women in combat.
Gen. Jennie Carignan responded to comments made by Idaho Republican Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking member of the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee, who was asked on Friday whether president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, should retract comments that he believes men and women should not serve together in combat units.
“I think it’s delusional for anybody to not agree that women in combat creates certain unique situations that have to be dealt with. I think the jury’s still out on how to do that,” Risch said during a panel session at the Halifax International Security Forum on Friday.
h/t Mauser
A Chinese hacking operation that tapped into the US phone network was far more extensive than first reported and could have listened into virtually any mobile phone conversation in the country, according to accounts.
The Salt Typhoon hackers group, named by the Microsoft engineers who first encountered it in the summer, was initially reported to have targeted the phones of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance, as well as Kamala Harris’s campaign workers.
Canadian leaders are signaling that they are willing to throw Mexico aside in a bid to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration as they prepare for tough trade talks.
With a scheduled review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement beginning next year, Canadian leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his finance minister, have said they are ready to make a new deal with President-elect Donald Trump alone, cutting Mexico out.
Canadian leaders say they are worried that Mexico has become a backdoor to the North American free-trade zone for Chinese products, much of which would otherwise face steep tariffs in both Canada and the U.S. Trudeau said he raised these concerns with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Brazil.
America and the United Kingdom have long had a special relationship, working closely as allies to protect the West from oppressive dictatorships that suppress their own people, arbitrarily jailing them and persecuting them for exercising their God-given right of free speech. Here’s the problem. The UK has become one of those oppressive dictatorships that suppress their own people, arbitrarily jailing them and persecuting them for exercising their God-given right of free speech. And I’m not particularly interested in having a special relationship with a country like that. Nor are many other Americans.
Luckily they’re stuck with us and vice versa. h/t DS
Hassan Daqqou is known as the King of Captagon, an amphetamine-like drug produced mostly in Syria that has become the stimulant of choice across the Middle East. At his recent trial for drug smuggling, held behind closed doors in Lebanon, Daqqou said that he had collaborated with the Syrian Army and flashed an ID card from its Fourth Division, which is commanded by President Bashar al-Assad’s brother Maher, according to leaked court transcripts published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a network of investigative journalists. He also admitted to working with Hezbollah, the Lebanese group that is at war with Israel and has a history of overseas terrorist attacks.
We’re going to be fine, just fine. That’s the message coming from the Trudeau government in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive comeback.
Just so there’s no doubt, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland put it like this last week: “I want to say with utter sincerity and conviction to Canadians that Canada will be absolutely fine.”
Maybe it’s just me, but when people tell me they’re speaking with utter sincerity and conviction it leaves me with the nagging feeling that maybe there’s a bit of a question mark over both their sincerity and their conviction. As in: aren’t you trying a bit too hard here?
U.S. President Joe Biden did Canada a solid back in 2023, when his government agreed to new terms on the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with Canada. A loophole in the previous agreement meant that migrants who crossed into Canada at irregular crossings, such as Roxham Road in Quebec, could still claim asylum in Canada. The U.S. could thus wash its hands of, for example, the nearly 40,000 people who entered Canada at unofficial points of entry in 2022 alone. “Sorry, Canada: they’re your problem now.”
U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump is not just revving his engines — he is ready to go. There have been a flurry of proclamations and appointments, including that of former ICE director Tom Homan as his “border czar.” What will Homan do in the role? At the 2024 National Conservatism Conference in Washington, he promised, “Trump comes back in January…. I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.” With 11 million migrants illegally in the country, he is not kidding.
