OpenAI is considered of critical importance to the USA government, so much so that they’re saying it’s ok for AI companies like openAI to use whatever copyrighted material they want to train their LLMs.
OpenAI will survive, as long as the US govt survives and is its backer.
International trade should be the primary purview of the federal government, with the provinces falling the fuck in line. Sask has a population for the entire province that’s less than half the size of one of Canada’s major urban city centers. The overall effectiveness of something like an international trade shift is only effective if everyone follows suit – having minority players decide to not go along with it, and instead take steps that go almost directly opposite the majority (ie Alberta), is pretty absurd and counter productive.
Even more, with the alcohol stuff, they were working to dismantle inter-provincial barriers to allow people to order from other provinces. So Moe’s move could plausibly be viewed as him trying to use the international trade dispute and the position of the majority of Canadians, to earn a profit by providing an avenue for people to avoid the booze bans in other provinces. He’s directly undermining their positions, and undermining the removal of interprovincial trade barriers.
Eh, this isn’t an issue exclusive to Doug Ford. And honestly, the rhetoric of our Government doesn’t really match their actions.
Last week we saw headlines about our biggest banks selling their payment network, moneris, to US Private Equity in San Fran for $450 mil – something that’d no doubt first get the green light from Canadian regulators before being announced. Media generally cheers, business communities cheer, politicians collect their pay cheques, everyone’s ok with it. Banks are federally regulated critical infrastructure, so Carney’s busy selling off/permitting to be sold off, our critical industries/infrastructure, while he’s also out there feigning to be ‘elbows up’.
David Eby too, in BC, for similar reasons. Credit Unions are provincially regulated, and the province has shrugged as US companies took over critical roles in that space – with all ‘larger’ credit unions, and the regulators that oversee them, completely reliant on US backend support companies to function. Using cheques to try and avoid US dependent payment networks? Too bad, those get scanned in to a US Cloud to get processed by most orgs! So even if you’re in a small town, banking with a local “community” credit union, you’re reliant on the US for your day to day payment services.
Most of our government agencies are absolutely dependent on US tech giants: if the US/Trump were to enact something like a 1 week, or 1 month ban on Microsoft/Amazon etc providing service to Canada, our gov would practically shut down. Canadian businesses would squeal, but practically all of Microsoft terms say they’ll hear disputes in US Courts, who would support MS complying with US trade requirements to absolve any liability claims for losses They’re not claiming Canada’s their bitch without some justification. That sort of ‘embargo’ stupidity is the sort of shit someone like Trump may decide to do (Cuba, for example). And as the media’s noted, if/when Canada retaliates the US response is totally up to the s(h)itting president.
One of the things that bugs me at this point, is it’s been like two years coming, and these business are still largely reliant on the USA market. Like if you’re a business owner, and your one major trading region is a dumpster fire, and you just let it burn for two years, what the fuck?
It’s sorta like people who rebuild homes in areas prone to natural disasters like floods / hurricanes etc. You can see the history, you have no reason to think that the trend is going to reverse, you know all your shits gonna get wrecked, but you just keep pretending like it’s all fine.
Canadians won’t do shit on this front.
I’m literally watching a “merger” in the financial industry, where the smaller player, who used a linux-based back-end stack for the banking system, is being forced to adopt the ‘industry standard’ of the larger financial institution – the industry standard being a US company system, running on Microsoft products, and using an Indian company, running the online banking in Microsoft’s cloud. Having a ‘sovereign’ local community credit union isn’t enough to get members/loans apparently.
Even had an opportunity to ask the new CEO about whether they thought it was a prudent move, given the constant news/trade tensions (admittedly, prior to the most recent issue) – and the CEO’s response was basically “I have a piece of paper from a third party that says there’s no risk, so shut up”. Also, the very accurate comment of “I don’t think the back end matters to people in general, no one is going to move their accounts just to be with a sovereign setup, if they can get a slightly better rate elsewhere”. And you can’t really argue that, seeing as the smaller company that’s being ‘merged’ couldn’t leverage it to gain memberships.
The regulators don’t only not care about this sort of thing, they encourage industry to move things into US tech giant clouds. It’s hilarious, the BC outsourcing regulations say to avoid concentration, but the regulators themselves practically disregard it and demand everyone use Microsoft, and FISERV (a US backend banking host provider that provides core services for like 80% of the credit unions around). The regulators themselves are in US tech giant clouds. There’s practically no chance that our government actually takes any kind of stand against Microsoft or US tech giants.
Harper gutting it was literally the reason we stopped participating routinely – like it was quite explicitly the reason Canada pulled back troops from most missions, where prior we had participated in every single one. Without routine/experience, shit goes wrong more often.
It’s sorta like… who would you rather for a surgeon, a person that does the procedure you need regularly, or a doctor that does it maybe once every few years?
Then you had a far higher opinion of PP than many of the people I know.
Canadas peace-keeping legacy was ended decades ago – so long ago that the younger generations don’t even recall it, based on notes in this thread.
I think it was Harper that ended it, if I remember right, in the early 00s. Prior, Canada had played some role in practically every UN Peacekeeping mission. Canada’s peacekeepers were semi-sought after by the UN/other nations, because they weren’t trigger happy. Then Harper/the Conservatives, who are supposedly pro-military, defunded things, and our position diminished significantly. I recall an old Italian lady coworker at one of my first jobs being absolutely apoplectic about it. She’d go on rants about how those sorts of missions are exactly how our military ought to get used, and that keeping preparedness/expertise in dealing with disaster zones, as a good chunk of peacekeeping ends up being logistics/resource distribution, helps when the military’s called on to aid in natural disasters etc.
So the booze bans, if I remember right, came in as part of the response to the US imposing tariffs, tariffs they justified with a flimsy excuse of ‘fentanyl!’. The US didn’t like that we responded to their clearly abusive/disrespectful tariffs, by applying more tariffs. Now Carney is negotiating to lower those tariffs in part by ending what little resistance/push-back Canada had shown.
Carney’s disappointing.
Still better than PP.
I think to understand my position a bit more, it’s worth considering how the US has approached international politics recently.
They knew they were going to bomb the shit out of Iran and cause massive oil price shocks. So a few months prior, they abducted the president of Venezuela, and declared Venezuela’s oil their own via military force – and an ongoing campaign of war crimes against fishermen in the region. They no longer see the point in ‘trading’, or the veneer of polite international politics, and are content to use military force to acquire assets for businesses. They have even threatened military force in the taking of Greenland, a region that’s part of a NATO partners traditional territory.
Seeing as they are prepared to use their massively lopsided military force in conflicts explicitly in the interests of American businesses, such as AI companies, I don’t think ‘money’ is the only metric at play in whether these companies stay around. Musk was literally pillaging America’s data systems under the guise of Doge, and the tech-fascists are very much integrated into the republican administration.
And yeah, these are the same people who partied with Epstein. They likely view the worst thing about the Epstein files situation, as being the audacity of the poors to think they have the right to hold their betters to any sort of accountability based on poor people morality. One reason they likely want their own regulation / law independent “freedom” cities, is so that they can have Epstein parties out in the open with zero risk, aside from STDs. So far, America’s shielded most of their rich pedophiles from any real fallout, but why should they even have to bother with such a nuissance, when they’re busy “earning” their billions by having bitchy low brow word fights on X.