No thanks less microplastics.

Cotton degrades, plastic just keeps getting smaller for a few centuries until it finally breaks down. And most of those bags are just non disposable plastic.

Alberta is likely the reason the Americans are confident they can ‘take Canada by economic force’. Smith’s overtures are basically moving towards Alberta leaving Canada / joining the USA. Once that happens, east/west trade basically gets cut – BC is left isolated and unable to feed its population without trade crossing the USA. This, coupled with the dissolution of the Columbia River Treaty, wherein we get a cut of the power produced by US hydro plants downstream of the river (so BC isn’t energy independent by any stretch, contrary to what some politicians have implied over the years), allows the USA to annex BC. Most of the prairies would follow Alberta, from the sound of things when push comes to shove (the Sask premier has made similar “you can’t restrict our trade south, we don’t care about the federation!” comments from what I recall, we just don’t hear it as much in the media), and areas of the northern territories would be increasingly pressured after BC+Alberta fall, especially on the western side. The USA wouldn’t have to move any troops to accomplish this, they just need a compliant Alberta, which they seem to have.

Taking Greenland would allow them to isolate the eastern parts of Canada by restricting ocean trade routes and limiting access to European markets – they won’t need to “take” take Greenland, but just setup a few occupied military bases similar to what they have in Guantanamo in Cuba (Cuba doesn’t want them there, but there they are!). And without BC / access to the West Coast and/or the Panama canal, moving goods from China becomes difficult/impossible for Eastern Canada. Without the prairies and lacking non-US controlled trade routes, food sustainability becomes an issue for Central Canada, making it an easy target. The maritimes fall, practically as an afterthought.

With the “fentanyl is a WMD” rhetoric, they may even try to expedite that by sending troops in to our ports – and honestly, when you hear how the longshoremen in BC operate, the states may have actual justification to do so: their ‘attack’ would have a grain of truth, given the seedy crap that goes on at the ports. And despite the bravado from some of our politicians, they would likely still capitulate on a ton of things to try and appease the Americans. PP would do it with a smile, Carney will do it slightly grudgingly but in the same “rationale” as what we saw down south with the Senate Democrats betraying the progressives on the budget vote – so, for example, the Americans are on about “banking”, specifically wanting access to retail banking while ignoring Canadian regulations. Carney likely won’t hesitate to throw Canada’s retail banking ecosystem under the bus. Carney and Carolyn Rogers are the folks who were responsible for smashing the hell out of the small credit unions in Canada already – Carolyn practically killed Central1, the primary trade association for the Credit Union system (though it takes a long time to bleed out) – they’ll happily sell out what’s left, and any modicum of privacy people have on their payments, to the USA if they think it’ll buy them a few more years of “near status quo”. Even if doing so will make it easier for the USA to target “bad thinkers” by reviewing where you spend money - similar to what Doge and the social media inspections are doing currently. The CBC will spin the story into a positive, just like how they spun Freelands negative results on the USMCA into a positive after that deal was signed. The CBC reporting there, while it was being negotiated, listed various things we were seeking that’d be ‘measures’ of how we did – we failed on most of em, yet they still ran pieces as though Freeland did a great job, with photos of her collapsed on a couch ‘exhausted’ from negotiating so hard or whatever. That sort of shenanigans from the CBC, is one reason the “right wing” calls to defund the CBC convince so many people; and instead of addressing the issue, the Left is now simply blasting out that we need to protect the CBC because of American influence in other media channels. You either support all Left wing positions without question/thought, or else you’re labelled a bootlicking fascist. We don’t really have a non-authoritarian option.

Another area they’re likely to capitulate on, are things like Immigration and “bad state” students – like the Bill the US is currently pushing to ban students from China from accessing higher education. Realistically, do you think they’ll be all “Yeah, no worries, we’ll keep sharing tech/education stuff with Canada, even though they don’t do the same racist shit”? Nah, they’ll require Canada to put restrictions / limits / block the same sorts of people. With Trumps approach, he may just go with a blanket “No more CPUs for Canada, unless they agree to our terms” – try finding any kind of computer that isn’t tied to the USA supply chains, its nearly impossible. And we’ll likely end up doing it, because our politicians will reason out that the “best option” is to go along with it, and hope the USA ‘gets better’.

Places like Europe are aggressively trying to build up sustainable military manufacturing. They’re pushing to excise American tech companies - advancing things like Linux-centric Operating systems for use by businesses/government agencies. Building up nuclear capacity. Our politicians are big on talking, but very short on actual action. They put the entire government into Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta etc. Our health records are in the US cloud. Our financial regulators are in the US cloud. Most of our government agencies are in the US cloud. Even if “data is stored in Canada”, access and use of that data is controlled by USA companies, that are beholden to the Orange mans whims – no, that’s not quite right: USA tech companies that are not only beholden to his whims, but are egging him on to do more. The govt sold out so much of our supply chain to other countries, that it’s nearly impossible to get anything that’s “Canadian made”, beyond the odd grocery or clothing item here and there. And while claiming that they view this as an existential threat, their actual response has been very muted when it comes to supporting Canadian industries / businesses. And none of the parties, from what I can see, will realistically change that trend – it’s mostly just whether you want PP gleefully destroying stuff with a “DOGE-NORTH” hat, or if you want a sullen Carney doing it. Best hope is that the states descends into a civil war, and we manage to last long enough to see it – but its increasingly unlikely, as American “resistance” sorts are weak willed, and generally “online activists, offline enablers”.

Like, it wasn’t too long ago that Trudeau was busy blasting out, and celebrating, that Canada was ‘the first postnational state’, adding that there was ‘no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’. Places like Vancouver don’t even bother with celebrating “Canada” on Canada day, instead putting on basket weaving “Canada is a genocidal shame fest” events, and making asking question about that narrative a criminal hate crime. Even if the Liberals are the most “likely” to provide some sort of resistance at this point, they celebrated the country being dismantled, segregated and separated. And they celebrate tools like censorship – many of the tools the right-wing extremists are using, were made/blessed by left-wing “progressives”. They’re all marching to the beat of the same authoritarian, tech oligarch drum.

Sorry, I’ll stop ranting.