In my opinio it is time that people realize free trade is only free if it benefits or suits the Americans...they care not one iota about anone but themeselves...and I believe they have more than proved that...
I refuse to buy American goods unless I have absolutely no choice......very careful about checking the labels and so far over the last 5 years I have been quite sucessful....yes it can be difficult and yes sometimes you have to change the menu but it works...

stop the gas, hydro and lumber going south and watch them squirm! they might have to live in caves and read by candle light...lol

Amen to that BCRacer

Maybe we should concentrating on buying Canadian too. If it is made in canada, buy canadian. Maybe we pick on Oranges, Nobody buy oranges for two months. Then nobody buys grapefruit for two months.

Maybe, Agriculture Canada needs to encourage more Canadian vegetable products to be grown year round. Incentives and subsidies to become more self sufficient, instead of importing.

We need to get the pipeline to Kitimat so that we can sell our oil to the world instead of just the states. We need to stop relying on the Americans to buy all our products.

We need to enforce the Americans to have their passports to come into Canada.

You can usually get oranges that are not from the USA...
if you look...
fruit and veggies from Mexico and Australia..
we have lots of meat...
Can buy cars from Japan or Europe...let GM, Ford, and Chyrsler slink of back below the 49th...

So if we get into a trade war and start to boycott US products and they then start to boycott Canadian products, how will that work out for the thousands of people who only have a job because they supply lumber to the US market? What about those people working in the oil patch? What about those on the pipelines? Just where are these people supposed to work? Or do we just keep the bailouts going forever?

The road across the border goes both way and I don't think we are as self sufficient as most people like to think. It's nice to think that we could stick it to the big bad USA, but when it comes right down to it, we need them and they need us. Such is life when we are 2 of 3 countries sharing a giant continent, separated from the rest of the world by two rather large bodies of water :)

They are already boycotting our wood...and have been for years...

Yet they still buy it . . .

I mean a REAL boycott like we are talking about here, where they simply shut off the money and don't buy. Who do you think would blink first in that game of chicken?

Quite simply, it's a losing proposition for both sides. If we only produced what we consume internally, the vast majority of the people working in the resource sectors in Canada would be unemployed.

I agree with NMG. Anyone who thinks that Canada can survive a trade war with the USA is living in a dream world. The US is our biggest customer and we export approx 80% of what we produce to the good old USA. This could be anything from Cattle, to Oil, Gas, Lumber, Pulp and Paper, Minerals, Power, Natural Gas etc; Other Countries in the world like South America, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Russia, China,Finland, etc; would love to see us at odds with the USA, this would give them a biggar market share.

These Mayors are a good example of the total lack of understanding that Canadians have about the USA. Do you really think that the Americans give a S..t what a bunch of Mayors from little towns through out Canada think. Give me a break. These Mayors have absolutely no power, and should keep their running noses out of business that is the responsibility of the Federal, and Provincial Governments.

Canadian Mayors should get their collective asses back to their Citys and start to work on local problems, and let the Big Horses haul the Big loads.

The American population is approx 350 Million people, while Canada is approx 30 Million. This should give you some indication of the differences between the Countries. In addition the Americans look after defending North America, which allows the Canadians to run around with a mere 80,000 men and women in our armed forces. This saves us hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that we would have to spend if the Americans were not friendly.

Its time to quit knocking the Americans, and try to increase our trade with them, on a friendly basis.

Without them we have nothing. Repeat Nothing. We would have millions of people laid off without the American market.

Quitchur Bitchin

NMG:- "If we only produced what we consume internally, the vast majority of the people working in the resource sectors in Canada would be unemployed."

In that one simple statement you've encompassed virtually the whole problem, NMG.

But can you not see there are TWO separate issues here?

One essentially 'economic' ~ producing and delivering goods and services as, when, and where required and desired by all the people who live here.

And the other essentially 'moral' ~ the ridiculously outmoded idea that we should "let no man eat unless he has first been made to work". An idea that denies ALL the benefits of technological progress since the dawn of the industrial age.

It isn't a proposition that man should have, "life more abundantly", but rather that he should be made to "work" ever harder for the fruits of his labours he's already worked for. Which will be increasingly denied him, lest his 'moral' virtue be corrupted.

So that even if there is an enormous, unconsumed 'glut' of everything anyone needs or wants already on the market, the only way anyone can access any of that is if they get busy and make still "more" of it. And make the 'glut' worse. Until we HAVE TO DESTROY IT. (Because that's the only way we can "keep the Price up.")

And then we wonder why there's such concern these days that our resources are 'finite', and that our environment is in peril.

If we produced only what we consume internally, and could do, and actually did so, right up to the full amount of our own citizen's demand for such production, why would we give a tinker's damn whether anyone was "unemployed" or not?

If everyone was getting that production, what more do they want? The PROBLEM isn't making "more" production, it's in DISTRIBUTING the production that we've already made with the utterly stupid idea that can only be done so by "wages" in a world that's doing its best to eliminate waged labour.

Now we both know that complete internal self-sufficiency is not, in a country like Canada, very practical. There are a lot of things we can and do produce in far greater surplus to what we could ever internally all consume.

While there are also numerous other things which we either can not produce at all here, or could only do so at great expense to us all. And even after that perhaps nowhere near as well as such items could be grown or produced elsewhere.

So we 'trade'. An exchange of our 'relative surpluses' for some other country's alternate 'relative surpluses. Such trade makes perfect sense, and should be as "free" from restriction as we can possibly make it. Both parties to the transaction mutually benefit.

But that is NOT what our external trade is presently primarily conducted for. Nor is any other modern industrialised country's.

It is not a trade, primarily, of "goods" for alternate "goods". But rather a trade of "goods" for international "credit".

Not so we can buy something from somewhere else at some time in the future. But so that there is enough internal EFFECTIVE DEMAND distributed to the general public in the form of Bank of Canada created 'money' to buy "goods" made here, for sale here, at the full FINANCIAL cost of their making.

Something that is completely unnecessary if we had a properly constituted, modern financial system. The PRIMARY purpose of which could then be restored to what it properly should be ~ the control (of "production", by Consumers) and distribution of goods and services produced (to those Consumers). Not to serve the false God of "employment."

"Canadian Mayors should get their collective asses back to their Citys and start to work on local problems, and let the Big Horses haul the Big loads."

Potholes - for instance. And many other local problems. Everybody knows what they are.