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Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

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Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#161

Post by quesera »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #41
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #35

Alaska is USA

You may not be aware, but Alaska is not part of the blob of 48 contiguous states. If you want to get from the main body of the US to Alaska over land, you'll have to cross Canadian territory.

HN title says "... road access from USA to Alaska".

"Contiguous USA to Alaska" would be fine, but ~"USA to USA" is poorly-worded.

Not confusing, mind you. Just poorly-worded!

If you spend any time living in Hawaii or Alaska, and then move to the mainland, you will receive a shockingly high frequency of questions about what it's like to move to the US.

GP might have similar experiences.

For non-US readers, or for the geopolitically-unaware, Hawaii and Alaska became US territories in the late 1800s, but didn't become states until 1959.

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#162

Post by SonicScrub »

Brusco_RF wrote: post #140
SonicScrub wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is likely referring to Highway 17, which is the only road connection between Manitoba and Ontario. A boulder once fell on this highway leading to its closure for a period of time. https://www.ctvnews.ca/winnipeg/article/how-crews-cleared-a-... I've seen this incident be the subject of hyperbolic clickbait articles and YouTube videos discussing the complete cutting off of East and West Canada (conve…

While you make a strong point, I'm not ready to cede it. Canada has winter storms that will close that road, albeit for shorter periods of time than the boulder situation. Being able to re-route through the US is critical during that time.

I don't really see how the Highway 17 situation is unique in the context of winter storms though. As per the comment above this, most transit of East and West goods occurs via other means, meaning the Highway 17 bottleneck is hardly some vital artery. A winter storm shutting down Highway 401 for example is much more economically chaotic, and has the practical impact of making travel through its corridor impractical (and in some circumstances just as impossible as if it were a single bottleneck). This scenario does periodically happen, and people manage just fine since the closures are expected to be short-lived.

So I don't buy the argument that Canada needs the US because of the threat of transit networks being completely cut off. I am much more amiable to the argument that reciprocal road tolls like this would be stupid because they'd increase the cost of goods for all of us (Canadians and Americans alike). As noted earlier, the fastest route between East and West is through the US due to geography. But or course things like this are stupid, and I doubt an argument as to why is required here. Maybe we should pull back and stop doing all this nonsense like arbitrary tariffs on close allied nations? Especially those who's explicit purpose as described by the elected head of state is to threaten the sovereignty of the other?

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#163

Post by diggan »

rayiner wrote: post #134
wwweston wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full franchise democracy in the US is arguably younger than living memory. So are a lot of things we take for granted as civil rights (and some of powers that be seem determined to roll those back). But even assuming the premise, it’s not hard to see how generations who’ve enjoyed a privilege might be more likely to take it for granted than societies that have more recently gained it, and are within living memory of…

Civil rights is orthogonal to democracy. Creating a democratic country like the U.S. is the real achievement. Most countries never come close to accomplishing that.

According to the Democracy Index (article about it here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/democracy-index-dat...) there are about 25 "Full Democracies", 107 Non-authoritarian regimes, and 60 authoritarian regimes.

Fun fact: The US isn't counted as a "Full Democracy" by that index, so seems it's not as a great of an achievement as you seem to think. I'm looking forward to see how the ranking of the US changes in 2025, seems to be slipping downwards rather than upwards sadly.

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#164

Post by mindslight »

mooxie wrote: post #50
mindslight wrote: post #15

How small-minded Trumpism is, just frustrated lashing out at things they refuse to understand. Canada has been so close to the US we would lovingly joke about it being "the 51st state". Canada's cities are all pressed up against the US border precisely because it's so tightly economically integrated with the US. We share the world's longest undefended "border" for a reason. The small minded neofascists think that som…

They are consistently on the wrong side of Chesterton's fence. Many of them were completely blind to politics until 2016 and have suddenly entered the chat with no context or background on what they're talking about. They assume, ignorantly, that everything that they can't immediately understand is a needless barrier erected for no reason and without context. This is a very intentional worldview organized, funded, an…

It's especially galling to me. I'm libertarian. If you communicated the Trump 2024 platform back in time to me in 2012, I'd be stoked that many of these issues were finally being talked about. I wanted to be having honest conversations about decentralizing federal power to the states, reducing monetary inflation and no longer taking being the world reserve currency for granted, dismantling the DEI-HR industrial complex, etc. But cheering to demolish the plane while you're still flying on it is just a special kind of stupid.

So really, it's the age-old political dynamic where frustrations with the current system are used as fuel for the next round of destruction, looting, and centralizing of power. It's why the Trump appointees are a menagerie of malcontents. Each has achieved popularity from criticizing the status quo on their own pet topic, but without constructive solutions. And now they don't need to actually agree on anything apart from the need to butcher our institutions.

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#165

Post by kolanos »

oalders wrote: post #16
kolanos wrote: post #13

[flagged]

This seems like a reasonable fact check on dairy tarrifs: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/politics/trump-canada-dairy-t...

It seems like a completely misleading "fact check" to me when you actually read the Wikipedia article I linked.

> Those high tariffs kick in only after the US has hit a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year – and as the US dairy industry acknowledges, the US is not hitting its allowed zero-tariff maximum in any category of dairy product.

1. The USMCA was agreed upon in 2020, but it has largely not taken effect yet as ratification is scheduled for 2026. So the "Trump negotiated" claim is false right out of the gate. Any terms Trump negotiated have not even taken effect yet. We're still under the NAFTA terms.

2. These quotas are very low. The new increased quota scheduled for 2026 is 3.6%. What does this mean? It means for dairy products, the U.S. can only export as much dairy product into Canada until it reaches 3.6% of Canada's total dairy market share. After that, you see 160-300% tariffs applied to those dairy products.

3. The claim that the U.S. is not hitting its dairy tariff maximum is true, but again, this is misleading. The reason for this is that Canada is granting such a small portion of their dairy market to the U.S. (3.6%) that it isn't worthwhile for many U.S. dairy producers to even bother. This is by design. If you can't compete with the other 96.4% of the market without seeing your goods being slapped with up to 300% tariffs, why would you?

> In 2015, the three top dairy imports into Canada were specialty cheeses, milk protein concentrates (MPCs) and whey products. The largest suppliers into Canada were the United States, New Zealand, France and Italy.

That should tell you something? Dairy producers are only exporting specialized dairy products into Canada, including non U.S. ones.

4. The U.S. isn't the only country with a problem with Canada's tariffs. [0]

> Ten dairy industry organisations, including the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand (DCANZ) and other dairy industry leaders from the US, EU, Argentina, Australia, and Mexico, co-signed a letter to request that their governments intervene in ending Canada's "new and harmful" 'Special Milk Class 7' mechanism by potentially entering a complaint through the WTO's Dispute Settlement System (DSS), a process which could take several years to conclude.

This is just one of many disputes Canada's trading partners have had regarding Canada's protectionist tariff policies.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_and_poultry_supply_manag...

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#166

Post by thomassmith65 »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #113
Trasmatta wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile that idea with the fact that the United States is the oldest country with a continuously running democracy?

Well we've only been a true "liberal democracy" for the past sixty years or so. Before that we were a de-facto apartheid state. Maybe at a stretch you could say 105 years if you go by the 19th amendment. And frankly i'm still skittish to call America pre-Trump a democracy with my full chest given the electoral college, completely bonkers division of the country into states, the senate, complete lack of a right to vot…

It's history: if a person doesn't grade on a curve, every page of the textbook looks the same (ie: people being jerks).

In order to deny that England, America, and France spearheaded the modern democratic system (albeit inspired by Ancient Greece), a person needs to explain who did?

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#167

Post by vkou »

throaway1987 wrote: post #89
phkahler wrote: post #78

Totally off topic, but after reading some comments here I got curious and went to Google and typed "population" and autocomplete offered "of Canada" with an answer of 40.1 Million already there. Of course that's what I was going to type, but but but... I'm in the U.S. so there's no reason to know what country I was going to look for unless Google (or this MS browser) knew I was just reading this in another tab. Reall…

people keep looking up the population of Canada to see where it would rank as a state

That's the wrong thing for them to be looking up. It would have to be 13 states, with 26 senators.

Oh, wait, is that suddenly not so appealing?

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#168

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Descon wrote: post #128
boringg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen Im all for smart reactions to dumb policies. This sounds like a dumb reaction to a dumb policy. Right now any article that does anything pro Canada anti US is going to get cheered in Canada because they are David against a mean Goliath (former best friend) situation. Intelligent conversation and debate has no baring in this absolutely ridiculous situation. This is truly one of the biggest unforced errors I hav…

What intelligent options are you offering for Canada then? The US is going to tariffs us. They have stated that their aim is economic warfare focusing on collapsing our economy so that they may annex us. It seems in the face of existential threats to our sovereignty, every option should be considered where we have advantage, and there are few.

You're using the pronoun "they" for the US. But this is by no means the case that there is a singular entity that has stated this policy.

Right now the US is in a political crisis. It has elected a weak, narcissistic man without coherent or sensible policy who is for the short term without serious opposition. (Mainly because its own neo-liberal elite has done a garbage job of running the country for the last 30 years and the population is desperate to try something else.) That man and the sycophants who travel with him is trying to use us as a whipping boy, a sacrificial victim, to rally his base.

In reality what is happening to Canadian workers via these tariffs are not in the interests of American workers, either. If they wake up they will eventually deal with Trump. Things will come to a head. The US will either destroy itself, or rescue itself. Unfortunately we're very much tied to this process because of geography.

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#169

Post by kolanos »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #24
kolanos wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick specific products rather than look at tariff rates as a whole. What's your justification for that? The World Bank's 2021 data shows that Canada has a 2.35% mean tariff rate weighted across all products, vs 1.47% for the United States.

The United States is an agricultural giant. Seems reasonable to start there?

But I think you're the one being intellectually dishonest by hiding behind these aggregates. The only reason why Canada's tariffs rates are so low is because no trading partner is actually paying their 160-300% tariffs. Canada has been the subject of numerous WTO disputes by numerous nations for their tariff policies, the United States is far from unique in this regard.

Re: Canada considering charging for road access from USA to Alaska

#170

Post by a-priori »

fmbb wrote: post #142
a-priori wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Canada is almost certainly going to cancel or severely limit a pending F35 order, and is actively sourcing aircraft and negotiating mutual arms deals with European partners.

… which is hard to do for European plane makers that have engines with parts licensed from US companies. Hopefully this all leads to more countries stopping relying on US trade.

Of course, NATO was founded on the assumption that the US is a reliable trading and security partner, and the defense supply chains reflect that assumption. It will take time to untangle those chains, but you're watching all of NATO speed-running that process right now.
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