Canadian news media are a source for truth! Reporting on the Canadian-U.S. evaporated trade deal in the Toronto Star

The United Kingdom‘s PM Keir Starmer was first to strike a trade deal with Donald Trump, writes Daniel Tisch, only to discover it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. 

Maine Writer-  In my opinion everything Donald Trump signs is written in "invisible ink".  His "deals" are always evaporating.

Canadian PM Mark Carney should pay attention.

Don't feed the crocodiles! An echo article published in The Toronto Star, by Daniel Tisch, president and CEO of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

Just over a year ago, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was quite chuffed- a little too sure of himself.  But, guess what❓ His delight was short lived.

After Donald Trump announced punishing tariffs on goods from America’s major trading partners, Starmer became the first to strike a deal with Trump. In exchange for substantial new access to the U.K. market for American agricultural exports, Trump agreed to lower tariffs on British goods to 10 per cent, down from 25 per cent.

At the time, some Canadian commentators praised Starmer’s decisiveness in protecting the U.K. economy. 

In contrast, Canada’s approach — a blend of retaliation and protracted negotiation — had achieved nothing but pain for our most targeted industries.

A year later, Canada still has no deal with Trump. Indeed, the U.S. refusal to extend the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) to 2042, has left the deal in place but in the purgatory of annual renewals, creating prolonged uncertainty when business craves just the opposite.

With hindsight, however, Starmer’s gambit (calculated risk) looks even worse.

Peace with Trump didn’t last.  Regardless of the deal, typical of Trump, he still wields his tariff threats whenever the U.K. displeases him, which is often, such as when it opposed the U.S. annexation of Greenland and military action in Iran, and imposed a digital services tax on American tech giants. But "HELL-O❓" - what about the U.S.-U.K. trade deal❓ It “can always be changed,” Trump declared.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Starmer — now on his way out of office — would have done well to heed Winston Churchill’s warning that appeasing an aggressor is like feeding a crocodile, hoping it will eat you last.  (In other words, Donald Trump lies about everything❗)😟😞🤥

For Canadian leaders and trade negotiators, there are other lessons:

Understand the speed limit: With Trump, the fastest deal is likely the worst deal. If anything, high inflation, weak job numbers and his growing unpopularity ahead of November’s midterm elections may weaken his hand further. This may create an opportunity for a deal to mitigate Trump’s sectoral tariffs. Until then, governments will need to continue short-term supports for our affected industries.

Use pencils, not sharpies: Negotiators sometimes refer to Trump’s preferred trade agreements as “sharpie deals”: they’re short documents, signed for the cameras, lacking detail, enforcement provisions or dispute resolution mechanisms — which means they’re easily revoked, changed or ignored. “Pencil deals,” in contrast, are like CUSMA (Canada United States Mexico Agreement) : finely crafted, and far more enforceable and resistant to unilateral change. When negotiating with a partner whose word cannot be trusted, that is what Canada needs.

Make no unilateral concessions:

Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney rescinded Canada’s digital services tax as a goodwill gesture — and got nothing in return. Now, the U.S. ambassador is pressing Canadian provinces to put U.S. liquor back on store shelves — another unilateral concession. When concessions are one-way, Canada’s answer must be ‘no way.’

Open multiple fronts:  Recently, we have heard a rising chorus of U.S. business and bipartisan political leaders in favor of CUSMA. In past trade negotiations, Canadians have enlisted powerful allies by leveraging their abundant relationships across America. Progress will not come from Canadians persuading Americans; it will come from Americans persuading Americans. 

Negotiate from a position of strength:  With slow productivity growth and an overreliance on one market, Canada was woefully unprepared for this trade war. In the last 18 months, provincial and federal leaders have worked to lower business costs, improve our investment climate, reduce barriers to trade within Canada, and build infrastructure to stimulate the economy and diversify our global trading relationships. The early results are encouraging: outbound trade with other markets is growing, as is inbound investment.

The unavoidable reality is that even as Canada becomes a stronger, more diversified trading nation, we will always need the U.S.

It’s equally true, however, that the U.S. needs Canada: for the energy that fuels their cars and heats their homes; the fertilizer that grows their crops; the lumber to build their houses; and the metals and minerals essential to their defense.

Canadians are also Americans’ biggest customers, with some eight million U.S. jobs relying directly or indirectly on trade and investment with Canada.

That means Canada can neither give in nor give up.

As Trump grows weaker — and likely more volatile — our negotiators must be both patient and persistent. 

Moreover, with evidence about how Trump routinely breaks his own agreements, our businesses must continue to invest in productivity and diversify their trade and supply chains.

We must remember that the Canada-U.S. relationship will long outlast Trump.

Most Americans want stable, secure trade with Canada. That makes this a relationship worth preserving.

Donald Trump obviously directing Department of Justice to cover up the Epstein Trump files- Guilty of Cover Up!

Echo essay published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by 

Elie Honig:

The United States Department of Justice is getting lapped by both Congress and the British authorities on follow-up investigations around the Epstein files. There’s no excuse for either. As British police arrest astonishingly powerful men for their dealings with Jeffrey Epstein and the U.S. House of Representatives tries to force titans of finance and politics to answer tough questions, our Justice Department lags far behind. It’s not even clear the DoJ is doing anything at all.

Over in the United Kingdom., law-enforcement officials have arrested former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson. (Technically, both have been arrested but not yet formally charged, under a wrinkle in British legal procedure.) The putative defendants reportedly face potential charges of “misconduct in public office” for allegedly providing confidential government documents, including sensitive financial information about investment opportunities, to Epstein. (British authorities have accused neither man of participation in Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring.)

The British case is based in part on emails contained in the U.S. Justice Department’s own Epstein files, which were released less than a month ago. In a matter of weeks, British police investigated and arrested a former prince (Andrew) and a lord (Mandelson); have subjected both men, and others around them, to extensive questioning; and have conducted searches at properties associated with the subjects. 

Meanwhile, the most memorable step taken by our Justice Department since the release of the files was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s public-service announcement that “the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein.”

The contrast extends to the tone at the top. King Charles — an actual monarch who wears a literal crown and carries a scepter to work — has told British investigators (in American parlance) to do what you gotta do. Or, in the proper King’s English: “What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and cooperation. Let me state clearly: The law must take its course.” Other heads of state should follow the king’s hands-off example — in a case against his own brother Andrew, no less.

Donald Trump, however, isn’t quite of the same mind. He has long dismissed the Epstein case as a hoax, though it’s unclear what exactly he claims is fake. And he recently urged the American public to just get over it already. “I think it’s time now for the country to maybe get onto something else, like health care,” Trump responded when asked about the Epstein matter.

The DoJ has dutifully adopted Trump’s recommended approach: myopia blended with dissembling and a pinch of proactive excuse-making. As Blanche explained earlier this month, “There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.” Not exactly the tenacious prosecutorial posture Blanche and I learned during our concurrent early days at the Southern District of New York. But hey, if our Justice Department isn’t going to make meaningful use of its own Epstein files, at least others will.

And then there’s Congress, which has taken a flawed but aggressive approach to its Epstein investigation.

Although a bipartisan (but mostly Democratic) coalition of lawmakers forced passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee has pressed forward with a series of aggressive subpoenas for testimony.

Yes, the subpoenas are largely for political show, and no, the House has not extracted any damning admissions — but it’s putting powerful people on the spot and making them face meaningful questioning under oath. (Except, not Donald Trump, whose name appears in the Epstein Files too many numerous times to count.)

Last week, billionaire Les Wexner — whose name the DoJ originally redacted from a document listing him as an unindicted “co-conspirator” but then unredacted after Representative Thomas Massie publicly called out the redaction — faced five hours of questioning from the Oversight Committee. 

Wexner, a close associate of Epstein’s, claimed no knowledge of his friend’s criminality. Wexner also denied allegations that he had sexually abused Virginia Giuffre, who testified in 2016, that, as a minor, she had been trafficked to have sex with Wexner multiple times. (She died by suicide in 2025.)

The beauty of being a federal prosecutor is you don’t have to take a blanket denial as the final word, even from an arrogant billionaire. People disclaim wrongdoing all the time. Sometimes they’re telling the truth; other times they aren’t. So ordinarily, given the lead provided by Congress, DoJ prosecutors may take Wexner’s testimony and subject it to rigorous testing — talk to other witnesses, examine emails and texts, check out phone, financial, and travel records. Yet we’ve seen no indication of DoJ doing any such thing.

This week, the Clintons take their turn at the Oversight Committee’s deposition table. After a prolonged back-and-forth during which they played themselves into a strategic corner, the former First Couple relented and agreed to testify under the looming threat of a contempt-of-Congress charge supported by some bipartisan votes.

The Hillary Clinton subpoena was an obvious stretch by a congressional committee seeking to drag in a boldface name. 

Mrs. Clinton had nothing to do with Epstein; the best that Republican committee chair James Comer could do in defense of the subpoena was to note that — brace yourself — Clinton had hired Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew to work on her 2008, presidential campaign and later at State. Yes, that’s the headliner. Clinton proceeded to tear the committee a new one with her opening statement on Thursday and, predictably, nothing of relevant substance came of her testimony.

But, Bill Clinton will have to squirm when he answers questions. The committee surely will confront the former president — a frequent flier on Epstein’s private jet — with photographs that show him partying with Epstein (not a crime, remember, per the deputy AG); swimming in a pool with Maxwell and a female whose identity has been redacted, and reclining in a hot tub at night, hands behind his head, along with a female whose image has been blacked out.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen no sign that the Justice Department has subpoenaed or otherwise sought to interview Wexner or Clinton or any other powerful Epstein associate — and certainly not the most powerful of all former Epstein pals, Trump himself. (Notably, even the aggressive House Oversight Committee hasn’t sought testimony from the current president.)

The DoJ’s apparent inaction is particularly galling given that prosecutors hold far more potent investigative tools than Congress does. Prosecutors have the vast resources of the Justice Department and FBI at their disposal, while Congress must make do with minimal investigative staff. Prosecutors can obtain search warrants and wiretaps, while Congress can’t. And prosecutorial subpoenas generally can be broader in scope than congressional subpoenas and are enforced more rigorously by the courts.

The Justice Department has been flailing for months now to justify its inactivity. Back in July 2025, top DoJ officials released a memo declaring that, after an exhaustive review of over 300 gigabytes of information, “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

Since then, the Justice Department has offered mixed messages (at best) about its ongoing investigative efforts. And while prosecutors could be moving stealthily behind the scenes, entirely undetectable to the public — I’m dubious, but it’s possible — we’ve seen zero public indication of actual in-the-field enforcement activity: no search warrants, no subpoenas, no interviews with key players, no arrests.

Meanwhile, the British authorities and Congress forge ahead. It’s an embarrassing moment for our Justice Department’s leaership and a telling indictment of its own stubborn — and perhaps purposeful — indifference.

Donald Trump and the Republican maga cult are making innocent migrants disappear!

Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

Intentional Cruelty❗ Opinion published in the The New York Times by Jeff Crisp*

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin,😟😢 but, also, explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Some of these efforts have faced legal challenges. Starting in 2022, for example, the United Kingdom attempted to establish a program that would have automatically deported some asylum seekers and migrants entering the U.K. illegally to Rwanda, costing over half a billion pounds — more than 200 million of which were paid upfront. The British Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unlawful, and Britain’s prime minister scrapped the plan last year.

But many countries remain undeterred. In 2023, Italy signed a deal that allowed it to send certain migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters to detention centers in Albania, and is persisting with the effort even in the face of legal setbacks. This spring, the European Union proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers.

Although these deals take various forms, states that enter them are motivated by similar concerns. The world’s richer states wish to retain control of their borders and are particularly aggrieved by the arrival of people who enter by irregular means, especially when they are coming from low-income countries that many associate with crime, violence and terrorism. Governments in destination countries are attracted to such deals by the promise of financial, diplomatic and military support.

Throughout much of the West, as public sentiment has turned against newcomers, policymakers and pundits alike have portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social stability. 

These innocent migrants, they argue, impose an unsustainable burden on government budgets and public services and deprive citizens of jobs. (Maine Writer: These desperate migrants carry a lable being "migrant", as though they are somehow not really human beings!)

Racism and xenophobia, fueled by populist politicians and right-wing media outlets, have also played an important part in creating a toxic environment in which the expulsion of migrants to arbitrary destinations is increasingly considered legitimate.

But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.

Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.

These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.

By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. 

As Trump works to bring this evil 👺👿new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.

*Mr. Crisp is an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.