When in the past ten years have they ever been okay?

It does bring the constant closures (actual and threatened) in Thessalon, Ont. into perspective a bit, though.

Which is traditionally a sign of distress . . . Maybe not entirely inappropriate, at that.

Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren’t quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.

It all depends on whether Parliament wants the tariffs gone so badly that they’ll back bad moves by Carney (technically, even the DST hasn’t been repealed yet, because Carney doesn’t have the authority to do that by himself—it’s been paused, but it’s still law until Parliament reconvenes and votes on it). Write your MP. Make it clear to them that you’d rather have tariffs than give in to the US on any of this.

Technically, being Deaf doesn’t mean you can’t speak, although fine-tuning for intelligibility is obviously a lot more work than it is for hearing people.

Some of the existing countertariffs are targeted specifically at the southern states (thus oranges, sugar, tobacco, and such) who tend to be more likely to vote Republican. The idea was originally less “strike out against everyone in the US even if they didn’t want this” and more “hurt the people who caused this mess”. How well that’s worked in practice is difficult to say.

Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?

In the McCarthy era, whatever the average person said usually didn’t make it past the actual people they said it to (and those people’s gossip buddies, possibly) unless someone had an axe to grind and wanted to get them in trouble. Today, anything you say has circled the globe ten times, been indexed in multiple systems, and fed to someone’s AI assistant before the hour is out. Yet another way in which technological change is a mixed bag.

“Has never been higher” = “less than a fifth are okay with it, but hey, that’s higher than 1%!”