These types of articles are annoying at this point – the sort of appeal to morality things, based on essentially dead ‘world order’ concepts. Even when there was a quasi functional set of agreements in place, America just veto’d any attempt to hold it accountable anyhow. International law, or any law really, is largely based on some sort of ‘force’ that gives it authority – in a country, that force is generally the state/police, and internationally it was generally the US-lead coalition of western nations. That authority died in 2025.

We’ve already seen the USA/Hegseth drag all his generals into a room and tell them to not be ‘burdened by rules of engagement’, encouraging them to commit war crimes openly in order to instill terror in others. Anyone who disagreed with his speech was basically shown the door. This was like a year ago even, it’s not ‘new’.

The USA basically shredded any moral dilemmas/debates in the process, and burnt the soft power they’d been cultivating for decades/generations in early 2025. What’s the point of saying it’s wrong based on an old, defunct system that they’ve already abandoned? If anything, the American right wing will likely cheer that they’re getting these sorts of angsty pearl clutching responses from the left / foreign liberal powers. Trump quite literally bragged about America’s war crimes in Venezuela during his state of the union address, cracking jokes to which all the republicans laughed and applauded. Trump’s threats about Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and the bets on whether he’ll drop nukes – these are things that the right wing / Americans want to see happen. They think it’s right to do it.

So really, the article shouldn’t be about “Oh No!! International Law may be violated!”, but rather, “Why should people care about international law being violated, when they’ve already asserted that they disagree with that law and its results?”. Like if/when Trump drops nukes on Irans civilian power plants/water desalination plants etc… what then? Is there some sort of accountability that’s gonna suddenly show up? Prolly not.

That’d seem likely, though there’s one particular anecdotal encounter I had that goes against that thought. The Iranian woman I’d mentioned, was a hairdresser who’d come over from Iran in order to go to university, and then she stuck around – she was in her mid 40s, had been in Canada ~20 years. I didn’t probe too much in the convo, cause that’d be weird I reckon, but what she had said was something along the lines of here in Canada, she’s had no luck dating, and she’s stuck working day after day in a generally low income job. Part of her dating issues seemingly stemming from an assumption that women don’t work, and men provide everything. Back home, she’d have been a ‘respected’ housewife at her age, or live independently as a ward with her parents – either way, nothing but spare time and freedom, so long as you don’t want/care about the freedom to do stuff in public. Instead she ended up as a wage slave, with basically nothing to look forward to but another 20+ years of being a wage slave.

Alberta was the location of choice for US draft dodgers who fled to Canada. They have a natural synergy with the president on this front. They’re also largely captured by the Oil industry, which is primarily US interest backed. Danielle Smith was quite literally employed as an oil industry lobbyist prior to becoming premier. The Federal conservatives have support from this region, likely because of PP’s alignment with Trump, and the money in the oil industry being in line with Trump. It’s why PP’s sham of a leadership review for his failures as a federal leader, was based on in person votes at a small gathering in an Alberta stronghold. PP’s playbook is practically the same as donalds in the states, with his “Only my plan can save this industry!” sort of dictator authoritarian bullshit.

Most local-born Canadians I know drastically cut all services related to the states after 2025, and have sought out Canadian options wherever possible, and have foregone some things when it’s not. That said, the people I know aren’t necessarily representative of the broader whole. Most major industries don’t care what customers seek anymore, as everything’s been driven to the bottom / driven by ‘scale’ type discussions – it doesn’t matter if you want a “Canadian” Smartphone, Bell, Telus and Rogers can make enough profit just acting as resellers for Google and Apple, so why would they bother trying to listen to the local market?

And to your point about locals v immigrant behaviours – I’ve noticed more of my immigrant friends don’t care as much. Our government boasted under Trudeau, that we have no unifying Canadian national identity, that we were some sort of post national multicultural state. Most immigrants I’ve met in my adult life have basically spoken about how much better things would’ve been for them, had they not left their country – including some women, working basic service jobs, who came from places like Iran where they’d have far fewer freedoms/rights. A lot of them actually look down on Canada, referencing stuff like FN issues, cost of living, etc, while exempting themselves from any atrocities/issues of their home nations (Canadian culture lets that slide). The number of immigrants who I’ve met, especially recently, that’re optimistic/positive about Canada is incredibly small. So why would they care if something is Canadian or not? Hell, a lot of them immigrate to Canada, as it’s thought to make immigrating to the states easier – having the states take over Canada would help them cut out some paperwork.

During a past major Iranian conflict, in the 1980s, a near worldwide recession was triggered, which saw interest rates spike to around 20% in Canada for a while, hovering over 10% for 3+ years. The basic triggers were the energy sector disruption from the conflict in Iran, US monetary policy screwing trade partners, and rising unemployment (generally resulting from softened export demand). Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia about the period, which sounds awfully similar to what’s going on these days…

Canada had higher inflation, interest rates, and unemployment than the United States during the early 1980s recession. While inflation accelerated across North America in the late 1970s, it was higher in Canada because of the US decision to switch to a floating exchange rate, which lowered the value of the Canadian dollar to US$0.85 by 1979, which made US imports more expensive for Canadians to purchase. Canada’s inflation rate was 10.2% for 1980 overall, rising to 12.5% for 1981 and 10.8% for 1982 before dropping to 5.8% for 1983. To control its inflation, the US introduced credit controls producing a slump in demand for Canada’s housing and auto industry exports in early 1980 thereby triggering the early first portion of the recession in Canada. Most Canadians were also hit hard financially by a steady rise in oil and gas prices during the 1970s, especially their acceleration in 1979 when the worldwide oil supply was disrupted by the Iranian revolution, with the price of oil reaching almost $40 a barrel compared to $3 a barrel at the start of the decade.

So, yeah. Things could get messy. The boomers and GenX saw the 1980s recession, noted that it was triggered by Canada being so entangled to the US, and then they just kept on with the status quo. This time around the states may even be hoping/planning on it getting messy, with the idea that they can basically use that recession to take over. They’ve explicitly noted they view Canada as a target they can “acquire” through economic warfare, without needing military involvement – all it’d potentially take is a recession, and a cuba-style trade embargo (made easier if they ‘get’ greenland, which they haven’t ruled out ‘force’ to take).

Heh, anyone pointing out the Trump’s are birthright citizens seems to’ve missed the Trump gold card citizenship racket that’s paired with anything related to citizenship revocation. If they change the law, rich people just pay some money to buy a gold citizenship card. Trump’s family would likely get theirs paid for by tech bros, wouldn’t even need to pay out of pocket.

While white nationalist racists are a part of Trump’s base, and are likely in favour of this law getting changed, thinking it’ll help their agenda… it’s really just another attack on poor/middle class people.

At this point, as a non-American, I’m fine with them disenfranchising most of their population and declaring them non-citizens. For regulated industries, it’d make things like FATCA reporting much simpler, and it’s not as though those ‘citizens’ deserve any respect/special consideration – look at the guy they elected as their leader. Who they still follow. Even as he openly makes moves to strip them of their rights.

Yeah, those darn conservatives and their meddling during covid. It’s like they didn’t even realise the liberals were in power.

The number of new refugee claims Canada receives each year has surged in the last decade from about 16,000 to 190,000 in 2024, though it dropped significantly to 107,800 last year.

I know a lot of people are lamenting the change, but I can’t help but read this line above from the article, and think about the findings from the recent auditor general’s report related to Student Visa Frauds. The AG report noted that Canada’s government had capacity to investigate 2000 fraud cases per year – but that it received around 75000 such allegations per year.

A huge gap between how people ‘wish’ the country worked/functioned on that front, and the reality.

With a surge of more than 10x in a short period, our government is overwhelmed on this front. Just like our healthcare system is overwhelmed – I’ve had relatives on wait lists for specialists for years at this point. Pretty much all of Canada’s gov functions seem incapable of keeping up, even with bloated public servant numbers (under Trudeau, they hit a record of like 22% of working people working for public sector, iirc).

We need immigration of all sorts, but it needs to be managed at a level we can handle as a country. If our government can’t even come close to processing their basic paperwork in a timely manner, it’d be crazy to think our other systems that require a whole lot more than pushing a button/admin paperwork, such as healthcare and housing, would be able to keep up with the increased demand. Putting in stricter conditions for refugee claims, given that the system is likely overwhelmed by the volume, makes practical sense.