Trump Tax™️.

President-elect Donald Trump may call it a “tariff,” but essentially that is what he is promising to impose on his first day in office: a tax. “Tariff” comes from a Turkish word meaning “prices.”

So, the price of just about everything is where the Trump tax will be most keenly felt. In his late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that he intended to slap tariffs “on ALL products coming into the United States.” His targets: China, Mexico and – notably – us.

For most of our history, we have been the closest allies and trading partners of the Americans. No more. If he carries through with even part of his tariff, Trump will effectively cripple the Canadian economy. He will be treating us like we are the enemy.

For Canada, the Trump Tax will mean that further interest rate cuts are over. Rates will likely need to go up, in fact, to shore up the Canadian dollar, which started to plunge the moment Trump made his announcement.

More broadly, the Trump Tax will strangle consumer spending just as the critical Christmas season kicks off.  Many firms will scuttle Christmas bonuses, and not a few would now be contemplating layoffs – they’d be fools not to. Inflation will return with a vengeance, and some analysts are even quietly wondering if the Trump tax will usher in something akin to a depression.

Trump has fans in Canada, mainly on the political Right. Those partisans will dispute all of this, of course, just like the millions of Americans who ignored warnings from Kamala Harris that Trump’s tariffs would cost them, too.

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In ‘Lee,’ Kate Winslet’s new movie about the celebrated World War II photojournalist Lee Miller, the descent into the heart of darkness is slow, but it is always the destination.

The film starts with Miller and her young friends watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis marching triumphantly through the streets of Berlin. Miller and her friends shake their heads, disapproving, still unaware that the Nazis are marching towards them, too.

War begins. With her Rolleiflex camera, Miller goes on to document London’s Blitz, the fierce battle over Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris. And then, with her photojournalist colleague David E. Sherman, Miller arrives at Buchenwald and Dachau, the concentration camps where tens of thousands of Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Freemasons, Communists, Catholic priests and Roma people were slaughtered. But mainly Jews.

You have perhaps seen the photos Miller took at Buchenwald in April 1945, just after it was liberated by Allied troops. They are famous photographs, now displayed in museums. In them, you see a block for medical experimentation, and other buildings set aside for executions and torture, and a crematorium. Miller described what she saw:

“The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.”

The movie about Lee Miller arrived around here in the same week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference to announce a tax holiday on pudding and fake Christmas trees. His smirking Minister of Finance hovering beside him, Trudeau was asked about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants against two Jews. His government would “abide” by the ICC warrants, he said.

“This is just who we are as Canadians,” he said.

Is it? Is that who we are now? Or is it the sort of moral abasement Lee Miller and her friends glimpsed in flickering newsreel footage about Nazis? Because it certainly feels like that.

The two Jews Trudeau agreed to arrest, in the unlikely event they ever alight on Canadian soil, are Israel’s Prime Minister and its former Minister of Defence. They had committed “war crimes,” the ICC declared in a release, which went then went on to say the details of the war crimes are “secret.”

It’s relevant that the details are being kept secret. Disclosing the facts, you see, would swiftly reveal the allegations to be as phony as one of Trudeau’s tax-exempt plastic Christmas trees.

The facts are these: Palestinians – some in uniform, some not – swept into Israel early on the morning of October 7, 2023, and commenced murdering, maming, raping and stealing thousands of Jews. On that day, you might say, it was “just who they are as Palestinians.”

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What I write sometimes makes people angry. Right and Left.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. It’s interesting.

I write about different stuff. Politics, music, culture, whatever. People react.

Sometimes I take a position that is notionally “progressive.” I’ll indicate support for trans kids, or taxing polluters, or vaccines.

Self-described “progressives” will react by saying nothing. “Conservatives,” meanwhile, will go apeshit and say I’m a communist, a pedophile, whatever.

But they will say those things to me directly. Right to me.

And sometimes I take a position that is notionally “conservative.” I’ll say I support capital punishment, or less taxation, or (these days) Israel.

Self-described conservatives will react by sending me messages about how delighted they are that I have joined their side, even though I haven’t joined any side. They always want to increase the size of their team. I think they always want validation.

The progressives are a different matter. When they read that “conservative” stuff, they again don’t contact me directly, almost ever.

Instead, they complain to my editors. They complain to my publishers. They complain to my clients.

They complain to whoever they think is my boss.

They do that to get me fired or disciplined or whatever. Mainly, they do it to get me canceled.

That’s the difference between conservatives and progressives, in my experience. The conservatives will get angry and abusive, but at least they do it to your face. The progressives get pious and indignant and vengeful, and they will try to get you shut down.

Both sides have assholes, in their own way. The critical difference is that, however: one side gets mad at you directly, and then forgets about it. The other side wants to end you, forever.

That’s how I look at the “woke” stuff. In definitional terms, being woke means opposing bigotry and injustice. I agree with opposing bigotry and injustice.

In practical terms, however, woke has come to mean: punish those who disagree with you. Make them bleed.

That’s what the Right and the Left have come to mean to me, at least insofar as my writing goes.

I don’t really give a shit about either extreme, but it’s certainly been interesting.

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Observing the braying, spit-flecked mob outside the doors to Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel on Monday night – replete with signs (falsely) accusing Israel of genocide, and hinting (clearly) at a desired genocide of their own – it almost seemed redundant to ask: what did the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas swarm hope to accomplish?

It’s a relevant question, too: like, what the Hell? Are you actually against books, pro-Hamas cabal? Have you, at long last, reached that low, that nadir?

Because that’s all that the tony affair at the Park Hyatt was about, folks: books. Canadian books, in particular.

The occasion was the awarding of the Giller, which is one of the biggest such prizes for writing in the world, with $100,000 going to the winner. It’s been going for years, now, and was started by the much-admired Jack Rabinovitch, a business guy who loved books. He named the prize after his wife and true love, Doris Giller, who had been editor at the books section of the Toronto Star. After Jack passed away in 2017, his daughter Elana Rabinovitch took up the mantle.

The finalists this year were from across Canada. There was Eric Chacour from Quebec, who wrote ‘I Know About You.’ There was Anne Fleming from Victoria, with ‘Curiosities.’ There was Guelph’s Deepa Rajagopalan, who was there for ‘Peacocks of Instagram.’ There was Conor Kerr, who is an Alberta guy and even wore his cowboy hat all night, picked for his book ‘Prairie Edge.’ And there was the winner, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Anne Michaels from Toronto, who wrote ‘Held.’

It was a nice event. Everyone there – former Toronto mayor John Tory, Canadian U.N. Ambassador Bob Rae, and a metric ton of folks sporting Order of Canada pins on their lapels – wanted to celebrate books generally, and Canadian books in particular. Who could be against that?

Well, the Hamas fetishists could be, and are. Last year, just a few days after Israel commenced its just and rational war against Hamas for slaughtering 1,200 Jews and non-Jews, some creeps disrupted the Giller ceremony. They jumped up on stage with signs that falsely accused the main sponsor, Scotiabank, of “funding genocide.” Screamed one: “We will not be silent anymore.”

Well, at this year’s gala, they were. There was more security present than at a typical Prime Ministerial speech, and everything went off without a hitch. No Hamasniks made it inside to cause trouble. Credit Elana Rabinovitch for that.

People at this year’s event – where Scotiabank’s name was absent – were clearly relieved. Some great books got promoted, and Canadian writing got celebrated. It was, as noted, nice.

But the question still nags: How can the ones who profess to be for Palestine be against books?

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