Favorable/Unfavorable opinion of the US by Canada stood at 68% / 26%.
As a baseline, our opinion of ourselves only runs 83% / 15%.
Given the current state of the Canadian economy, good relations may hinge on softwood lumber:
B.C. Premier Christy Clark is expressing hope the Trudeau government can overcome U.S. resistance and renew a softwood lumber deal that brought peace to Canada-U.S. trade relations a decade ago.
"The last time … relations around softwood lumber went sideways, [Canada's] whole relationship with the United States went off the rails," Clark told reporters in Ottawa Thursday.
...
The previous agreement expired Oct. 12, but included a standstill clause that prevents the U.S. from launching any trade action against Canadian producers for one year.
The original deal to revoke U.S. countervailing measures against Canadian lumber was signed in 2006 and renewed in 2012, after years of trade disputes at the World Trade Organization and an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 job losses for the Canadian industry.
More than $4.5 billion in tariffs were eventually returned to Canadian exporters. Since then, export charges have been levied on Canadian products when the lumber price dropped below a certain amount.
Now, Canada's low dollar, combined with promising U.S. housing starts, is creating new demand for the B.C. industry's products. That's also attracting the attention of U.S. producers, who appear uninterested in renewing the previous agreement as Canada wants.
When former President Donald Trump falsely proclaimed online last month that Democrats were “getting ready to cheat” by mailing ballots to voters overseas, Bruce Heyman couldn’t hold back his excitement.
A former U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Barack Obama, Heyman is now leading an effort to canvass and turn out American voters living north of the border to support Democrats. He is convinced that in a close election, Americans in Canada could make the difference.
To Heyman, Trump’s outburst looked like an admission the Republican nominee agrees.
“There’s zero chance Donald Trump used that language himself,” Heyman told POLITICO in Montreal in late September, shortly after Trump made the post. “It came out of the campaign. The campaign recognizes how many Americans live abroad and the effort we’re putting forth, and they can’t compete against it.”
The presidential race is so tight that Democrats are going door knocking in Windsor, Ontario, in search of American voters to tip the balance for Kamala Harris.
Anywhere he gets the chance, Heyman makes his case to get out the vote from Canada: in media interviews at the Democratic National Convention, in talks with university students at Concordia and the University of Toronto, or on a global Zoom call for Harris-Walz — one of the Democrats’ online telethons that featured such celebrities as Lynda Carter and Jane Fonda.
“I believe in my heart of hearts that Americans living in Canada could determine the outcome of this election,” Heyman told POLITICO.
Millions of American voters live outside the country. While there’s a lot of uncertainty over the exact current numbers, vote-rich Canada is home to hundreds of thousands of potential U.S. voters — estimated to hold the most of any foreign country, followed by Mexico and the U.K.
The non-partisan Federal Voting Assistance Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Defense to help overseas voters participate in elections, estimates there are 605,697 Americans in Canada who are voting age.
I know Maine is the big producer of Maple Syrup in the US but it seems like every one I know with enough property to have trees, have maples and tap them to make their own maple syrup. Seems like a huge PITA to me for very little reward and even if I had fountains of maple syrup and substitute sugar with it I'd still have little use for it. I still have a couple of jars from years ago that my parents gave me.
Up north in Michigan as well. It's clearly a labor of (sweet-smelling) love, as I agree with your assessment of the labor required versus the end product.
"Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet." — Elontra
