(Zero Hedge)—The fundamental nature of socialist economics is to use governments to rig markets in favor of certain groups and outcomes. Canada has been exploiting this dynamic for decades (along with their proximity to the largest consumer market in the world), in order to secure optimal benefit for their GDP and their liberal leadership.
US tariffs, love them or hate them, are one of the few mechanisms available to level the playing field against countries (and corporations) that abuse global trade.
Rather than admitting that the jig is up and accepting that trading with the US is going to require more balanced arrangements from now on, the Mark Carney Administration has decided that Canada is entitled to special privileges when engaging in commerce with America. If they can’t have unfair advantages, then they will go to war with the US instead.
It sounds like madness given that Canada relies on the US for over 76% of their export sales, and exports are over 30% of Canada’s total GDP. Meanwhile, the US only sells 16% of its exports in Canada, and exports make up a comparatively small 11% of American GDP.
There’s no debating it: Without the US, Canada’s economy will implode. Without Canada, the US will barely notice.
Carney’s war campaign is already off to a rocky start, with 42,000 jobs lost in August and another 68,000 jobs lost in September. That’s 110,000 workers laid off in only two months in a country with a population roughly the same size as California. The majority of these losses are due to Canadian-based manufacturers and companies shifting operations outside the country, or shuttering factories until the tariff situation changes.
These mass layoffs are embarrassing Carney, who ran his campaign on a platform of big job gains. In response, the liberals are applying typical socialist pressure in order to prevent job losses from continuing.
Ottawa is weighing legal options against steel producer Cleveland-Cliffs (the U.S. owner of Canada-based steelmaker Stelco) after the company rejected a federal demand to stop planned layoffs. Current projections expect around Stelco layoffs for approximately 500 employees.
To put this in perspective, consider the audacity of the threat: A US based company opens steel plants in Canada and creates thousands of jobs. Tariff negotiations fall apart because the Canadian government is too greedy to accept more balanced trade standards.
Tariffs then force Canadian based manufacturers to make cuts to stay solvent. The Canadian government that demands those companies continue employing Canadian workers at a loss, and if they don’t, they will face fines, lawsuits and other legal punishments.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the government expects Stelco to honor the employment undertakings it gave under the Investment Canada Act when Cleveland-Cliffs acquired the company in 2024 (Selco had little choice in the matter and this was before tariffs were considered a possibility).
Those commitments included maintaining at least the same number of unionized employees and the vast majority of non-unionized employees for five years. Joly stated that a business decision or change in market conditions cannot justify non-compliance, and that “everything is on the table.”
In other words, they don’t care about the extraordinary circumstances of the trade war they created.
Under Section 40 of the Investment Canada Act, possible measures include financial penalties, a court order requiring compliance, or an order forcing the company to sell its Canadian assets (which would create far more job losses). Joly did not confirm that court action would be launched; she said the government is reviewing Cleveland-Cliffs’ letter and remains open to discussions. Stelco has already begun the layoffs.
You create jobs in their country, and then they decide this is your obligation instead of you doing them a solid. In other words, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. This is the way of socialism.
Carney was supposed to be the liberal but “improved option” over former Primer Minister Justin Trudeau, who left the office in disgrace and the nation with a faltering economy. However, Carney is proving to be even more of a disaster than Trudeau.
The liberals in Canada have also been beating their chests and posturing over the trade war, declaring that they don’t need the US and will find “better partners” who “share their values”. This is clearly not going to go the way they imagine, given the immense cost increases associated with exporting to anyone other than the US. There is no viable consumer replacement for the US market.
Layoffs are likely to accelerate in Canada over the next several months unless a deal is struck in the near term.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
