Manufacturers Set To Move Production Out Of Canada As US Tariffs Hit Hard

The circumstances of US/Canadian trade should be common knowledge by now, but the details often get mired in the swamp of political rhetoric.  When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney describes the tariff issue as the US "waging war" on Canada, he knows exactly what he's doing.  Carney has turned a simple trade issue over reasonable 10% tariffs into an existential crisis, an invasion, an ethnic cleansing, a last stand against "evil" imperialists.  

But getting the Canadian public riled up with delusions that they are underdog insurgents will not help them keep manufacturing companies or domestic jobs.  There is no reason to "endure" a trade war involving 50% tariffs that can be easily solved by simply taking the sweetheart deal that was offered to them.  Carney could easily wait Trump out and try to renegotiate once a new president is elected.  Unless, there's an alternative agenda at play for Carney.

Estimates in July on manufacturing losses indicated that 42% of Canadian companies (and some US companies) would be moving at least a portion of their operations to the US to avoid the debilitating tariffs.  Some will be shutting down entirely.  With Carney asserting that negotiations are off the table, this leaves no room for speculation.  Businesses are adjusting operations for the long haul which means skyrocketing job losses for Canada.

The latest manufacturers to make announcements are:

Aeris Protective Packaging in Montreal: The company says it is opening a U.S. plant after 50% U.S. tariffs on paper and packing containers. About 70% of its customers are in the U.S. It plans to keep some manufacturing in Quebec and Ontario for Canadian, European, and Mexican customers.

Sapporo/Sleeman Breweries:  Sapporo says it will move production of beer made in Canada for the U.S. market to the United States by the first half of 2027, citing 50% tariffs on Canadian beer. Sleeman later said the move is “not finalized”. Most beer sold in Canada would still be brewed in Canada.   

RYAM (Rayonier Advanced Materials) in Témiscaming, Quebec:  The US-owned paperboard mill announced an indefinite temporary shutdown, blaming 50% U.S. tariffs. About 400–425 workers were affected. The stop was first set for mid-September, then postponed to October 3rd after new Canadian orders. The company has not given a restart date. 

Stellantis - Brampton Assembly (Ontario):   In mid-August 2026 the company told Unifor it was opening talks on a possible sale of the idle Brampton plant (idled since late 2023 after Jeep Compass production was moved to the U.S.). Stellantis had plans to reopen the mothballed site, but they backed out after the trade war with the US went parabolic.  

Northern Cable (Brockville, Ontario):  An August 2026 report says the firm is considering a U.S. factory if 50% tariffs on electric cable take effect, because half of the company's business is in the United States.  

Some companies have already move production to the US, including Crown Royale which moved its bottling plant to Alabama in April.

A Reuters/LSEG poll of economists originally predicted Canada would add 15,000 jobs in August 2026.  Instead, the country lost 42,000 jobs; that's a 57,000 job disparity.  Canadian economists are treating the forecast miss as an anomaly, however, it is likely that the decline in jobs will escalate through the end of the year unless a deal between the US and Canada is struck.  

If Carney's intention is to use economic hysteria as a tool to help Democrats win during the US midterm elections, then there's no chance of a deal before the end of the year.  Canadians will continue into winter with the threat of rising unemployment and much higher prices. 

Canada relies on the US for 78% of all export sales and there are no practical trade alternatives.  A similar but smarter base case is Mexico, which sells around 84% of all their exports to American markets.  The difference?  The Mexican government has avoided arrogant jousting with the US and is engaging in fair negotiations (so far).  They are also showing more cooperation to meet the Trump Administration's demands on securing the southern border. 

In other words, they didn't abandon negotiations at the last minute like Carney, and this has helped Mexico to avoid punishing tariffs and job losses.  Whatever Carney's intentions, it's clear that average Canadians will be paying the price for the Prime Minister's lack of diplomacy.  

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/15/2026 - 15:40
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Manufacturers Set To Move Production Out Of Canada As US Tariffs Hit Hard

"Dead Mall" Era Ends As Shoppers Return, Values Surge And Sector Leads CRE Revival

The "malls are dead" narrative gained traction in corporate media coverage in 2016 and 2017 and lasted until 2022.

Those headlines reflected the strain across the sector as excess retail space, department-store closures, and shifting consumer habits led to widespread low occupancy and cratering property values.

But now, new data suggest that the "dead mall" narrative has not just reversed: that part of the CRE market is thriving, with a Wall Street Journal report saying it's outperforming every other major CRE sector.

CRE research firm Green Street released a new report showing that mall values across the US rose 13% over the past year, leading all 10 sectors it tracks and more than doubling the increase in overall CRE prices. That recovery has attracted investors who are souring on weak performance across office and multifamily properties.

Simon Property Group, the largest US mall owner, saw its shares surpass their 2016 peak in July. That earlier peak came just as the "dead mall" narrative began to erupt in MSM headlines. The stock is up nearly 11% this year.

WSJ cited Vincent Rouget, CEO of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based CRE company, who explained that US tenant sales and net operating income growth are exceeding the company's broader portfolio average, with rent growth at levels unseen since the early 2010s.

"We see the type of rent growth that we haven't seen since the beginning of the 2010s," Rouget told the outlet.

Morgan Stanley real estate research chief Ronald Kamdem said, "In terms of how we think about the malls today fundamentally, this is probably the best it's felt post-Covid."

The tailwinds extend beyond trophy malls. CBL Properties, which entered bankruptcy protection during the Covid pandemic, reports rising traffic and sales. Its shares have climbed 48% this year, and it has acquired five properties since July 2025 after shrinking its portfolio footprint for years. 

CBL's West County Center near St. Louis couldn't refinance its debt in 2022, and the property was in decline but has since seen tenant sales increase by 13% since 2023. 

Oversupply conditions have likely abated, as Green Street said about an estimated 200 malls have closed since 2008, leaving about 900 operating nationwide. 

Resilient consumer spending has put the remaining malls on some of their strongest footing in years, and many have shifted from a department-store-led business model toward destinations built around shopping, dining, and entertainment.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 15:45
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"Dead Mall" Era Ends As Shoppers Return, Values Surge And Sector Leads CRE Revival

California Enacts New Child Safety Laws On Social Media And AI Chatbots

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed bills that restrict how social media companies may design products for children and that tighten rules for AI companion chatbots.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to reporters in Stockton, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

He announced the package on X.

"I just signed the strongest kid safety laws for AI chatbots and social media in America," Newsom wrote. "California is banning addictive social media features for kids, cracking down on dangerous AI chatbots, and strengthening privacy protections for ALL kids. PROTECT OUR KIDS!"

The signing took place in Marin County, where Newsom was joined by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the legislators who carried the measures.

The social media bills focus on product design.

AB 1709, by Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat representing Long Beach, bars platforms from offering users under 16 autoplay and algorithmic feeds drawn from a user's history and profile.

AB 2, also Lowenthal's, adds civil penalties when children are injured.

Fighting Online Addiction

In September 2024, Newsom signed SB 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. That statute would have required parental consent before addictive feeds reached minors and would have limited alerts during school hours and overnight. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 28, 2025, blocked SB 976 after NetChoice sued, arguing the law impinged upon protected speech.

Thursday's package focuses on strict age verification and penalties. Chatbots are another focus.

SB 1119 is titled Adam's Law, named after Adam Raine, 16, of California, whose parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior Court on Aug. 26, 2025. Their complaint argued ChatGPT became their son's "closest confidant," mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times, and urged him toward what it called a "beautiful suicide."

Adam's Law, the governor's office said, requires companion-chatbot firms to keep crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, provide parental controls, notify a parent if a child disables safety settings, submit to independent child-safety audits, and file annual risk assessments.

The bills also include SB 867, which restricts companion-chatbot toys, while other bills limit targeted ads aimed at children and set rules for K-12 pupil data inside AI systems.

AB 1946 adds a reporting route for child sexual abuse material. SB 1276, by state Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park, extends child sexual-exploitation law to digitally altered or AI-generated material depicting a person under 18 in sexual conduct.

"Our children's safety deserves to be at the center of every conversation about technology," Newsom said. "As innovation moves faster, our protections must keep pace. Today's legislation makes clear that California will not stand by while unregulated technology puts our children at risk. Innovation comes with responsibility and protecting our children comes first."

Siebel Newsom said technology should support children's well-being, not exploit their vulnerabilities.

"With this critical legislation, California is sending a strong message that when it comes to our kids, safety must not be an afterthought - but baked into design and a necessary requisite for all innovation," she said.

State Sen. Steve Padilla, a Democrat and co-author of the chatbot bill, said California must set an example for the rest of the country.

"Adam's Law will save the lives of children here in California and across the country as it becomes a national model," Padilla said.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover authored AB 2071, which directs public schools to plan digital-wellness instruction.

"Protecting kids online is not a partisan issue. As a parent and former school board member, I have seen first-hand the impacts that screens and social media have had on our kids," he said.

AI Safeguards

Earlier, on Oct. 12, 2025, Newsom signed measures requiring Apple and Google operating systems to send age-range signals, add warning labels after three hours a day for users under 17, and ban using an AI tool as a shield when a user's prompt produces harmful content.

This followed after Megan Garcia in 2024 filed a lawsuit alleging a Character.AI chatbot contributed to the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III.

Character.AI later said it would block open-ended chat for users under 18. California dockets have also seen lawsuits arguing that infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendation engines were built to keep adolescents on the apps.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 16:40
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California Enacts New Child Safety Laws On Social Media And AI Chatbots

New Report Exposes Climate Litigants' Campaign To Influence The Judiciary

Authored by Michael Toth via RealClearEnergy,

Thousands of judges across the nation have sat through climate-science training and received literature from trusted federal bodies and scientific institutes. Those judges had every right to expect that the information they received was neutral, objective, settled science.

They were mistaken.

My latest research paper presents the first full taxonomy of a coordinated, multi-year campaign designed to shape how the American judiciary understands climate litigation. It documents how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) built an extensive educational apparatus to train judges on climate issues - in the words of one session attendee - "from what would effectively be the plaintiff's side."

ELI routinely portrays itself as a neutral arbiter committed to "insightful and impartial analysis." In 2018, it launched the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to provide judges with "authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science." Yet, as my report details, CJP shares multiple donors and advisors with Sher Edling LLP, the San Francisco-based law firm behind more than two dozen climate lawsuits against energy companies.

The training methodology CJP deployed is striking. The goal was not merely to educate judges about complex areas of law and science, but to encourage them to develop and execute their own climate "action plans." Slide presentations and emails obtained between ELI staff and attendees show judges being coached on how to spread that influence to colleagues on the bench.

Attendance forms show judges from California, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and even Puerto Rico attended CJP trainings - all jurisdictions with active climate suits.

CJP's reach extended to established judicial and scientific gatekeepers. A 2020 CJP curriculum draft identified the Federal Judicial Center's (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Extreme Weather Attribution Report as publications judges could rely upon. Both would go on to bear the project's fingerprints.

Released in 2025, the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual included a climate change chapter for the first time. That section was later revealed to have lifted material heavily from the prior writings of a lawyer representing climate plaintiffs, Sher Edling's Michael Burger.

The chapters' listed authors, moreover, were both CJP presenters and the manual shared some of the same funders as the foundations bankrolling the public-nuisance suits targeting the energy sector. Following the public outcry over these conflicts of interest, the FJC and NAS took the unprecedented step of removing the climate chapter entirely.

That controversy, however, did not stop NAS, which initially pushed back against criticism of the manual, from releasing the Extreme Weather Attribution Report.

The committee behind the report was similarly one-sided in favor of climate plaintiffs, which may explain why the 253-page document lays out theories for attributing the effects of climate change to specific energy producers without seriously dealing with the inconvenient fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by global demand for energy.

When private interest groups slip past the adversarial process to tilt the scales on contested issues, the rule of law is compromised. The findings in my report demonstrate an urgent need for updated disclosure requirements surrounding judicial education programs. Trusted institutional gatekeepers like the Federal Judicial Center must institute rigorous vetting mechanisms to restore their credibility.

Ultimately, federal and state officials should investigate how ELI and CJP gained such unchecked access over the bench and establish strict guardrails to ensure this cannot happen again.

* * *

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What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism

Authored by Vincent Geloso via FEE,

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every rule has exceptions though.

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Recently, Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, delivered her "three years in the making" commissioned piece on "capitalism." The piece went viral. The reason that it sparked such attention is that it read to many as basically a rehash of old online talking points spewed by more refined trolls. That is unfair but there is truth to the claim that there is no smoke without fire. It is indeed a boring "takedown" of capitalism.

Let me be precise here: the problem is not that the entry is critical of capitalism. There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over "capitalism" and "neoliberalism." The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.

Some examples help show this usual reflex. When describing the "market capitalism" advanced by Hayek and Friedman, Cordelli claims that they believed capitalism required "complete, private, and unregulated markets," and that this stemmed from their acceptance of a "general equilibrium" view, with the implication that "capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with." But both claims - which underlie much of the entry - are massively incorrect. Not minor quibbles, mind you, but major and easily verifiable errors. Friedman initially advocated antitrust laws and, while he moderated on this front later in life, he still believed they did some good. He supported a negative income tax - a variant of a guaranteed minimum income - and schooling vouchers. Hardly the mark of someone who believed in the complete absence of political interference. Hayek for his part rejected the idea of general equilibrium altogether and preferred to speak of competition and markets as discovery processes. He defended regulation of natural monopolies and he also spoke in favour of some basic welfare state functions.

But this is not new. This description of Hayek and Friedman - and others like them - has been there since the 1960s and it can be found in the work of many. So too are the replies pointing all of this out. The claim has been recycled and vomited back. The replies have been ignored - the mark of the inability to undergo the key Turing tests I mentioned. Thus, the entry massively misrepresents what it dubs "normative defences" of capitalism.

And then, the preferred views of the entry's author also eschew major criticism raised at it. The best illustration of this is visible in the considerably detailed treatment that Karl Marx gets. Marx is presented as complete, coherent and accurate. No mentions are made of the fact that Das Kapital self-contradicts itself via the well-known transformation problem. Marx first argues that the value of commodities is determined by the labour required to produce them (i.e., the labour theory of value). This is the key foundation of "exploitation" theory in Marxist theory. But he later recognises that competition tends to equalise profit rates across industries. For that to happen, market prices must diverge from labour values. The problem, then, is explaining how one gets from labour-determined values to observed competitive prices without abandoning the labour theory of value itself. Marx never provides a fully consistent solution to that transformation. And no solution to the problem exists.

It explains why Marxist predictions fail to materialise. The most obvious example is that wages and incomes for unskilled workers were rising while Marx was writing his works. Not only that, he was writing in Britain - a society where inequality was actually falling! Moreover, in the United States - the country most often described as most capitalist by Marxists then and now - even socialist writers like Charles Spahr produced data which, when used with subsequent works, show massive growth in living standards at the bottom while inequality between the top 1% and the bottom 90% either stagnates or actually declines.

Not only did Marx predict that capitalism would generate pauperisation; he also added that it generated persistent pressure to lengthen working hours and lower labour's share of national income. Historical evidence runs strongly against these predictions: working hours have fallen dramatically since the nineteenth century, both annually and as a share of waking life - with only modest influence on unions or legislation. Marx's prediction about labour's share of income also fares poorly empirically, as many studies find that greater economic freedom (a proxy for capitalism) and globalisation are associated with a larger share of national income accruing to labour. In fact, in causal empirical tests, economies that become more capitalist (by liberalising) tend to show rising boats for everyone. Taken together, these findings suggest that some of Marx's central empirical predictions about capitalist labour markets have been contradicted rather than confirmed by subsequent economic history.

All of these massive holes in the Marxist account of capitalism are ignored and set aside. The criticisms are still presented as high-quality despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed to generate the predictions they are supposed to.

This is precisely where the usual reflex in debates over "capitalism" becomes problematic: early and criticised claims (even debunked ones) are built into the description of capitalism itself and then rediscovered as criticisms of it, even when the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction. Once repeated often enough, such claims pass from one scholar to another as established facts, with the original empirical proposition increasingly insulated from serious testing. The entry falls prey to this and while it does offer insight into how some people think about capitalism, it is merely a sophisticated rant - nothing more.

This article was originally published by CapX.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 18:40
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What Critics Keep Getting Wrong About Capitalism