Canadian Trumphobia not as bad as originally feared

Here’s a story from CBC that says Canadians are making more trips to the USA since the election of you-know-who. That figures. Canadians tend to be a smug and hypocritical lot. They may despise that vile man in the Oval Office, but Girl Guides aside, they’re still gonna cross the 49th if they can save ten bucks on a tank of gas.

On a related note, here’s a point of view on the Muslim ban that hadn’t occurred to me. Seems that within hours of its implementation the high-traffic freight crossings from Ontario into Michigan and New York State were getting seriously bunged up.

Here’s why; back in the day, when the Teamsters were a serious outfit and the vast majority of drivers were members, driving truck was a respectable career. If you were a Teamsters driver in the middle sixties you were solidly “middle class” income wise.

There weren’t a lot of guys named Mohamed in the Teamsters at the time.

Thanks to fifty years of deregulation and union-busting, truck-driving has become a shit job, and you know who takes those. As has always been the case, the recent immigrants end up in the shit jobs. When the Irish were recent immigrants, they got the shit jobs. Same with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Poles… everybody started out at the bottom of the ladder.

When my dear Daddy got off the boat in 1956, his first job was shovelling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph -with a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

Guess who you’re likely to find behind the wheel of the typical big rig today? That’s right – a recent immigrant, and a lot of those guys have Muslim names.

So Mohamed pulls up to US Customs with a 52 foot trailer loaded with ten million dollars in auto parts from Linamar or Magna. Customs guy notices driver was born in Somalia.

“Ya’ll park that rig in the lot over there and come in for a chat, Mohamed.”

Well guess what? If the driver isn’t crossing that bridge, the truck ain’t either!

That ten million of auto parts is heading for a Ford or GM or Toyota or Mercedes plant somewhere. Thanks to the magic of JIT and all that stuff, those car plants cripple up pretty quick.

Team Trump may take their sweet time returning calls from lawyers for the ACLU, but they pay attention right smartly when lawyers from GM and Ford are on the line. By the end of day one dozens of those trucks were parked and Team Trump knew they had a serious problem.

Judge James Robart’s overturn of Trump’s travel ban was actually a huge face-saver for Team Trump. Anything else you’re reading is just spin and optics.