A Bit More Detail

• Marginal Revolution considers if the CFA franc system is dying out, here.


• Marginal Revolution shares a link to a paper quantifying the effects of the old boys club, here.


• Marginal Revolution contrasts and compares the old NAFTA and the new USMCA, here.


• Marginal Revolution notes how Germany has access to nuclear weapons, here.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the high rate of consainguineous marriage in Saudi Arabia, here.

• This John Ivison article noting Canada and Mexico need to be united on trade issues versus Trump's United States still makes sense, and can be read at the National Post.


• MacLean's last month took a look at what Mexico's new president, AMLO, meant for bilateral Canadian-Mexican relations and wider North America.


• Freezing out Canada from NAFTA negotiations is apparently a Trump tactic presented in The Art of the Deal. Business Insider reports.


• The proposed terms of the NAFTA renegotiations, which involve higher wages for workers, may have a minimal effect on Canada. Global News reports.


• Is it possible, as suggested at Quartz, that the renegotiated NAFTA might play to the benefit of Canada?

• In this searing examination of a newly-impoverished family's life, Stephanie Nolen looks at how Brazil's deep income inequality really hasn't materially changed, over at The Globe and Mail.


• At Quartz, Gwynn Guildford explains the political and economic forces that have kept Appalachia poor and coal-dependent for well over a century.


• Noah Smith suggests at Bloomberg View that greater investment in infrastructure and dense construction, along with assisting people who need to move, could really save much of the United States from decline.


• Bloomberg notes a new Mexican law that would weaken unions might be used by Trump to justify retaliation against NAFTA.

• Bob Hepburn at the Toronto Star wonders if the unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne, Ontario premier, has anything to do with her being a woman. It does follow a Canadian pattern, sadly.


• Bob Pittis notes at CBC that the Ontario minimum wage increase constitutes a fantastic economic experiment, potentially transformative for the entire country.


• Would the withdrawal threatened by Trump from NAFTA constitute a bargaining tactic? Global News suggests this is a real possibility.


• Canada is bringing a wide-ranging challenge to US trade policies before the WTO, taking issue with more than two hundred examples of violations. This could be big. Jesse Snyder reports for the Financial Post.

• Canada is redoubling its lobbying efforts in the United States, to try to gain some security versus Trump. Global News reports.


• Kevin Carmichael looks at how the Trump Administration is triggering Canada's own internal divisions, on things as various as milk and lumber and Bombardier, perhaps to the United States' own benefit. MacLean's has it.


• John Geddes looks at the subtle differences in the videos of Conservative Andrew Scheer and Liberal Justin Trudeau, Scheer's video being in the suburbs and Trudeau's being among the crowds. MacLean's carries the article.

• MacLean's takes apart the very bad advice of Stephen Harper to Canada over NAFTA and trade negotiations.


• MacLean's notes that Japanese discount retailer Miniso may undermine the local hegemony of Dollarama.


• East Africa is starting to clamp down on North American exports of used clothes, to promote their industry. CBC reports.

Resolute Forest Products Inc. is seeking damages of more than $70-million under the North American Free Trade Agreement, citing losses it blames on the government-aided revival of an idled paper mill in Nova Scotia.

The Montreal-based company said in a statement late Wednesday that it has filed a notice of arbitration under NAFTA, saying the closure of its Laurentide mill in Quebec was a result of competition from the paper mill in Port Hawkesbury, N.S.

The mill, idled for about a year, was restarted with aid of more than $124-million in government assistance in 2012.

“Resolute contends those measures discriminated in favour of Port Hawkesbury and resulted, among other damages, in the closing of Resolute’s Laurentide mill in October 2014, depriving Resolute of its investment in that mill, and the value of other investments, in violation of the company’s rights under NAFTA.”

The company said it is seeking damages for direct losses of some $70-million, as well as unspecified consequential damages “and additional costs and relief deemed just and appropriate by an arbitral tribunal.”

Barack Obama downplayed Canadian frustration over his country's so-called Buy American provisions Monday, arguing that complaints about U.S. protectionism were over-the-top.

On a shared stage with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, the U.S. president said his country's controversial procurement rules came up at their so-called "Three Amigos" summit.

Obama said Canada and the United States will seek freer trade among provinces, states, and cities, but he dismissed the complaint frequently heard north of the border that Americans are shutting down trade.

"I want to assure you that your prime minister raises this every time we see each other," Obama told a news conference as the summit wrapped up.

"(Harper) is expressing his country's concerns ... I think it's also important to keep it in perspective: We have not seen some sweeping steps towards protectionism."

Sources say the prime minister has expressed concern so often about the danger of protectionism to Obama that when he brought it up again at Monday's meeting, Harper prefaced his remarks with a self-deprecating preamble.

"I hate to sound like a broken record," officials quoted Harper as telling the leaders. "But I feel strongly about this issue."

I’ve been watching politics for a while, and I have to say that conflating Harper’s remarks with the suggestion that he “Blames Canada” is one of the bigger stretches I’ve seen. It’s a fair comment to say that you’re doing something drastic because a system is flawed and needs fixing. It’s not blaming a nation to say that a government department needs to be reformed. And in any event, heaven help us if we can’t step forward and say that our country isn’t perfect and there are flaws that need fixing.

And I’d be perfectly willing to accept Harper’s explanation for slapping visa restrictions on Mexicans so fast if… he actually had been serious about making reforms to Canada’s refugee claimant system before now. After all, he has only been in power for three years! You’d think that, if fixing flaws to the system were truly a priority for this government, we’d have heard more about this issue in parliament by now.

But, not quite. This government has proposed and made changes to the immigration process — changes so dense they have frustrated efforts of immigration lawyers to provide decent service for their clients (and, believe me, I know of what I speak) — but the refugee system wasn’t really touched, or even referred to in the three years that this government has been in power. And then all of a sudden, the Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, slaps visa restrictions on Mexico and the Czech Republic, offering no transition period, and so little warning, that a number of Mexican tourists had their vacations to Canada scrubbed.

• BlogTO's Nav writes from the scene of one of the Tamil protests outside of Sri Lanka's Toronto consulate, and wonders who Israeli and Palestinian supporters can't be as civilized in their protests.


• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias finds herself in partial agreement with conservative columnist Barbara Kay on abortion, in that it's not comparable to genocide or slavery or ...


• Centauri Dreams reports on the news that astronomers have found a small rocky planet similar to the Earth, a body with 11 Earth masses that rotates in a torch orbit around its sun.


• Far Outliers considers the question of whether the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge can trace their origins to primal forces within Khmer culture or were directed from above on the typical totalitarian pattern, and comes out in favour of the latter, and also describes the humiliation inflicted on the Chinese military by Vietnam's in their brief border war of 1979.


• Inkless Wells reports that Defense Minister Peter Mackay might be an acceptable compromise candidate for the post of NATO secretary-general. Might.


• Joe. My. God and Towleroad report on the sad news that Oscar Wilde's, New York City's oldest GLBT bookstore, is closing down.


• Noel Maurer comes out in favour of a NAFTA-bloc protectionism aimed against China on the condition that Canadian and Mexican stimulus packages work as well as we'd all hope.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye blogs about the Tunit people, an Arctic culture that predated the Inuit.


• Slap Upside the Head covers the news of the Manitoba doctor who allegedly refused to take on two patients because they were lesbian.


• Torontoist's Stephen Michalowicz reports from the scene of one of Toronto's great snow depots, almost industrialized in their vastness.


• Windows on Eurasia blogs about the dubious efforts behind the efforts to create a "hard core" of closely integrated post-Soviet states around Russia and the ongoing emigration of Russians (Russophones?) from Central Asia.