The U.S. boycott remains strong. Why many Canadians are digging in their heels

Why many Canadians are digging in their heels

Because every level of american government has failed to do it's job of maintaining stability and have instead allowed a handfull of racist, bigoted, psychopaths to start wars, disrupt trade, and directly deal pain and death to their own people.

Is the news so slow that the CBC even needs to ask?

It's been fun replacing American goods and services with Canadian and not-American alternatives.

In many cases, you end up with better products anyway.

I buy Canadian first and anywhere but murica second. There is no third.

Canada first, rest of the world second, US never.

Hint: it's not the tariffs, we are used to that from the [redacted] from our southern border, it's the threats against our sovereignty

Not just the threats, but the deafening silence from Americans in general about it (outside Lemmy) is something we will not forget for a generation.
- Exactly. The first trump presidency can be seen as a blip. The second was intentional.
- Seriously. I have too many American friends who are confused when I tell them I have and will have no interest in going down to America, even if it's just to visit them, for the foreseeable future and they wonder why.
  Could it be because your country was having open public discourse on the merits of annexing us? Or maybe that I don't want to get thrown into an ICE concentration camp for no reason?
- What gets me is that no one seems to be mentioning exactly what it means that US is entering their 'Papers please' phase, and that supporting a fascist state isn't a very Canadian thing to do.
  Not wanting to be hassled at the border, or having our sovereignty threatened is an understandable reason for avoiding the US, but it's also pretty selfish.
  I wish I see more people, and Canadian news media talking about the bigger side of it as in 'We don't support fascism'
  That should be an integral part of our identity, especially if we want to ensure the Conservatives stop trying to normalise maple maga ideals.
Is lemmy.ca redacting naughty words now?
- When instances block words, I normally see it as "removed". I think that @lost_faith@lemmy.ca might've self-censored?
- not that I know of, I just rather let the reader inject their own word there

It's about survival and resisting the encroachment of a hostile foreign power. Simple as that. Appeasement will not save Canada. Only resistance and dissociation will.

Why? Because it got personal. Trump can verbally shit his policies all over the place but once he started talking about annexing (invading) Canada then the citizenry took notice. This is not a boycott hand in hand with the government of Canada. This is a boycott by the people at a grassroots level and it needed no organizing whatsoever.

The quarterwit Muricans have no fucking clue how petty and grudge-holding we actually are.
- Pettiness and grudge-holding are more of a human condition than a national one, yet I agree with you.
Also why? (You probably said this but wanted to add my words) Unless you want your country to be batted around you need to stand strong. Is it for the best? Maybe not. Can we win? Probably not. But fighting authoritarian despots is needed to be a proper democracy. We can't bow down to fascism.
I'd rather pay more (or way more) and give the middle finger to the US government, fucking despot ruler. We need strong allies now and not our neighbors.
I do understand how some could not afford this luxury and I hope our government would help them through these times, because I think that's part of why I pay taxes to help the people who have less. I only wish it was more inclusive to help us grow as a country and tell others we helps others.

My boycott is for life. Trust is earned slowly, and broken instantly.

Yup. I'm 50 and teaching my 10 year olds all about boycotting murica products and services. They're into it. It will be generational. Good luck getting us back.

Trumpi America can go fuck itself!

Just got a quote for new ac and furnace installation. They sent the quote with both units being American made. I asked them if they can quote with non-US products. If they can't, I'll try another company..

Now imagune the effect if we was building alternstives to anything from the usa

we are?

I’m boycotting them for life. ♾️🖕🇺🇸🖕♾️

Good! Stay safe. Stay far away.

Canadian investors divested from U.S. equity funds in the first quarter at the highest rate since the start of the pandemic, moving their money into more conservative investments, according to a new report from Sun Life SLF-T.  But people aren’t cashing out. Overall withdrawal rates remained stable, suggesting that investors are staying committed to their long-term savings.

I mean, he is actively cutting the SEC for his own scamy benefit, he is tanking the dollar, he is ruining the economy, he is defenestrating the rule of law and due process, and he is doing his best to overthrow the federal reserve. Also, Republicans kind of hate a lot of the companies in the Mag 7 and are all on board for antitrust suits against woke oligopolies. If equities are investments you hold for the long haul, regardless of how the US has done in the past, how can you see current actions working out well for investment in the future?
Get off the American meme stock market rocket, chances are growing it will do a SpaceX to your investments.

I totally understand the boycott and cheer you guys on, but do ya'll not watch/play any American media?

Looks like taking the high seas is the common tactic. Godspeed!
Sure. I just make sure I pirate it all now.
I steal my US media, I have ad blockers blocking ads.
- Nice
Lemmy is Canadian so there is that. My next phone will be a nothing or fairphone.
Cutting everything that we can identify as American. UK has better TV. Foreign films are often better than the "blockbuster" junk out of Hollywood.
Ew.
No.
Considering what consuming American culture has done to Americans, it's probably better not to ingest any of that fucking swill.
Yup, and I set up a Jellyfin server.
I started it before all the Trump stuff and was using it for stuff that couldn’t be found on streaming services, but since Trump decided to threaten Canada those are all cancelled and it’s a full-on pirate’s life for me.
Only for free. Pirating that shit for over two decades now. Fuck em.
Everything else is a no go. Even food. If it's not from somewhere other than murica we don't need it. Period.
The annexation threats really turned my sea-sailing habit into a spiteful obsession.
Nope. I'm listening to canadian music and watching international films these days.
- Can't go wrong with TPB
Only sort of facetiously, it's all filmed up here anyway.
Yes, the tech and media giants are harder to avoid. Ali Express has left a lot to be desired as an Amazon replacement, although I haven't quite given up. For streaming, CBC Gem is publicly funded. The boycott is mainly targeted at physical products.
- Speak for yourself and being mainly physically targeted, I came to Lemmy to get off of Reddit, I miss the local community as many people do not have the interest in figuring out Lemmy. I have cancelled all of my streaming services from the US, if there is something I want to see that is strickly on a streaming service I put on my pirates hat and sail the high C’s, other wise I watch it on the Canadian Channels app (with my pihole on so that I do not see ads so that it becomes less valuable for the Canadian channel to continue paying for it) I subscribed to CBC Gem+ or whatever it is called and watch Canadian content on there. I us Unwatched to watch YouTube so that I am not paying Google, I feel for the non US videos I watch but they are still getting money from Google but Google is not getting it from me.
  One of the first buy Canadian things I did was move my blog hosting from a US provider to hosthero.ca and changed it from .com to .ca then I looked at my iCloud stuff and started finding other options. Sure they are not all together anymore and do not easily communicate together it is however far less expensive than what I was doing before. I was using Apple’s hide my email feature I had 60 some email address (I think). After going through all those addresses and finding out what was dead or not I moved something like 45 addresses to my hosthero email server, and I started moving more things that did not already have their separate email address to my address. I would later find out that my ISP changed to an exchange server, I have no idea if they have to pay Microsoft for that or what but I have been transitioning all of the emails I get from there to there own email address. This is not a short process and I am up to 120 some email addresses, all of the pseudo-random email addresses are forwarded to 1 of 5 email accounts that I check. I can have unlimited free trials for things if I so choose (have not done that with this yet, I had done this a couple of times for things in my iCloud days). I do not trust myself with hosting my own password manager so bitwarden is not really an option for me so I went with 1password, for my cloud storage I just downloaded everything to one of my pi’s but I was having all kinds of difficulties with hosting my own VPN and NextCloud crashed on me a couple of times so I decided to go with sync.com. If there was any real competition for youtube I would not be sneaking in via other apps I would be using the real alternative platform.
I only watch US media with Canadian actors. So, I guess most of it.
Sometimes, though I have been prioritizing CBC originals lately I'm still finishing Handmaids Tale
I pirate them

What about US tech?

What about whataboutism?
- Brudda, it's a geniune question. The article talks about physical products. I'm wondering how it going on other fronts i.e the non-physical. A real answer would be appreciated instead "I'm on high alert and will interpret any answer I see as malevolence".
What US tech? You mean the tech they buy from south-east Asia and slap their logos on?
- While it’s true there’s a lot of that, AWS just dominates the cloud, and many of our own tech companies here in Canada use AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, not because they’re cheap, but because they have good uptime guarantees, security guarantees, easily allow you to deploy worldwide and provide fast access to customers almost everywhere (especially major markets like the EU and Asia), and provides companies access to a large talent pool who know how to use these systems. You’d be hard-pressed, as a business owner and/or CTO, to use other options and handle all those downsides yourself, slowing down your ability to do business. The only other potential non-US alternative here is probably Alibaba, but they’re not even close to being considered competition internationally.
  Aside from Apple, the big tech companies down south are big and hard to displace not because of what most people know them for, but because of this large arm of software infrastructure that basically serves as the literal backbone of the consumer-side of the Internet.
  And for those who think that we can just build that infrastructure ourselves, take note that these companies have been doing this for at least a decade, and spent billions and probably trillions doing this in the US and abroad. AWS itself claims that between 2011 and 2022, it invested $108.9 billion in USD, just within the US alone, and they have data centres in many parts of the world. Not discouraging anyone, but you have to think about where that kind of money has to come from.
I divested from US tech decades before it was cool.
- Pepperidge farm remembers! (Is there a famous canadian farm one could use in this meme?)
I have stopped paying for US services, my future computers will either be from outside of the US, or used with a clean install of some flavour of Linux. It will be difficult to transition myself away from Apple when the time comes to update my phone or tablet but it will happen eventually, there are plenty of non US phone and tablet makers who do not use iOS or Android. Once Trump burns down the US even more competition will come around.
After reading some more of your replies, I have personally dropped almost all of my US online stuff. Apple still has some to backup my iPhone and iPad but I am trying to get away from that to, it just involves me figuring out what is up with my old Mac and getting sync setup on there and backing up my iPhone and iPad onto sync via my Mac.
What about it?
Is this “us tech” in the room with us now?
- It might be listening in an destroying your democracy. It might also just be the tinfoil hat scratching against my ear.
- Yes.
  There is likely a device running US software in the room you are in.