Author: tribe34

Well.. I suppose this isnt much of a shocker, but the main conservative and religious-right groups...

I’m reposting this here from Daily Kos.. only because we have a fair bit of Canadian readers...

[Promoted by susanhu. Too funny. ‘cept it’s sad.] Condi Rice was in Ottawa for a couple of days on a state visit, but she had to rush off this morning back to Washington, abruptly cancelling some interviews and raising speculation what exactly was going on.

Before doing this, the aforementioned Ms. Rice got very peeved at some pesky Canadian media questioning her about the US’s committment to treaties and signed agreements. I guess she isnt used to such media scrutiny from the Beltway Press Club back in D.C.

You see, Ms Rice feels the softwood lumber dispute is a rather trivial trade dispute compared to other great issues, and when the media took her to task over it, she didnt like it…

As background for those unfamiliar, Canada has won a series of NAFTA trade panel rulings that have ruled that Canada is not illegally dumping softwood lumber on the US market, and that 5 billion $ of duties the Americans have collected in tariffs should be repaid to Canada (I’ll also mention these rulings were done with a majority of US judges on the panel listening to this case – the verdicts have been a unanimous 5-0 in Canada’s favour).

The US in effect then told Canada it was ignoring the rulings and insisted on continued negotiations to break the impasse. Canada’s government has withdrawn from talks and said there’s nothing to negotiate over – we’ve won a ruling fair and square, and the ruling is part of a panel to a treaty that the US’s signature is attached to. This led to the following testy exchange…

Continued BELOW:

Hi folks.. just read this in the Toronto Star giving more details on the relief mission Canada is...

I think maybe the US finally accepted our request for aid – or some of it anyways. We wont...