What Canada, Germany and Rwanda have in common: Trade troubles with team Trump

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TODAY:

• Trump's confrontational approach to trade negotiations has few limits, as seen in dealings with Canada, China, Germany and even Rwanda
• Denmark has passed a ban on full-face veils, becoming the sixth European nation to enact legislation pertaining to burqas and niqabs
• More than a third of the whales Japan harvested under its "scientific research" program this year were pregnant
• Missed The National last night? Watch it here

Trade whiplash

Ottawa's trade negotiators might want to get checked for whiplash following this morning's announcement that the Trump administration is imposing tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

The duties — 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminum — were first floated at the beginning of March as part of the U.S. president's drive to protect domestic producers from what Trump called "decades of unfair trade and bad policy."

But within a week, Canada and Mexico had carved out an exemption tied to the ongoing NAFTA renegotiations. The European Union quickly reached a similar understanding.

Those temporary reprieves are set to expire at midnight tonight, and now it seems that the United States will punish both its allies and its trading foes like China, the world's biggest steel producer.

No one should be surprised, however. The only thing that has been consistent about Trump's trade policy is its inconsistency.

A year ago, the U.S. president labelled America's free-trade agreement with South Korea, known as KORUS, a "horrible deal" and threatened to tear it up unless major revisions were made.

The renegotiated pact, announced at the end of March, was substantially the same as the old one, despite Trump's pronouncement that it was "wonderful."

That agreement survived for about a week, until the U.S. President gave an-off-the-cuff speech in which he mused about withholding his signature — purportedly to put pressure on North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who is not a party to the trade deal.

"I may hold it up until after a deal is made with North Korea, does everybody understand that? Do you know why? Do you know why?," Trump asked a crowd in Ohio. "Because it's a very strong card, and I want to make sure everyone is treated fairly and everything is moving along very nicely with North Korea."

Trade negotiations with China have been similarly stop-and-go.

First, Trump ordered $50 billion US in tariffs on Chinese-made goods. Then, after Beijing reacted in kind, it appeared that the two sides had reached a deal to avert a major trade war, with the U.S. president even going out of his way to help resolve a long-running regulatory dispute that threatened to drive Chinese phone maker ZTE out of business.

Then earlier this week, the tariffs suddenly reappeared on the table, along with some tough talk.

"From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and to be reciprocal," Trump said in a statement, along with an all-caps accusation that YEARS OF UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES are UNDERMINING AMERICAN INNOVATION AND JOBS.

Then there's the case of German automakers, watching their share prices drop today after a magazine reported that Trump told France's Emmanuel Macron that he intends to punish the car makers until there are "no more Mercedes-Benz rolling down Fifth Avenue."

Trump has already proposed a 25 per cent tariff on all imported cars. But while it's true that about half of all vehicles sold in the U.S. are foreign brands, with BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen having a strong hold on the luxury market, many of those cars are actually made in America.

Last year, for example, German automakers exported 657,000 vehicles to the U.S., compared to 804,000 they constructed in American factories like BMW's Spartanburg, S.C.-based facility — the company's largest manufacturing plant.

Trump's confrontational approach to trade negotiations has few, if any, limits.

In March, the U.S. gave Rwanda 60 days notice to reverse a 20-cent-per-kilogram increase in import duties on used American clothing, or face retaliatory tariffs. That deadline expired on Monday.

It's not yet clear what the Trump administration's next move will be. But it's unlikely to work out well for the Central African nation, which already had a $22 million trade deficit with the U.S.

Rwanda ranked 159th out of the 188 countries listed on the United Nations' 2017 Human Development Index. The United States was 10th, tied with Canada.

Danish veil ban

Denmark has passed a ban on full-face veils, becoming the sixth European nation to enact legislation targeting burkas and niqabs.

The law, passed in parliament today by a 75-30 vote, comes into force on Aug. 1. It will see "anyone who wears a garment that hides the face in public" punished by a fine of 1,000 kroner ($203 Cdn).

Repeat "offenders" will face fines up to 10-times more, or a six-month jail sentence.

"We don't cover our face and eyes, we must be able to see each other and we must also be able to see each other's facial expressions, it's a value in Denmark," said Søren Pape Poulsen, the Danish justice minister and leader of the Conservative People's Party.

The government says the ban is not meant to target any particular religion.

Human rights organizations are not buying that argument, however. Amnesty International released a statement denouncing the legislation as an affront to democracy.

"All women should be free to dress as they please and to wear clothing that expresses their identity or beliefs," it reads. "If the intention of this law was to protect women's rights, it fails abjectly. Instead, the law criminalizes women for their choice of clothing, and in so doing, flies in the face of those freedoms Denmark purports to uphold."

Enacting a ban has been a longtime promise of the populist People's Party. A public opinion survey published last fall suggested that 62 per cent of Danes supported such a ban.

Although the ban does not appear to address a widespread phenomenon — the government estimates that 150 to 200 Danish women wear full veils, out of a population of 5.7 million.

In 2011, France became the first European nation prohibit full-face coverings. Since then, it has been joined by Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Last summer, the European Court of Human Rights rejected a challenge brought by two Belgian women who wanted to the wear the niqab, finding that the country's ban did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

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Japan's whale hunt

More than a third of the whales that Japan harvested under its "scientific research" program this year were pregnant.

A new technical report filed with the International Whaling Commission (IWC) by the Institute of Cetacean Research — an offshoot of Japan's Fisheries Agency — details that 333 minke whales were killed during the November 2017 through March 2018 hunt in the waters off Antarctica. There were 152 males and 181 females taken, 122 of which were carrying calves.

Labelled as the "results of the third biological survey," the five-page document — six if you include the thank-yous and footnotes — provides a bare-bones accounting of the stomach contents, blubber thickness, body length distribution and sexual maturity of the dead whales.

The hunt's stated scientific objectives, as outlined in the report, are to improve the "precision of biological and ecological information" for the IWC's efforts to establish "sustainable" catch limits for commercial whaling, and to investigate the "structure and dynamics of the Antarctic marine ecosystem."

"Whales were sampled using a random sampling procedure (Kato et al., 1989). One or two minke whales were sampled randomly from each primary sighted school using harpoons with a 30g penthrite grenade," reads a section on "Sighting and Sampling Protocols."

Japan officially halted its commercial whaling operations in 1986, after signing on to a global moratorium on the hunting of the marine mammals. But a year later, it began to harvest the animals again under a loophole that permits sampling for research purposes.

In 2014, the International Court of Justice handed down a decision that appeared to put a final end to the catches, agreeing with the Australian government's argument that the "experiments" were a sham and ordering a halt to the hunt. But the Japanese government reduced its annual minke quota by two-thirds and sent the whaling fleet out again the next spring.

Norway, which never signed the whaling moratorium, and Iceland, which only partially agreed, both continue commercial hunts.

Japan is the only country using the scientific loophole, although the whale meat ends up on dinner tables all the same.

Japan also conducts a "scientific" cull of endangered sei whales in the Pacific each fall, harvesting 134 of them this past year.

A Standing Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) launched an official investigation of the sei hunt last fall, dispatching an international "fact-finding" mission to verify the research claims. The group won't table a report until the next CITES meeting in Sochi, Russia, this October.

In the meantime, Japan forges ahead with its stated plan to harvest 4,000 whales over the coming decade.

One of the main whaling ports, Shimonoseki, is part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's electoral district.

A closer look at …

The Bryan Colangelo-Philadelphia 76ers Twitter controversy:

Quote of the moment

"With what moral authority are you speaking? Are you perhaps Mother Teresa of Calcutta?"

- Mariano Rajoy, Spain's prime minister, reacting to an attempt by opposition parties to defeat his government via a no-confidence motion over a simmering corruption scandal.

What The National is reading

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Today in history

May 31, 1996: Can Canadian hip hop break out?

Ron Nelson, who debuted the very first Canadian radio show dedicated to rap in 1983, and fellow radio host DJ X, sit down with Daniel Richler to discuss how far the music has come and the distance that it still has to cover. "Canadian rap is still looking for an identity," says Nelson. "Being articulate isn't what gets you through the door. It's being able to find something the kids can relate to." He predicts it will take 10 years before Canada produces a really huge rap star. Drake's first album, Thank Me Later, was released in June 2010.

Can Canadian hip hop break out?

29 years ago

Duration 5:47

In 1996, two Canadian hip-hop experts discuss whether Canada will ever produce a bona fide rap star.

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