The May 12 announcement of a 90-day tariff truce between the U.S. and China, brokered in Geneva, marked a pivotal moment in global economic diplomacy. While U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration initially framed the trade war as a unilateral cudgel to force Beijing into submission, the current agreement — halving punitive tariffs to 10 per cent and establishing a bilateral consultation mechanism — revealed a critical reality: China’s strategic discipline and institutional coherence reshaped the contours of engagement. This was no unilateral capitulation but a demonstration of calculated statecraft. 

The Geneva negotiations is a departure from Washington’s traditional script. For the first time, the U.S. delegation accepted a neutral venue — Switzerland — and abandoned the elaborate optics of lengthy Trump monologues in Oval Office, or unsubstantiated talks that followed.

Closed-door negotiations focused on tariff details, a stark contrast to Trump’s earlier theatrics, where foreign leaders were pressured to praise him publicly. Beijing’s insistence on equal representation and rejection of direct negotiations between Trump and Xi underscored its refusal to be treated as a subordinate.

Canada’s decision last fall to impose a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), mirroring U.S. policies, sparked a damaging tit-for-tat with Beijing. In March, China retaliated with tariffs on Canadian canola, seafood and pork, crippling Prairie farmers and fisheries already stressed by market volatility and climate disruptions.

As tensions escalate, Prime Minister Mark Carney faces a pivotal choice: prolong a futile trade war or pursue pragmatic negotiations to ease Western Canada’s crisis, reduce U.S. dependency and build a sovereign EV industry.

Ottawa’s insistence on maintaining tariffs, citing “protecting jobs” and countering China’s “unfair subsidies,” rings hollow. Canada’s EV market remains nascent, with imports from China dominating 2023 sales (C$2.2 billion). Tesla, reliant on Shanghai for most of its production, leads this space, yet Ottawa ignores the root problem: Canada lacks infrastructure, supply chains and cohesive policy to compete globally.

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a 90-day suspension on plans to place 145-per-cent tariffs on Chinese goods coming into America. Refusing to back down completely, however, Mr. Trump left in place a new 30-per-cent tariff on products from China entering the United States.

Mr. Trump favours tariffs for two reasons. First, he sees trade deficits as proof that countries are “ripping off” the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, China imported US$151.1-billion worth of goods from America in 2021, while Americans bought US$506.4-billion worth of goods from China that year. This brings us to the second reason why Mr. Trump favours tariffs: He believes that the resulting US$355.3-billion “deficit” America has with China is the result of decades of American business strategy that offshored its domestic manufacturing capabilities to cheaper labour markets. As the White House’s own fact sheet on the matter states: “Large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits have led to the hollowing out of our manufacturing base [and] resulted in a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity.” Thus, the tariffs are an attempt to reverse both the U.S.’s perceived trade deficit with China, and American de-industrialization.

On April 2, U.S. President Donald Trump, as part of his broader “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, announced a hefty 46 per cent tariff on imports from Vietnam. Following the 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, Vietnam — like many other countries — has scrambled to negotiate with the U.S. through diplomacy and trade concessions. 

It is a stark change of fortune from Trump’s first term, when Vietnam benefited from the fallout from U.S.-China trade tensions as manufacturers sought to diversify their manufacturing and production sites to other markets, Vietnam foremost among them. This time, however, with an economy still heavily dependent on exports — especially to the U.S. — and a manufacturing sector closely intertwined with Chinese supply chains, Vietnam faces heightened exposure to a renewed wave of U.S. tariff threats and an escalating U.S.-China trade dispute. 

As the country looks to reduce this vulnerability and diversify trade, what are its opportunities and challenges, and how might Canada position itself as a reliable and strategic partner for Vietnam’s continued growth?

Published: May 29, 2025
Written by: Sakshi Venkatraman

President Donald Trump's administration says it will "aggressively" revoke the visas of Chinese students studying in the US.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the move would include "those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields".

Relations between Beijing and Washington have plummeted in recent months as a tit-for-tat trade war erupted between the two superpowers sparked by Trump's tariffs.

There were an estimated 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year. It is not clear how many of them could be affected by the latest move.

Lee Jae-myung’s hardscrabble path to the South Korean presidency mirrors his country’s stratospheric rise from grinding poverty to one of the world’s leading economies.

When Lee, a scandal-prone school dropout-turned-lawyer who was elected in a landslide on Tuesday, was born in 1963, South Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was comparable with sub-Saharan African nations.

South Korea was so poor, in fact, that Lee’s exact birthday is a mystery – his parents, like many families alert to the sky-high infant mortality of the era, took about a year to register his birth.

Yet even by the standards of the day, Lee’s early years were marked by deprivation and adversity, including stints as an underage factory labourer.

The Takeaway

On June 3, 2025, South Korea held its 21st presidential election, resulting in the victory of opposition candidate Lee Jae-myung. The election, triggered by the December 2024 impeachment of former president Yoon Suk Yeol, took place amid heightened social tensions. As the new president, Lee will be tasked with uniting a deeply polarized society and re-establishing South Korea’s regional and global credibility. However, ongoing legal challenges and a deeply divided political landscape will shape the trajectory of his presidency. Lee’s leadership may mark a shift toward dialogue with North Korea and a recalibration of Seoul’s ties with Japan, while maintaining strategic alignment with U.S. priorities, particularly in extended deterrence and critical technology supply chains.

The artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI recently announced that its ChatGPT platform now provides free image generation, prompting an online flood of images imitating the styles of the animator Hayao Miyazaki and other well-known artists. This has been heralded as the next step in the death of art and artists, joining the impending death – or zombification – of the writer, as AI-generated novels are slated to flood the market. But a peculiar feeling, or rather lack thereof, arises when trying to engage with AI art objects.

It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat.

Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called “artists” but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one’s own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access.

Published: May 11, 2025
Written by: Anna Luisa Daigneault

If there are few speakers left of a language, how does a community revive it? In our current era, 3,000 languages are at risk of extinction due to the pressures of colonization, globalization, forced cultural assimilation, environmental devastation and other factors.

According to Canada‘s Commission for Indigenous Languages, “research shows that no Indigenous language in Canada is safe and that all are in varying stages of endangerment.”

Our society is also being shaped by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Can AI be used for the benefit of Indigenous language survival in Canada and elsewhere?

Just over a month after almost one million Ontarians lost power in the midst of a destructive ice storm, the province is proposing to cut the meagre budget of emergency preparedness and response from $70 million to $66.2 million, even as it becomes a standalone ministry for the first time. 

The government is also decreasing its budget for emergency forest firefighting, from $177 million to $135 million, even as evacuation orders are already in place in at least one northwestern Ontario community this spring. 

These decisions to cut funds put towards the effects of climate change were some of the only mentions of the environment in the budget the Doug Ford government released May 15. Instead, it focused heavily on supporting drivers, with more talk of new and expanded highways (without offering additional funding), a ban on congestion pricing (which is working in New York) and a continued crackdown on the premier’s foe, bike lanes. 

Only a few months ago, a headline like “United States sets tariffs of up to 3,521% on solar panels from Southeast Asia” could have been dismissed as satire. Today, it‘s nothing special, one of many published amid an uninterrupted fusillade accompanying Donald Trump‘s first 100 days in power. Yet it‘s also part of something bigger, as axes of economic power shift, technological changes surge, and popular sentiments reconfigure and metastasise. Amid that fracturing world order, how should we consider the climate crisis?

As an unfolding and catastrophic reality, to be sure. Last year was the warmest on record, breaching for the first time the Paris Agreement‘s target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. From wildfires to tropical cyclones, extreme weather events in 2024 displaced the highest number of people since 2008, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Homes, livelihoods and natural systems were destroyed, compounding global shocks and stresses, from armed conflicts to rising food prices.

Earth.Org‘s Data Analyst and Visualization Expert Madina Tussupova uncovers the patterns, causes, and real consequences of global temperature rise.

Instead of exploring average temperature data, this article looks at temperature anomalies; in other words, deviations from average temperatures. Why is it more useful? Because the “normal” temperature range for each location is widely different – by looking at anomalies, we can effectively measure the temperature trend while avoiding climate bias.

References to global warming in this article include both land and ocean warming. The decision to not overlook ocean warming makes sense, as 90% of global warming occurs in the ocean.

The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto celebrates its 25th year in 2025 with a move to summer.

Naomi Johnson, the festival's executive director, said she's hoping the festival's new June dates will set them apart from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In previous years, imagineNATIVE was held in October about a month after TIFF.

"We had to get away from that fall season," she said.

"It's just very packed in the city, especially because we're the first festival to follow TIFF, so it was getting very unmanageable in trying to get our events noticed.

Tucked into a quiet corner of the Bill Reid Gallery is a nine-minute film by Nlaka‘pamux artist Jade Baxter about the wildfire that devastated her homelands. 

Through a series of raw, handheld clips, Why Would I Leave? documents the months leading up to the June 2021 blaze that tore through “Lytton.”

Baxter‘s footage captures not only the fire itself, but the simmering tension of a community living under intensifying climate pressure. 

After weeks of record-breaking temperatures during the western “North America” Heat Dome, the fast-moving flames caused two fatalities and destroyed most of the Nlaka‘pamux village. 

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