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Ontario 'Ripping Up' Contract With Musk's Starlink as Canada Targets Trump Allies in Trade War
"Canada didn't start this fight with the U.S., but you better believe we're ready to win it," Ontario Premier Doug Ford said.
Feb 03, 2025
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday that his government will exclude American companies from provincial contracts and cancel a massive deal with Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service in retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump's imposition of 25% tariffs on Canadian goods.
"Starting today and until U.S. tariffs are removed, Ontario is banning American companies from provincial contracts," Ford—who leads the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario—said on social media.
"Every year, the Ontario government and its agencies spend $30 billion on procurement, alongside our $200 billion plan to build Ontario," he continued. "U.S.-based businesses will now lose out on tens of billions of dollars in new revenues."
"They only have President Trump to blame," added Ford, who once professed his "unwavering" support for the Republican during his first White House term. "We're going one step further. We'll be ripping up the province's contract with Starlink. Ontario won't do business with people hellbent on destroying our economy. Canada didn't start this fight with the U.S., but you better believe we're ready to win it."
"I don't care if it's a toothpick. We need to purchase from Canada and Ontario."
Last November, Ontario and Starlink signed a C$100 million (USD$68.6 million) deal to provide high-speed internet service for around 15,000 eligible homes and businesses in remote rural communities in northern parts of the province by June 2025.
However, Ford on Monday accused Musk—who gave Trump's campaign tens of millions of dollars and heads the president's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—of being "part of the Trump team that wants to destroy families, incomes, destroy businesses" by waging a trade war.
"He wants to take food off the table of people, hard-working people, and I'm not going to tolerate it," Ford said of the world's richest person. "We just aren't going to be using American companies."
"And no matter if we are building a hospital, if we're building anything, if we're building a dog house, I want to make sure we are using Ontario steel, Canadian products, Canadian wood, Ontario wood," he added. "I don't care if it's a toothpick. We need to purchase from Canada and Ontario."
Ford also ordered the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) to remove U.S.-imported alcohol products from store shelves in retaliation for the tariffs.
"Every year, LCBO sells nearly $1 billion worth of American wine, beer, spirits, and seltzers," he said on Sunday. "Not anymore."
Musk reacted to the loss of the Starlink contract with Ontario with a two-word post on his X social media platform saying, "Oh well."
Ford's move followed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's announcement Saturday of retaliatory tariffs targeting Republican-led states and Trump allies after the U.S. leader said he would impose levies of 25% on Canadian and Mexican imports and 10% on goods from China.
"Canadians understand that we need to respond to this," explained Trudeau, who is set to resign once his Liberal Party selects a new leader. "We need to respond in a way that is appropriate, that is measured but forceful, that meets the moment."
Trump singled out Canadian energy for a reduced 10% tariff. On Monday, he announced a deal with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to pause U.S. tariffs for one month in exchange for the deployment of 10,000 Mexican troops to the country's northern border to target drug trafficking and, according to Trump, prevent migrants from entering the United States.
Frustration with Trump's policies and actions—which include ongoing calls to make Canada the "51st state"—was on display over the weekend as Canadian fans attending National Basketball Association and National Hockey League games against visiting U.S. rivals loudly booed pregame performances of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
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Harris, Trudeau, and the Fall of Our Noeliberal Saviors
What is that lesson that corporate-friendly so-called "centrists" refuse to learn? That you cannot save democracy while preserving the very economic and political arrangements that have hollowed it out.
Jan 08, 2025
Justin Trudeau's resignation and Trump's looming return on the anniversary of January 6 mark not just the resurgence of the far-right, but perhaps final collapse of centrist delusions.
There's a bitter poetry to the timing. On January 6, 2025—exactly four years after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn democracy—two events crystallized the profound failure of liberal centrism. In Ottawa, Justin Trudeau, once the global poster child for progressive liberalism, announced his resignation as Canada's Prime Minister. Meanwhile in Washington, Donald Trump prepared to return to power, having decisively defeated another supposed liberal savior in Kamala Harris.
The convergence of these events represents more than just the latest episode in the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy. It marks the definitive end of an era defined by a particular political fantasy: that charismatic centrist leaders could somehow save liberal democracy from its own contradictions while preserving the very system that produced its decay.
The Liberal Savior Myth
At the heart of contemporary liberalism lies a seductive myth: that the right combination of charismatic leadership, technocratic competence, and moderate politics can save democracy from its enemies while avoiding fundamental social transformation. This "liberal savior" narrative has dominated centrist political imagination for the past decade, manifesting in figures from Emmanuel Macron to Pete Buttigieg.
The limits of liberal centrism proved fatal. Unable to deliver material improvements in people's lives while preserving the interests of their donor class, these supposed saviors watched their support collapse.
The myth operates on two levels. First, it suggests that individual leaders—through force of personality, rhetorical skill, or managerial expertise—can resolve deep structural crises without challenging the underlying power relations that produced them. Second, and more insidiously, it promotes the idea that liberal democracy itself can be saved simply by defending existing institutions rather than radically democratizing them.
This mythology reached its apotheosis in Justin Trudeau. Young, photogenic, and armed with progressive rhetoric, he seemed to embody everything liberals believed could defeat the populist right. Here was a leader who could speak the language of social justice while reassuring financial markets, who could kneel at Black Lives Matter protests while expanding oil pipelines, who could champion feminism while maintaining corporate power structures.
The same template was later applied to figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both presented as the noble defenders of democratic norms against Trumpian barbarism. Yet in each case, the fundamental contradiction remained: you cannot save democracy while preserving the very economic and political arrangements that have hollowed it out.
The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau
Trudeau's trajectory is especially revealing. In 2015, he rode to power on a wave of optimism, presenting himself as the progressive antidote to conservative rule. With his carefully cultivated image of youthful dynamism and performative embrace of diversity, he became the archetype of what liberals imagined could defeat the rising tide of right-wing populism. International media swooned over his "sunny ways" and apparent commitment to progressive causes.
The reality never matched the image. Behind the woke platitudes and photo ops, Trudeau's government consistently served the interests of Canadian capital. His administration expanded oil pipelines despite climate crisis rhetoric, continued selling arms to Saudi Arabia while claiming to champion human rights, and used federal power to crush labor resistance, as seen in his government's draconian response to postal worker strikes.
The contradictions only deepened over time. While Trudeau spoke eloquently about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, his government aggressively pursued resource extraction projects on unceded territories. He campaigned on electoral reform but abandoned it when he couldn't secure a system favorable to his party. His supposed feminist credentials were exposed as hollow when he forced out strong women in his cabinet who challenged his authority during the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
The Myth of the Liberal Savior
This gap between progressive aesthetics and neoliberal governance isn't a bug but a feature of the liberal savior model. Figures like Trudeau fundamentally misunderstand democracy as a system to be preserved rather than radically expanded. Their project was always about maintaining the status quo through a kind of repressive tolerance – allowing just enough progressive window dressing to deflect demands for structural change while keeping the fundamental power relations of capitalism intact.
This gap between progressive aesthetics and neoliberal governance isn't a bug but a feature of the liberal savior model.
The same dynamic played out in the United States. After Trump's 2020 defeat, Democrats assured voters that "normalcy" would be restored under Joe Biden. When his presidency floundered, they turned to Kamala Harris as the next great hope for defending democracy against Trump's return. Yet as with Trudeau, the limits of liberal centrism proved fatal. Unable to deliver material improvements in people's lives while preserving the interests of their donor class, these supposed saviors watched their support collapse.
The liberal savior myth rests on two fundamental delusions. First, that individual leadership qualities—whether Trudeau's charisma or Biden's experience—can overcome the structural crisis of legitimacy facing liberal democratic institutions. Second, that these institutions can be preserved in their current form while addressing the deep inequalities and democratic deficits that fuel right-wing populism.
The Structural Crisis of Liberal Democracy
This approach was always doomed to fail because it refused to acknowledge that liberal democracy's crisis stems from its own internal contradictions. The same free market capitalism that centrist leaders champion has hollowed out democratic institutions, atomized communities, and created the precarious conditions that drive authoritarian appeals. No amount of symbolic progressivism or calls to preserve norms can resolve this fundamental tension.
The same free market capitalism that centrist leaders champion has hollowed out democratic institutions, atomized communities, and created the precarious conditions that drive authoritarian appeals.
The failures of figures like Trudeau reveal the bankruptcy of what have called "repressive democracy"—a system that maintains the formal structures of democratic governance while emptying them of substantive content. Under this model, democracy becomes primarily about managing dissent rather than enabling genuine popular power. Elections serve more to legitimate existing power structures than to facilitate real political transformation.
This crisis has only deepened in recent years. As economic inequality has soared and climate chaos intensifies, liberal democratic institutions have proven increasingly incapable of addressing fundamental social problems. The response from centrist leaders has been to double down on technocratic management while wrapping themselves in progressive rhetoric—a strategy that has now definitively failed.
Beyond Liberal Democracy: Building Socialist Alternatives
The real question is not how to save liberal democracy, but how to transcend it through the creation of genuine democratic alternatives. This requires moving beyond both right-wing populism's false promises and liberal centrism's managed decline. Instead, we need a democratic socialist vision that expands democracy into all spheres of life—economic, social, and political.
This means building power from below through militant labor movements, tenant organizations, and community groups that practice genuine democratic decision-making. It means fighting for universal public goods and democratic control over the economy. Most importantly, it means rejecting the liberal belief that democracy is primarily about preserving institutions, and embracing it as an ongoing project of collective liberation.
The real question is not how to save liberal democracy, but how to transcend it through the creation of genuine democratic alternatives.
Practical examples of this alternative vision are already emerging. The recent wave of labor militancy across North America shows how workers can exercise democratic power outside traditional political channels. Municipal socialist movements are experimenting with participatory budgeting and community control. Indigenous land defenders are modeling forms of democratic governance that challenge both liberal capitalism and right-wing reaction.
Trudeau's fall and Trump's return should serve as the final nail in the coffin of the liberal savior myth. The choice we face is not between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, but between the expansion of genuine democratic power or its continued erosion under the twin forces of right-wing reaction and centrist accommodation. The only way to defeat the far right is to build democratic socialist alternatives that actually address the crisis of democracy at its roots.
The future depends not on enlightened leaders preserving the status quo, but on ordinary people organizing to fundamentally transform it. The fall of figures like Trudeau should not be mourned but celebrated as an opportunity to finally move beyond the dead end of liberal centrism and begin the real work of democratic reconstruction.
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Beware Elon Musk and His Attempts to Steer the World Toward the Neo-Fascist Right
It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
Jan 07, 2025
Elon Musk repeatedly asserts, without evidence, that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer covered up the abuses of young girls by gangs comprised largely of British Pakistani men, in cases that date back to before 2010 when Starmer was head of Britain’s public prosecutions.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years,” Musk posted to the top of his account on Friday. “Starmer must go, and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
In fact, Starmer, who heads the Labour government, did not cover up abuses. Instead, he brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children, including the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.
Musk also calls Jess Phillips, the Labour government’s under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, a “rape genocide apologist” because she pushed back on calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.
In fact, Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, has called for a local investigation by Oldham authorities rather than the central government. Women’s rights supporters say Musk’s labeling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” is threatening her safety.
Yesterday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line,” adding that “once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”
Musk’s Global Reach
Musk’s lies about the left-wing British government and his support for far-right groups are parts of an emerging pattern. Musk is also:
- Boosting the far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi ties, known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), before elections early next month. Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an op-ed in a German newspaper recently, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk is planning an online “discussion” on X with the AfD’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, amplifying the party’s neo-Nazi ideology.
- Attacking the Italian judiciary for curbing Italian Prime Giorgia Meloni’s hardline anti-asylum immigration policies. Musk has met regularly with Meloni, who has called him a friend, and appeared at a youth event for Meloni’s party.
- Urging support for Britain’s far-right MP Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party. Musk says he might donate upward of 100 million pounds ($127 million) to Farage’s group.
- Demanding Britain “free Tommy Robinson,” the far-right founder of the English Defence League—an Islamophobic nationalist group—and anti-immigrant agitator who, Musk charges, is in jail for “telling the truth.” In fact, Robinson is in jail because he was found to have defamed a teenage Syrian refugee and then defied a British court order by repeating the false claims. (Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud, and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.)
- Allowing on X inflammatory lies of a kind that incited anti-immigrant riots in Britain last July, following the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport. After Britain arrested more than 30 people, Musk condemned the government for what he called an attack on free speech.
- Calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an “insufferable tool” over comments Trudeau made in support of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and predicted he “won’t be in power for much longer.” (Yesterday, Trudeau announced he will resign.)
Where Musk Is Getting This Power
As the richest person in the world, politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.
He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.
Musk has hardly left Trump’s side since the election, meaning that Musks’s opinions (amplified by his social media platform) cannot be ignored by politicians around the world who are trying to decipher Trump’s opinions.
One prominent member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party is asking that Germany determine “whether [Musk’s] repeated disrespect, defamation, and interference in the election campaign were also expressed in the name of the new U.S. government.”
This combination—the richest person in the world, owner and manipulator of the biggest political messaging platform in the world, with direct influence over Trump—puts Musk in the position of being able to move other nations toward the neo-fascist right.
Why Musk Is Doing This
Not for money. As it is, he has far more than any human can utilize.
Partly, it’s ideological. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” which puts him at odds with Europe’s and Canada’s aggressive responses to hate speech online. (Britain, Musk says, “is turning into a police state.”)
But the roots of Musk’s neo-fascism probably go deeper.
I am no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that as an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is especially triggered by poor people of color moving into white nations. His father smuggled raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.
Part of his shift to the radical right also comes from Musk’s transgender child. As Musk told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, “I lost my son, essentially,” claiming she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” (Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 20, toldNBC News that Musk was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.)
On X, Musk continuously criticizes transgender rights, including medical treatments for trans-identifying minors, and the use of pronouns if they are different from what would be used at birth. He has promoted anti-trans content and called for arresting people who provide trans care to minors. Last July, Musk said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents. After Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he rolled back the app’s protections for trans people, including a ban on using birth names (known as “deadnames” for transgender people).
Perhaps the major reason for Musk’s recent effort to push other nations to the neo-fascist right is his newfound thirst for right-wing global politics. After effectively (at least in Musk’s mind) winning the presidency for Trump by spending more than $250 million and unleashing a maelstrom of pro-Trump and anti-Harris lies over X, he now seeks even more of an authoritarian rush.
It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
What Should Be Done About Musk?
For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in America can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.
Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:
- Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
- Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
- Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
- Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
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