Tea & Two Slices is a snarky, long-running news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran restaurant dishwasher Sean Orr. Mr. Orr lives and works in Gastown and is very aware of his privilege, so there’s no need to remind him of it.

Trade Trudeau: Canadian dairy farmers slam new trade agreement, say it will have ‘dramatic impact’. We agreed to renew the war on drugs for this? What else? American Netflix and cheaper cheese strings?

We were snookered by a one trick pony who is terrible at negotiating, uses distributive bargaining and resorts to personal attacks when things don’t immediately go his way. Trump created a storm of uncertainty here, and if there is anything that markets don’t like, it’s uncertainty.

And now he gets to claim victory and that he “killed” NAFTA. We had no choice but to play our carefully scripted role: Globe editorial: With USMCA, Canada holds its own in the unnecessary, absurd Trump reality show.

What should not be forgotten in this moment of calm, however, is that the storm was the invention of one man. Canada has concluded an unnecessary and absurdly belligerent negotiation that was provoked by Donald Trump and impelled by a collection of outright lies about NAFTA that the U.S. President repeated ad nauseum.

No, NAFTA was not the cause of the decline of American manufacturing. No, the United States does not run a trade deficit with Canada. No, America wasn’t poorer for the deal, and no it wasn’t the worst trade agreement in history.

Cheap cheese aside, am I finally going to be able to get some of the cheap US data? Canada promises to regulate legal cannabis with same fairness and efficiency as telecommunications.

Was this part of the NAFTA negotiations? Longtime rivals, the US and Canadian ice-hockey captains just got married.

We want to be friends so badly with the States that our media comes to the defence of a spoiled, lying, rich frat boy: Lakritz: Kavanaugh doesn’t deserve this. What happened in high school stays in high school.

Related: The Day American Patriarchy Took its Mask Off.

America has always been ruled by a little tribe of men among whom the most violent, abusive, and narcissistic rise to the top — because rigid hierarchies will quite naturally always select for such a person. Social structures which go on selecting for violence, not say, courage, truth, kindness, wisdom, intelligence, or compassion, are the grim residue — the toxic waste — of centuries of supremacy, of racism, of slavery, of genocide, if we are honest. They are what made America rich, and maybe even powerful, if you think power is only a thing had at the point of a gun. But now this structurally selected, encouraged, inculcated, and cultivated violence — so prized amongst American elites — is what is tearing America apart, too.

A caveat, as always: these things are not isolated entirely in the USA, and by no means do we have the moral authority to judge them from a place of smugness: Social media erupts – RCMP say dead Native woman found in ditch ‘not suspicious’.

This is what reconciliation looks like: Employee sent home for wearing Orange Shirt for residential school survivors. Come on, Quality Foods, get your head out of your ass.

TIL: The Little-Known History of How the Canadian Government Made Inuit Wear ‘Eskimo Tags’.

Bonus: A cruise ship’s emissions are the same as 1 million cars: report.