A reader alerted me to the LCBO website going dark. When you go to lcbo.com, this is what you currently get:
No doubt that this was ordered by Ontario Premier Doug Ford who has threatened to take US alcohol off of LCBO shelves if Donald Trump levied tariffs against Canada. Well he did so Ford followed through on that threat. For context, the LCBO because it is located in Canada’s biggest province makes it the single biggest buyer of alcohol on the planet according to Wikipedia. Thus this move will absolutely hurt US producers of alcohol.
But that’s not all that Ford is doing:
The premier cancelled the province’s $100 million satellite internet deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink and threatened 25 per cent export taxes on electricity sent from Ontario to 1.5 million customers in New York, Michigan and Minnesota.
“We need to make sure America feels the pain. Stop buying U.S. goods,” Ford told reporters at Queen’s Park.
“We’re ripping up Ontario’s contract with Starlink. It’s done, it’s gone. We won’t award contracts to people who enable and encourage economic attacks on our province and our country,” he said.
Taking aim at Musk, the world’s richest man and one of Trump’s most influential advisers, Ford reminded people that the Tesla tycoon used to live in Ontario.
“Isn’t it ironic that … part of his education was at Queen’s and he’s attacking the country and the province that gave him the opportunity to go to Queen’s University. They should be embarrassed that he went to Queen’s,” the premier said.
“He should be embarrassed to attack the people that took care of him for a number of years with his family.”
Elon may not notice this deal being cancelled. But it’s the latest problem for Elon as Tesla sales are tanking along with Tesla’s stock value because of his association with Donald Trump along with his own ill advised antics. Whether that is going to make enough of a difference to make Elon suggest to Trump to call off the tariffs is an open question. But it’s clear that Canada isn’t taking this lying down.
BREAKING: Starlink Is Down
Posted in Commentary with tags Starlink on July 24, 2025 by itnerdThe Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Intelligence team has detected a widespread global outage impacting Starlink, which began around 19:15 UTC and is still ongoing. Our team continues to monitor the situation in real time.
This is confirmed by Down Detector:
Given that a lot of people rely on Starling for their Internet connection, this is as non-trivial as it gets. Let’s hope that Elon Musk can tear himself away from his other problems to fix this one. In the meantime, you can monitor what’s going on here.
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