Standing in Ottawa on Saturday morning, hours after the American duties landed, Mark Carney said Canada would match them dollar for dollar. The targets: American steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp, paper, electronics. The start date: September 8.

That date is the interesting part of the announcement.

Retaliation that begins immediately is punishment. Retaliation scheduled seventeen days out is an offer. Everything between now and September 8 is a negotiating window that Carney has created for himself without appearing to concede anything, and the composition of the list keeps the window open. Steel and agricultural equipment hit exporters in states that pay attention to trade policy. Dairy is the mirror image of the American grievance, aimed squarely back at the sector Washington named first. None of it is calibrated to maximize damage to the Canadian consumer, which is the constraint every retaliating government actually works under.

Lawmakers and lobbyists have started using generative tools to draft legislation. Reporting on the practice found that the tools are currently poor at the technical mechanics of federal law and regulation, which is an awkward finding, because the technical mechanics are most of what a bill is.

A statute is not an argument. It is a set of instructions for amending other statutes. The operative text of a typical bill consists of directions to strike a phrase in a specific subsection of an existing code title and insert different words in its place, plus definitions, effective dates, severability, and appropriations language. Getting it right requires knowing what the current code says, what pending bills would change about it, how courts have construed the terms of art, and which committee has jurisdiction over the resulting text.