Removing trade uncertainty tops Harold Kriewald’s wish list.

On Wednesday, he hadn’t heard from suppliers about which — if any — products at Stalwart Appliances in Winnipeg will be hit with new levies.

Canadian tariffs on $26.7 billion worth of United States imports are set to begin Sept. 8. They come before the holiday season, the retail sector’s busiest stretch.

“(If) the forecast is uncertain, you as the consumer are not always prone to want to make a big purchase,” said Kriewald, Stalwart Appliances’s owner. “Uncertainty is probably the worst thing. The tariffs, of course, bring that uncertainty.”

If you spend any amount of time having deep conversations on sensitive subject matters, you will undoubtedly encounter patterns of thought and speech peppered into the discourse as if certain people were helpless but to utter them.

Perhaps you are trying to get to the heart of a complicated matter and the disagreement with your conversational partner starts to get a little heated. Often somebody will dust off the old diplomatic gem of “let’s agree to disagree” to extinguish further argument.

Or perhaps you are trying to console a grief-stricken person who has gone through a traumatic event. People in such a state will often rail against the state of the universe with powerful philosophical sentiments, demanding to know how such injustice could be permitted. You would not be the first person to misguidedly try to soothe them with something like “everything happens for a reason.” Or, less secularly, “God works in mysterious ways.”

These are known as thought-terminating clichés. Pithy little sayings that sound like folksy wisdom but serve mostly to sever a train of thinking, often because it is either uncomfortable or more complicated than the person is willing to engage. Admittedly, they often come from a good-natured place of keeping the peace, though it could easily be argued that they mostly serve to preserve to comfort or indulge the intellectual laziness of those who speak them.