We have amazing snipers.
raises hand - even the retired ones are still decent. And prepared.
We really need trained drone operators. It’s still something that the Americans neglect as far as I’m aware.
It’s a unsurprising given Canada’s economic relationship with the US which counts for three quarters of Canada’s exports and half of its imports.
The report should also be a wake-up call in my opinion that Canada must not rely on any single country for future trade. This week, Carney visits China, and the same Eurasia Group report leaves no doubt about the Chinese economy and the government’s policy. In brief, it says:
Beijing won’t break out of its deflationary trap this year; instead, it will keep trying to export its way out, flooding global markets with cheap goods at everyone else’s expense.
The whole report makes a worthwhile read. China has been pursuing coercive trade practices with literally all countries for a long time, showing that it’s not a reliable trade partner. The country is highly dependent, however, on foreign markets to sell its overcapacity made by cheap -and often, forced - labour. (An important detail here is that exactly China’s huge labour force will be tested soon as researchers such as those by the World Economic Forum project an labour force gap in the next decade due to population decline.)
All these are reasons to diversify trade further away from countries with self-centered governments. To gain at least some degree of predictability in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical landscape, Canada should reach out to its European allies and some in the Indo-Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, …) and put together a united front against any aggressive actions taken by the U.S. president as much as against autocracies like China and Russia.
Yeah well when the Canadian government has a couple hundred billion invested in just one investment alone, it’s quite clear that Canada is fucked (isn’t the travel boycott like 100b max?). Still Canadians refuse to boycott the S&P500 because there is nowhere else to invest (other than precious metals lol) and citizens refuse to remove their accounts on non-essential American services (Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Paypal, etc). Canada can’t even get their own local e-commerce platform down, Amazon is mostly foreign goods but it is currently the most dominant way to distribute goods and that will not change anytime soon due to insane commercial real estate pricing. For reference Czechia has quarter the population yet has their own massive ecommerce platform Alza.cz, Amazon isn’t even able to compete in that country. Hell, the Canadian government will not stop using D365, Azure, AWS. God damn Canadians are deluded as to what is coming in their future.
Canadians are deluded as to what is coming in their future
We see what’s happening, and most of us are in the process of disentanging over a hundred years of having our economy and systems intertwined with the Americans.
Yes, there are still some maple maga idiots who are dreaming of the taste of Trump’s boots, but they are a minority. A noisy minority to be sure, but a minority.
