Jeff Penney retweetledi
I get that this elbows-up crap plays well politically within Canada, but as @Afinetheorem said, it's "economic malpractice." Our physical proximity to the US isn't a weakness---it's one of our most valuable endowments.
The Canada-US border is totally unique. Geographically and topographically speaking, there's nothing else like it in the world. It's far cheaper technologically for Ontario & Quebec to trade with the midwest & east coast than with BC & the prairie provinces. And vice versa: getting stuff from New York City to Los Angeles is technologically more expensive than getting that same stuff to Toronto.
Regardless of what political leaders on both sides of the border say and do, Americans and Canadians will want to trade intensively with each other. Whether we have a free trade agreement or 25% tariffs, that's still going to happen (a 25% tariff is still much lower than non-tariff cost of moving stuff to Europe or Asia). Donald Trump can't change that, and neither can Mark Carney.
Frankly, Carney's single most important job is to manage our relationship with the US so that we can get as much economic value out of it as possible. Trying to design policies to redirect economic activity away from the US is just going to make Canada poorer, and it's going to be counterproductive, anyway---again, the geographic and topographic realities are simply too strong.
(By the way, the fact that we've somehow gotten poorer than a geographically isolated, but otherwise fairly similar, country like Australia is shocking. But it's totally wrong to expect that making ourselves more effectively isolated is what's going to somehow make us richer.)
CTV News@CTVNews
Exclusive: PM Carney declares U.S. ties now a ‘weakness’ in address to Canadians ctvnews.ca/politics/artic…
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