Subject: Re: Golden Dome - Canada?
But if Canada wants to flood itself with cheap stuff and the. Wonder where all their jobs went in 10 years… that’s on them.

There's no doubt that Canada would prefer to do most of their trade with the U.S. After all, they have done most of their trade with the U.S. We're their largest source of imports, as well as their largest export market. There's no other nation on earth that they're as closely linked to.

But if we're going to keep punishing them and whipsawing them and ripping up our trade agreements and threatening them with things like 100% tariffs every time the President gets annoyed with them...they can't continue with that. They can't continue to rely on the U.S. to the extent they have. They have to diversify their international trading so that they aren't as vulnerable to us.

It didn't matter that they were so vulnerable to us in the past, because we were trustworthy. We weren't using the fact that they integrated their economy so closely with ours as a weapon against them. Now we are. We weren't abrogating trade agreements every time the President gets a different idea about something. Now we are. So they have to change.

This is not surprising. It's the inevitable result of the U.S. trying to reset many (most?) of our trading relationships in ways that are fundamentally less favorable to all our counterparties. Of course they're going to change what they do in order to mitigate the changes we're making to their disadvantage. And of course their responsive actions are going to be things we don't necessarily like, such as increasing their interactions with China - the world's second largest economy.

Because we're unilaterally reducing their access to export to the U.S., they want to rebalance. So they're going to replace some imports from the U.S. with imports from China. That gives them leverage to get more favorable trade terms for their exports to China, to replace the lost access to the U.S. market. It's not ideal, but it's better than having 65-75% of their entire bilateral trade be solely with the U.S.