My claim is Canada has no unique product that it offers that the US is sufficiently conspicuously dependent on for it to guarantee any real sense of true independence, and so it finds itself subject to the whims of a foreign state.

Right now there is a very large Canadian boycott of US products, services and tourism. I also had to explain to a client this week that because of the import tariffs on Chinese goods to the US the US assembled products are now no longer competitive with alternatives. The fact you were seemingly unaware of this kind of demonstrates the level of effect of it.

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mgraczyk 3 days ago | parent [-]

You are arguing my point. Canada may stop importing from us but will never stop exporting. There are no incentives for that and never will be.

We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years

If we imported chips from Canada, that supply chain would be safe for at least 50 years, probably hundreds

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fidotron 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The Nintendo Wii SoC was actually fabbed in Canada and exported, but that facility has changed into something slightly different because the whole east coast/hudson river valley fab world went sideways a while ago.

> We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years

More importantly for Canadians that food or energy has no alternative competing market to sell into. Consequently the Canadians are totally dependent on the US market to even set the price of it. This applies to many other sectors as well.

Canada is currently having a huge desperate push to export to non US markets because of the levels of uncertainty that have been created. And I say this as someone not totally dismissive of the US position, but they need to do a far better job of bringing their allies into the tent with them.

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SJC_Hacker 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Historically there have been plenty of incentives to stop exporting. Its called an embargo. Usually in an attempt to get the host country to change foreign policy, though I can't think of any situation where it actually worked. Examples: Napoleon's "Continental System" against Great Brtain, US oil embargo against Japan prior to WWII, Confederate States of America cotton embargo against the UK during the early years of the American Civil War

	▲	mgraczyk 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes it's definitely possible, but very rare and as you pointed out (especially in the confederacy's case) it usually harms the exporter much more than it helps. I'd say that in any case of a serious Canadian export embargo, it will have been in retaliation to US trade policy or US invasion, not the other way around. We had essentially no risk that Canada would embargo us, there was no possibility of this happening for the last 150 years until we became the aggressors

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foxglacier 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At any time, Canada could decide to stop subsidizing its uncompetitive chip makers for the same reason so many people in this thread want the US to do, and the US would then become dependent on someone else who might be their enemy (eg. Chinese occupied Taiwan or China itself).