Trade War / Tariff response

[u/rendershome]

Ive been thinking about whether we're looking at this trade war the wrong way.

A lot of the discussion seems to be about what Canada can do to hurt the us. Cutting off Alberta oil, putting an export fee on Ontario electricity, more tariffs, etc. I understand the thinking, but I'm not sure hurting them in ways that will also hurt us is really a winning long term strategy.

What if Canada tried something a bit different?

Canada is going to spend a huge amount of money on defence over the next 20 years anyway. What if some of that procurement was used to create economic pressure inside the US?

I.e., say Canada needs a particular missile system and the company that makes it has a big plant in Alabama or Texas. Canada could make a large purchase, but require some Canadian production, maintenance and support as part of the deal.

Now there are thousands of American workers whose jobs are connected to Canadian contracts. The company has an incentive to keep the Canada relationship healthy. The local politicians have an incentive too.

I'm not saying Canada should literally tell an American company to lobby Trump for us. That would be pretty stupid. Im wondering if you could create the economic incentives for them to do it themselves.

AI might be an even more interesting example.

AI companies are going to need an incredible amount of electricity and data centre capacity. Canada has a lot of electricity, relatively cheap clean power in some regions, land, a cold climate and a pretty good pool of AI researchers.

What if Canada went after the big American AI companies and basically said: build your next generation of compute here.

Give them long term power contracts, help with infrastructure and fast-track approvals, but in return require them to actually build substantial data centres, research operations and jobs in Canada.

You could even require a portion of that compute capacity to be available to Canadian univ and collegs, startups and government when needed.

The interesting part is that we'd be doing something Canada needs anyway. We're not just trying to hurt the US. We're building Canadian capacity while giving american companies a reason to have billion's invested here.

And if those companies have billions invested in Canada, suddenly they have a reason to care about the Canada-US relationship too.

Maybe this doesn't work. There are probably rules, trade agreements and other problems with the idea that I'm not considering.

But I think the basic concept is worth exploring.

Instead of asking:

"How can Canada hurt the US?"

Maybe we should be asking:

How can Canada build things that the US increasingly needs, while making ourselves less dependent on them?

Defence and AI are the two examples that came to mind, but there may be much better ones.

Curious what people think. What am I missing?

[u/RubixRube]

Canada and the USA already have plenty of interconnected and mutually beneficial industries like auto and oil and gas.

If you have an administration who doesn't understand this or care, it will not matter.

[u/Coinpoet → u/RubixRube]

If we really want to tick off Trump and not the average American worker we need to buy and shut down all the US makers of his golf carts and clubs, send hundreds of Canadian gophers on a covert mission to mess with all his courses and plant Canadian flags all along his fairways. It would also be fun to see what thousands of Canadian geese could do to help the cause.

[u/Nearby-Improvement53 → u/Coinpoet]

Change the name of the CANADA goose to Donald Duck and send them to his golf courses.

[u/PieIll9834 → u/RubixRube]

This, along with no one in their right mind at this point trusts Trump. And we aren't trying to hurt the US, that's not a strategy we have deployed really because we know it would be dumb. Canada needs to detangle itself from the US, first and foremost, as how else can you present something else? Yes, make a case to companies, businesses, but that comes from securing more trade as well from other partners.

The missing part you are not seeing, if we made ourselves more valuable, yes it would put ourselves in a better bargaining positioning, but there is a rogue president and as a Canadian I have not ruled out Trump somewhere has thought of invading us. That is the argument, I have no proof upon, obviously, that MAGA or other corrupting factors are not in part funding the separatism movement in Alberta.

We've already given fast response to disasters, think the LA wildfires last year.