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.
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:
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.