On Monday, Toyota said it will build a new US$3.6B plant in San Antonio, Texas, and move some production of its Tacoma pickup truck out of its Mexico plant over a four-year period.
Trade isn’t really meant to be a win-lose calculation, your take on NAFTA being a win for the USA and not Canada is a fundamentally Trumpian way of looking at it. NAFTA benefited all participating countries.
In terms of Canadian companies filling voids, that’s a very optimistic/hopefully outlook. More realistically, Canada’s market size is about 1/10th that of the USA, and it’s most likely that the Canadian government won’t employ things like industry protectionist tactics, such as tariffs on foreign imports. They definitely wouldn’t tariff that USA’s imports, and not tariff other countries, due to the amount of trade still reliant on the USA – even if the Canadian govt hits its target of doubling non-USA foreign trade, the USA would still be like >50% of our exports.
I think a slightly different way of looking at this though, is that the companies that are considering moving do not have a sufficient customer base / market in Canada ‘alone’ to justify their presence. Too many of our businesses get too much of their revenue from USA sales, with little market activity on the Canada side. There are also some manufacturers, particularly in the auto industry, who are getting obliterated by the automation/efficiency of Chinese companies already, who are using the trade fiasco as an excuse – similar to tech companies using AI as an excuse to trim bloat.
Yea but we’re telling each other to not implement automation and Ai. So take that China. We have so many groups on western internet telling each other that these technologies are evil. So at least we have morals given to us by these anonymous totally not Chinese backed digital groups
Trade isn’t really meant to be a win-lose calculation, your take on NAFTA being a win for the USA and not Canada is a fundamentally Trumpian way of looking at it. NAFTA benefited all participating countries.
In terms of Canadian companies filling voids, that’s a very optimistic/hopefully outlook. More realistically, Canada’s market size is about 1/10th that of the USA, and it’s most likely that the Canadian government won’t employ things like industry protectionist tactics, such as tariffs on foreign imports. They definitely wouldn’t tariff that USA’s imports, and not tariff other countries, due to the amount of trade still reliant on the USA – even if the Canadian govt hits its target of doubling non-USA foreign trade, the USA would still be like >50% of our exports.
I think a slightly different way of looking at this though, is that the companies that are considering moving do not have a sufficient customer base / market in Canada ‘alone’ to justify their presence. Too many of our businesses get too much of their revenue from USA sales, with little market activity on the Canada side. There are also some manufacturers, particularly in the auto industry, who are getting obliterated by the automation/efficiency of Chinese companies already, who are using the trade fiasco as an excuse – similar to tech companies using AI as an excuse to trim bloat.
Yea but we’re telling each other to not implement automation and Ai. So take that China. We have so many groups on western internet telling each other that these technologies are evil. So at least we have morals given to us by these anonymous totally not Chinese backed digital groups