Not really. Canada's economy can be described as trade with the US and some other stuff.
The correct response is for Canada to remove its dependence on the US. The behavior of the current US government basically destroys their “soft power” for a very long time - who will trust treaties with the US when the next admistration can arbitrarily end them? How much of a sweet deal will countries be willing to give the US in treaties anyway?
I suspect the current behavior of the us administration is going to have very long term consequences - the biggest being a long term reduction in global influence as countries (like Canada) seek to reduce their dependence.
I say this with the assuredness of a random commenter on HN ;)
This would be reckless. Geography dictates the U.S. and Canada will be major trading partners. Population, resource distribution and topography dictate, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will be the big sister in that relationship.
Smarter would be to hang low and wait for fairer weather.
> who will trust treaties with the US when the next admistration can arbitrarily end them?
I agree. Since "the U.S. has not withdrawn from a trade agreement since 1866" [1], there is disagreement over whether Trump can unilaterally kill NAFTA or if he requires Congressional approval [2][3]. Either way, it's not a good show.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/06/news/economy/trump-nafta/in...
[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international-affairs...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-30/trump-boa...
That is the sensible thing for Canada to do. No one wants their economy to be dependent on a country that from one election to the next may choose to divorce itself from reality, or at a moments notice label long term allies as being “the enemy”.
Of course Canada will continue to try to maintain trade, but they recognize that in the long term that is no longer a safe option...
Installing Huawei telecom equipment would be a "cutting off the nose to spite the face" way of achieving economic independence. I agree that Canada should work to diversify its economy. But diversifying away from the U.S., instead of working to improve the relationship, would be silly given the geographic, cultural and linguistic proximity between the nations.
You can argue that there are many reasons that Canada has for maintaining that relationship, but the same thing applies to the US, and it threw that away. Basically: given the behavior of the US, what reasonable country would want to continue to have their economy be dependent on it?
Also, while Huwei may be producing compromised equipment, what reason does Canada have for trusting US provided equipment? Or any other country -- every country that manufactures any network, radio, satellite, or other technology has a spy agency. All of those spy agencies would happily take an opportunity to compromise each others equipment. The "correct" course of action is to design your secure systems to assume non -trustworthy network hardware.
Mostly don't buy cheap equipment from anyone, because it seems they always ship on day 1 with software that's 2 years old that somehow has like 3 years of vulnerabilities :D
The way I see it, the US may be erratic, but it's still a country with the rule of law. China is a massive unknown because it's a dictatorship run by competent but unconstrained (and therefore sketchy and unpredictable) group of people. Even worse now that Xi is going to a full single-man dictatorial model.
I see you've ignored nearly the entire Middle East and what the USA has done almost everywhere in the world throughout its history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magampura_Mahinda_Rajapaksa_Po...
Everywhere in the world throughout its history? That's a pretty amusing statement, given the US barely left its shores for the first 140 years of its history. The US didn't even have a serious standing military until after WW1, and more realistically just before WW2.
Demonstrably the US has done dramatically more good in the world than it has ill. In the era of the US superpower, the world has never been better off. It's just as absurd to ignore the vast good the US has been responsible for, as it is to ignore the mistakes it has made.