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Comment by kashunstva | Hacker News Reader

Canada has historically relied on a relatively stable trading relationship with the U.S. That relationship is a shambles. It remains to be seen how Canada retools itself; I imagine that we will see a blend of on-shoring and new trading sources. So it’s less of an issue of “can’t” and more “hasn’t (yet)”.

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Frankly to me the fact Canada is "retooling itself" knowing well that this nightmare should be over in less than 3 years, and most likely next President will be a Democrat, but yet they keep retooling, means their strong (reliable?) assumption is that Trump Administration won't leave the office at all, similar to how Putin stayed in power in what arguingly is a Democratic Country.

The nightmare was supposed to be “over in 3 years” 9 years ago.

The foreseeable future is MAGA candidates with a coin flip odds of winning indefinitely.

A lot of people are still in denial about Jan 6th. They really tried to overthrow the election like actually in physical effect. Not hypothetically. They were trying to not certify the election and it came down to a hairs width. They're going to try to again.

You're missing some of the history here. Canada's initial free trade integration with the US in the late 80s was controversial at the time, with opponents specifically predicting a slow erosion of sovereignty until one day Canada is forced to subordinate itself to the US. What Trump showed is that that concern was correct, although the erosion was fortunately not yet complete enough to force Canada's hand. The Canadian people don't want to be continually dependent on the goodwill of future US Presidents; they want "Canada should the US" to sound like "Taiwan should join the US" or "France should join the US", an obviously impossible idea that even the most vehement partisans would have to explain away rather than trying to make it happen.

As an addendum to this post, this debate between Turner and Mulroney over (what would become) NAFTA captures some of the feeling of the time [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jlvb9czZFXw

[2] https://www.c-span.org/program/international-telecasts/canad...

This is Trump's second term and MAGA views won't disappear 3 years from now. Even if they assume that there will be a peaceful and lawful transition of power, I can see why they may be planning on the assumption that the "instability" (from their point of view) will continue into the future.

I disagree. You literally have one single human being in charge of 3 main branches of government, and multiple smaller agencies. Noone will manage US like Trump does.

It's all project 2025 and the heritage foundation running the government.

Trump doesn't "manage" anything. Trump is "managed". The question is who all pull the strings.

There's a "people won't get tired of our good cop/bad cop bullshit because there's money to be made" attitude in the US that doesn't even reflect our own point of view.

They're retooling because it doesn't matter who the next president is.

It's not just trump anymore. The entire cabinet is project 2025 people, most GOP has turned or was replaced with MAGA. Project 2025 wasn't just about RAGE, it was a sycophant hiring system as people could send in their resumes and get into unelected positions.

The only chance is if the cult spell breaks with trump, as cults rarely survive that. But it at some point it will be too late, their takeover and ability to fuck with elections means you can't vote them out anymore.

It's actually that I think most expect the Democrats to either be to weak to fix it, or not much better even if they can win big. That's part of it, anyways.

That and there's been a clearly protectionist bias also among Democrats as well. We had to lobby the crap out of the Biden admin to get "Buy American" provisions to not exclude some standard Canadian things, etc. etc.

At the same time, flipping things around... it's clear that Carney and Co are holding out for November mid-terms on the trade front. Conservatives here keep lambasting them for not sitting down to bargain with the US to hammer out a deal, which is just the stupidest losingest idea you can think of. Trump is going to get hammered in November -- why would we sign a deal with a loser like that? To our disadvantage?

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