Redeploy Spare Industrial Capacity to Major Infrastructure Program

[Dougie93]

28 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Again, we should be enhancing the economic partnership with the U.S., but they’re abrogating the agreement, threatening our sovereignty, and pushing us towards other countries.

in the near term,

but the idea that Canada is going to decouple from America long term is not realistic,

in terms of what Canada can do, the main problem in Canada is a lack of productivity,

and that is due to Canadian businesses not investing in upgrades,

but it's not a command economy,

the government can't simply wave a wand and cause Canadian businesses to reform themselves,

this has been a forty year problem in Canada,

if there was an quick & easy fix, that would have been done long ago,

Canada's problems are mostly cultural, Canadians are not a dynamic business oriented people,

mostly Canadians just want the government to be the national parent, which is the cause not the solution

Edited March 16 by Dougie93

[Dougie93]

1 hour ago, Zeitgeist said:

I think in the long run the U.S. may wish it hadn’t been so dismissive of Canada’s resources and partnership, because we’re a reliable and cost effective trade partner, their biggest export market and biggest foreign supplier of energy, which they get at a discount. 

I don't doubt it,

I don't even think it will be in the long run,

the majority of Americans are regretting it already,

Trump is on course to blow himself up,

but as soon America goes back to business as usual,

Canada will bury the hatchet and go back to business as usual too

Edited March 16 by Dougie93

[Dougie93]

1 hour ago, Zeitgeist said:

 There’s a significant call in Britain to strengthen ties between Canada, UK, Australia, and Nee Zealand.  Don’t forget that the UK is still smarting from Brexit and they’re frustrated with the U.S. on Ukraine.  Now they get to experience the tariffs as well.

I see HM The King had the Royal Family out in force for Commonwealth Day,

I don't doubt that the British are all for Canada in this fight,

Canada is much beloved in the United Kingdom,

it's actually Canadians whom are hostile to we British, not the other way round

Edited March 16 by Dougie93

[CdnFox]

1 hour ago, eyeball said:

So investors would be nuts to invest while Trump's in charge just like I said.

That's not what you said, You just have a habit I'm waiting till someone says something intelligent and then claiming but that's what you said in the past to cover the fact that what you said was kind of dumb.

1 hour ago, eyeball said:

But you needed to add another 500 more hee haws to the mix.

I actually said something intelligent. You just said something stupid. It can take more than one sentence to actually say something intelligent with Clarity. As you have shown many times stupid can be managed in far fewer words  

To correct what you said you said yet again it's not while trump's in power or in charge that's the issue, it's the instability. It's quite possible he'll get this out of his system in short order and realize this isn't going where he wanted it to go and look to bring back stability, in which case the markets will return.

So the question is will that happen sooner or later? If it happens too late it will be very challenging to recover and they'll have a recession and that will last a while. if they correct sooner then that money sitting on the sidelines may choose to invest and they can still have a positive outcome. 

[Zeitgeist]

25 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

I don't doubt it,

I don't even think it will be in the long run,

the majority of Americans are regretting it already,

Trump is on course to blow himself up,

but as soon America goes back to business as usual,

Canada will bury the hatchet and go back to business as usual too

I think if Canada does the things it should be doing anyway, with or without free trade with the US, such as get to 2% of GDP military spending and opening up more domestic and international trade and transport opportunities through the right investments in pipelines, refining, and rail, and if we seek an even freer trade deal with the U.S. than USMCA, everyone wins.

The infrastructure and military investments help steel Canada against the impacts of tariffs and threats against our sovereignty, and they put us in a more solid bargaining position for future trade agreements.  The Yanks can claim they forced Canada to pay its fair share to NATO.

Ideally Canada and the US can get to an agreement that makes the two countries feel as much like one country as possible, affording free movement of goods, services, and people, without eliminating the sacred cows of national sovereignty and self-determination on public safety/security, public services, taxes, and federal policies for both countries, which over time might become quite harmonized, reducing duplication and costs, with each country adopting the best approaches as the people see fit to choose.

Edited March 16 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

3 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

I think if Canada does the things it should be doing anyway, with or without free trade with the US, such as get to 2% of GDP military spending and opening up more domestic and international trade and transport opportunities through the right investments in pipelines, refining, and rail, and if we seek an even freer trade deal with the U.S. than USMCA, everyone wins.

The infrastructure and military investments help steel Canada against the impacts of tariffs and threats against our sovereignty, and they put us in a more solid bargaining position for future trade agreements.  The Yanks can claim they forced Canada to pay its fair share to NATO.

Ideally Canada and the US can get to an agreement that makes the two countries feel as much like one country as possible, affording free movement of goods, services, and people, without eliminating the sacred cows of national sovereignty and self-determination on public safety/security, public services, taxes, and federal policies for both countries, which over time might become quite harmonized, reducing duplication and costs, with each country adopting the best approaches as the people see fit to choose.

oh I don't expect this war to go on forever, it's not going to be that long before Trump has discredited himself,

but it's not going to be Canadians whom constrain him, only the American business community can do that,

but whenever the war ends, I do think Canada will buy a considerable amount of US military hardware,

just to remove that as an irritant to trade relations

[eyeball]

34 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

...it's the instability

You figured that out all on your own?

Good job.

[Zeitgeist]

57 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

oh I don't expect this war to go on forever, it's not going to be that long before Trump has discredited himself,

but it's not going to be Canadians whom constrain him, only the American business community can do that,

but whenever the war ends, I do think Canada will buy a considerable amount of US military hardware,

just to remove that as an irritant to trade relations

Yup. Trump will be able to claim a win, but he’s not getting everything he wants at other countries’ expense, obviously. There are far too many people and businesses negatively impacted by tariffs, boycotts, and the lousy soft power coming out of the White House.  Pissing people off damages relationships.  Sure fear can go a long way, but if people feel disrespected or coerced, the first better option that comes along will cause people to jump ship.

I say that as someone who really likes America and sees a lot of value in statehood, but most Canadians are apoplectic about Trump’s economic threats against our sovereignty, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  His administration should know better.  Looks a bit like amateur hour.  The chaos and unpredictability can’t persist without serious costs for America, irrespective of how it impacts Canada.

[Dougie93]

4 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Yup. Trump will be able to claim a win,

well American military hardware and logistics is better and cheaper,

so if you are going to buy military hardware, buying American gives you the most bang for your buck

[herbie]

5 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Trump will be able to claim a win

Just like Neville Chamberlain did!

[Zeitgeist]

1 minute ago, herbie said:

Just like Neville Chamberlain did!

I’m talking about trade not Ukraine.

Trump is pushing the envelope on Ukraine as well, because Putin isn’t coming across yet on security guarantees.  Now, if Trump can get those guarantees backstopped by unlimited armament support for Ukraine in the event of further invasion, those would be wins.

There also has to be an assurance of self-determination for all the regions of Ukraine, without manipulation from Russia or the West.  The inhabitants should decide who their rulers are.  That’s where the UN could play a role peacekeeping and monitoring elections.

[Army Guy]

13 hours ago, CdnFox said:

I'm not sure where you're seeing that 3 trillion number in new investment but there isn't 3 trillion dollars in new investment since trump took over at all. In fact i haven't seen any - trump has held up a number of companies as examples but ALL of their investment has been in the works for well over a year and they all already have their operations in the USA so the tarrifs didn't affect that in the slightest. 

Apple's building a server farm for example, but they were always going to build it in the us. Some of the pharma companies have made announcements recently but they've been working on those for years and they ALWAYS do their manufacturing and development in the us. They've been planning this for years, they just announced some of the details lately but that's got nothing to do with tariffs or trump. 

I can't find any examples of the tariffs convincing a company that was going to invest somewhere else to invest in the US, if you have any please share by all means. Or one that's begun the process of shutting down somewhere else as a result of the teriffs.  But i suspect that in fact very very few companies are listening. 

Meanwhile tho at the moment he's destroyed 4 trillion dollars in wealth for corporations:

US stock market loses $4 trillion in value as Trump plows ahead on tariffs | Reuters

and that's money that won't be invested in the economy. 

Maybe it'll recover but unless things change very soon i doubt it. IF this keeps up after a few more months i suspect we'll be into a recession or close enough and that's going to last a while at that point. 

Don't get me wrong i'm not a fan of trump, but if we are going to talk about the topic we should know both sides...the fact he is reasonable for 3 trillion dollars worth of investments, is impressive, something Canada has never been able to do....as for the stock market losses , those will all come back, as this whole tariffs goes away if it goes away...

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/03/04/trump-3-trillion-investment-american-economy/

https://www.courtmagazine.org/post/new-investments-under-president-trump-s-leadership

[CdnFox]

3 hours ago, eyeball said:

You figured that out all on your own?

Good job.

Yes. Which is more than we can say for you, you needed me to tell you   

Bad job.

[CdnFox]

1 hour ago, Army Guy said:

Don't get me wrong i'm not a fan of trump, but if we are going to talk about the topic we should know both sides...the fact he is reasonable for 3 trillion dollars worth of investments, is impressive, something Canada has never been able to do....as for the stock market losses , those will all come back, as this whole tariffs goes away if it goes away...

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/03/04/trump-3-trillion-investment-american-economy/

https://www.courtmagazine.org/post/new-investments-under-president-trump-s-leadership

I am actually a bit of a fan of trump although I recognize his faults as well and still think of him in many ways as being the lesser of two evils in the last election.

I'm just not seeing this 3 trillion dollars worth of investments. I'm seeing some recent announcements that trump said he was very happy about but they i've been in the works for years now and he is definitely not responsible for it

The tiwanese semiconductors MAYBE...  they're expanding existing operations but in fairness they directly credited trump in both 2020 and today so fair is fair. 

But the rest were all happening anyway. Trump just happened to be standing there when the announcements came in.

I'm happy to give him credit where credit is due and I always have in the past but he in no way shape or form can take credit for any of those other investments. And it's worth noting that even if those investments did happen because he had been in office (Which is not the case, they were all at the end of their development before he even won) They all have been planning that investment in America anyway and is tariff plans would have done nothing to change that

Like you say it's important not to take a side or another but to be impartial as much as possible and give fair consideration to everything. But every single cent of that money would have gone forward either way even if he wasn't elected and about the only one you can credit to him is the $100 billion from the chip manufacturer who says that it was his support in 2020 that got the first $65 billion rolling and paved the way for this expansion.

About the only thing you can say is that he hasn't caused anyone that we know of to correct or stop their investment that they had planned previously. Yet.

And when you offset it against the 4 trillion he's lost which is a more precise number easily attributed to him so far it's not going well.

 

Even more importantly those are announcements rather than actual spending. It may very well be that all of those companies to to delay their plans until after the instability. None of that is actually money spent. And in some cases it's to be spent over 10 or 20 years so we can't really attribute it to this cycle.

Here's a chart of the actual business investment per quarter for the last several decades.  As you will note there is often a bit of a dip in the quarter leading up to the election or just after the election, because investors are waiting to see what's going to happen and who's going to get in. So we can give a little leeway off the first quarter which trump wasn't even president for all of. 

But that's where we're going to see the actual numbers that matter. Our company's actually putting cash down on the table rather than just announcing. Ideally we'd like to see investment go up in the first quarter but maybe that won't happen because of the changeover, but the second quarter is definitely where we're going to see whether he succeeded or failed. It should go up either way but if it only goes up a little bit he will have failed tremendously, if it goes up a lot then he succeeded and his plans are working and business is not holding back from investment.

If the second quarter actually goes down then America is truly and hopelessly screwed and will be for some time.

Too soon to call it, not fair to judge him based on the first quarter, but that's where we're going to see it when we see it. So in July we'll have a better idea of what's going on

 

[Zeitgeist]

5 hours ago, Dougie93 said:

I see HM The King had the Royal Family out in force for Commonwealth Day,

I don't doubt that the British are all for Canada in this fight,

Canada is much beloved in the United Kingdom,

it's actually Canadians whom are hostile to we British, not the other way round

I think the UK is softer than it used to be.  They should be presenting a united front with counter tariffs.  Mexico and Australia are doing the same thing, placating Trump to get a special deal for themselves. It just feeds the bully’s ego and divides the opposition.  

Edited March 16 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

19 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

 They should be presenting a united front with counter tariffs. 

as if Canada has been fostering its ties to Britain all this time ?

in Canada, "British" is decried as being White Supremacist Settler Colonial Genocide,

Canada has proclaimed itself the world's first Post National State with no core ( read British ) identity,

yet all of a sudden in a panic, when set upon by the Americans,

Canada is demanding a "Commonwealth" united front,

Edited March 17 by Dougie93

[Dougie93]

19 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

I think the UK is softer than it used to be. 

the British Army puts the Canadian Army to shame,

the Australian Army puts the Canadian Army to shame,

the New Zealand Army puts the the Canadian Army to shame,

Canada is by far and away the softest weakest link in the "Commonwealth"

[Zeitgeist]

1 hour ago, Dougie93 said:

the British Army puts the Canadian Army to shame,

the Australian Army puts the Canadian Army to shame,

the New Zealand Army puts the the Canadian Army to shame,

Canada is by far and away the softest weakest link in the "Commonwealth"

Australia is a lot more alone in Asia and requires protection from China.  Its military expenditures have certainly come up and are currently significantly bigger than Canada’s at 2% of GDP, where we need to be.

Britain is struggling to avoid becoming a woke surveillance state and ward off mass influxes of migrants.  It’s not doing better than Canada in that regard.  Believe me I know this first hand having been there recently and being a dual British-Canadian citizen.  

Canada has probably contributed more per capita to the World Wars than any almost any country.  Don’t forget that the door swings both ways.  When has Canada asked for military support from anyone?  How many British imperial ventures did Canada support?  How many American ones?

Canada started going down the road of supporting in other ways, like taking large numbers of refugees, providing water purification, foreign aid, peacekeeping, and policing, things that are actually quite costly but not traditional combat operations.

I’m not defending Canada’s military decline, but thankfully it happened in a time of relative peace.  We cashed in on that peace dividend like most countries and pooled our resources in security alliances.  Now of course we can’t count on those alliances, and Canada has fallen short on military spending, so it needs to change.  I don’t think there’s any hesitation to do that in Canada.  The question is how.  Clearly there’s plenty of daily debate on what we procure.  

Edited March 17 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

1 minute ago, Zeitgeist said:

Yet Canada has probably contributed more per capita to the World Wars than any almost any country.

that was British North America fighting for the British Empire,

this is not that Canada now,

my great grandfather who fought in every battle from Second Ypres to Mons, to include standing atop Vimy RIdge

would rightly condemn Canada now as being an utterly unmartial Bolshevik lunatic asylum

[Zeitgeist]

6 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

that was British North America fighting for the British Empire,

this is not that Canada now,

my great grandfather who fought in every battle from Second Ypres to Mons, to include standing atop Vimy RIdge

would rightly condemn Canada now as being an utterly unmartial Bolshevik lunatic asylum

But sadly Britain has become similarly lunatic, and they don’t have prairie frontiersmen carrying the torch for capitalism.  Britain is more nanny than Canada right now, and more of a surveillance state.

Edited March 17 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

Just now, Zeitgeist said:

But sadly Britain has become similarly lunatic,

yeah, okay sure,

Canada has literally dismantled its own armed force, beyond the point of no return,

while the UK has thermonuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, armoured divisions,

keep blowing sunshine up your own asses about how you have kept pace with the allies, Canada

[Zeitgeist]

14 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

yeah, okay sure,

Canada has literally dismantled its own armed force, beyond the point of no return,

while the UK has thermonuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, armoured divisions,

keep blowing sunshine up your own asses about how you have kept pace with the allies, Canada

Well I don’t need to explain the history of Canada’s military decline.  Trudeau Sr was probably the worst PM for military.  His pacifist policies kept nukes off Canadian soil.  He also degraded the uniforms and reduced the number of branches.  The Liberals have been worse on military than the Conservatives.  They’re the party of cancellations (helicopters, aircraft, airborne…).

Edited March 17 by Zeitgeist

[Dougie93]

3 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

Well I don’t need to explain the history of Canada’s military decline.

not just military, its been a decline of state power overall,

political, economic, diplomatic, industrial & military,

Canada had made itself into an American protectorate deliberately,

why blame Donald Trump ?

[Dougie93]

6 minutes ago, Zeitgeist said:

The Liberals have been worse on military than the Conservatives.

they're all the same, it's all the same unserious Laurentian Elite political class,

bear in mind that the Conservatives are hardly a monolith,

Doug Ford has no relationship with Pierre Poilievre, Captain Canada Doug Ford is rooting for the Liberals

[Zeitgeist]

8 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

not just military, its been a decline of state power overall,

political, economic, diplomatic, industrial & military,

Canada had made itself into an American protectorate deliberately,

why blame Donald Trump ?

I don’t. Canada should’ve been prepared for a leader like Trump to take as much advantage of American power as he can get away with.  We’ll see whether Canada rises to the challenge. It has many historical examples of doing just that.

I’m not worried about whether Canada has the ability to maintain itself as a sovereign state.  It should be very wealthy and strong.  The question is whether today’s Canadians will choose to make the necessary moves. The country has changed so much in just 10 years. 

Edited March 17 by Zeitgeist