Trump's war on Iran gives Canada a strong edge in trade negotiations

[I am Groot]

I've been saying for a while now that what the Trump white house really wants are not trade concessions but a change in our behaviour towards Chinese influence and towards developing our natural resources.

I've been reading in multiple areas over the last weeks that the US is running out of its expensive weapons systems. For example, the US makes just 700 Patriot missiles a year. It makes less than 100 THAAD systems.  Raytheon is increasing their manufacture of Sidewinder missiles and hopes to reach 2500 a year by 2028. They are increasing their production of air-to-ground cruise missiles from 115 to 550 by 2029. Similar increases are going on with all their other missiles. They will need a lot more drones. A LOT more drones to match the Russians and Chinese. They don't even have enough for Iran without leaving themselves dangerously short. And Russia and China have many more missiles and drones than the US, then the US and the entire West. China's production capacity is up to 500,000 armed drones per month. 

So, where does the US get the minerals, the rare earths, and metals? At the moment, a lot of it comes from China. And China could cut that off at any time. The entire West is dependent on China for rare earths and Russia for gas. Especially with the war in Iran (Trump cancelled the sanctions and restrictions on Russian oil and gas). How soon before the gulf can resume oil and gas shipments? Who knows. With all the drones Iran has it could bottleneck the gulf for a long time.

Canada has enough natural gas to power the world for 200 years. It has almost every rare earth and metal the US and the West needs.

Unfortunately, it has a government that despises its natural resources industries and has been working to shut them down for over a decade. It's done that with a myriad of rules and regulations, with long, complex approval processes that can easily exceed a decade and cost a mining or oil company hundreds of millions to wade through. That has to stop. If we promise to rapidly develop and ship these things, we could get a lot of trade concessions, not only from the US but from Europe.

Not to mention a hell of a lot of money to help our economy.

The West is currently facing a supply-chain crisis for military procurement. Even the world’s most powerful army cannot assume victory if the war lasts more than a few weeks. It may simply run out of key materiel. And the US is already running into bottlenecks. Contrary to Trump’s recent claims that the US has “a virtually unlimited supply” of munitions, Foreign Policy magazine reports that the war is already burning through the US/Israeli arsenal at such an alarming rate that the retaliatory destruction caused by Iran could take years to fix — and only then if the defense-critical minerals can be sourced. Tracing the military supply chains all the way back to their original sources, the journalists discovered that it is all but impossible to “instantly reverse decades of consolidated construction lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity”.

Metals, minerals and chemicals sit at the top of every supply chain, and most have to be extracted. These raw materials are then processed to produce those essential base materials like steel, aluminum, or magnets. The material goes through a number of further processing stages and if the final product is complex, like a military radar, or even a car, there will be many additional nodes in your supply chains. Small wonder the German car industry regularly breaks into sweat whenever China restricts the supply of any single piece of equipment — such as an essential mid-range semiconductor. Without it, their engines are useless.

https://archive.is/r2432

 

[Moonbox]

A lot of the restrictions on resource projects is provincial (like the NB natural gas moratorium you highlighted previously).  

While I agree with the sentiment around Canada not doing enough to develop its resources (or to obstruct that altogether), the reasons why we don't do certain things aren't always as simple as "the guberment". 

Things like rare earths are a good example.  Rare earths aren't rare.  They're everywhere.  They're just expensive to extract and process, and the initial investment is prohibitive when there are cheaper and larger-scaled operations in China.  These are strategic resources and we SHOULD be self-sufficient on them, but in this would probably be something the government would have to subsidize to remain independent of China.  

 

[eyeball]

1 hour ago, Moonbox said:

They're just expensive to extract and process, and the initial investment is prohibitive when there are cheaper and larger-scaled operations in China. 

They're cheap in China mostly because they don't give a crap about their environment.

Thankfully that's not something Canadians are prepared to accept and we have 13 chances to say thanks but no thanks.

I suspect we'll be seeing most rare earths being mined out of sight and mind from the bottom of the deep seas before long.

Edited March 9 by eyeball

[paxamericana]

2 hours ago, I am Groot said:

change in our behaviour

Finally, a Canadian that actually understands. Ding ding ding 🛎️ . Get with the program Canucks

[suds]

I'm left wondering what the price of oil, natural gas, rare earth minerals, or even basic metals, has to be before we finally ger our act together.  We found out the hard way how a pandemic can cause havoc with supply chains which we all took for granted. Undoubtedly war would even be worse with the purposely targetting of a country's supply chains. We could be self sufficient in energy but we chose not to, and it puts all of us at risk. Right, so let's blow a $100 billion on high speed trains which only a small percentage of Canadians are ever going to use. I get it, high speed trains are sexy, building infrastructure to get our resources out of the ground and off to foreign markets (never mind domestic markets) is not. And let's not forget the predictions by a number of different government agencies that we have to at least double our capacity to produce energy by 2050 or our entire economy could suffer. But nobody's listening.

[John Johnston]

Trump says now this is just an excursion. A different reason each hour from this extremely dangerous Psychopath with dementia. What does the American people get out of this? Maybe the world should send an invoice to Trump and Nutanyahoo. 

[herbie]

 

[ironstone]

Carney works towards (finally)reaching a deal with the US? Or does he stay the course with the Trump as the boogeyman which helps Carney's polling numbers?

My guess is the latter.

[eyeball]

2 hours ago, suds said:

I'm left wondering what the price of oil, natural gas, rare earth minerals, or even basic metals, has to be before we finally ger our act together.

Remember when Canadians were told to give up hewing wood and switch to the service economy instead?

We never had much of a choice around here.

 

Edited March 10 by eyeball

[ExFlyer]

9 hours ago, ironstone said:

Carney works towards (finally)reaching a deal with the US? Or does he stay the course with the Trump as the boogeyman which helps Carney's polling numbers?

My guess is the latter.

Fact is...Canada is exporting more then it ever has and it is not to the US.

The Port of Vancouver handled a record 170 million tonnes of cargo in 2025, including new highs for oil, grain and number of containers

Oil exports through the Port of Vancouver almost doubled in 2025, with a huge increases in shipments to China, helping propel overall cargo shipments to a new record.

Terminals at Canada’s biggest port handled 170.4 million tonnes of cargo in 2025, surpassing the 158.4 million handled in 2024, thanks to big increases in shipments of grain, potash and especially oil, according to statistics released Monday by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority.

The results, coming after Prime Minister Mark Carney has set a target to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports, show “the Port of Vancouver is playing an outsized role,” port authority CEO Peter Xotta said in a news release.

https://vancouversun.com/business/expanded-trans-mountain-pipeline-almost-doubles-oil-exports-from-port-of-vancouver

[John Stone]

Canada  - 40 million people - 2nd largest geo footprint - rich as Croesus in terms of natural resources / fresh water. 

What could go wrong?

Politics! 

 

[I am Groot]

19 hours ago, Moonbox said:

Things like rare earths are a good example.  Rare earths aren't rare.  They're everywhere.  They're just expensive to extract and process, and the initial investment is prohibitive when there are cheaper and larger-scaled operations in China. 

The reasons they're more expensive here ARE the government. While I agree we don't want to throw all the environmental rules into the garbage like China has, there has to be a way to refine these metals here while accepting 'some' degree of local, contained pollution.

19 hours ago, Moonbox said:

These are strategic resources and we SHOULD be self-sufficient on them, but in this would probably be something the government would have to subsidize to remain independent of China.  

Subsidize them and tariff the ones from China if necessary. These are more important to be able to produce and refine locally than milk, which is HEAVILY subsidized and protected by tarriffs. 

[I am Groot]

21 hours ago, suds said:

I'm left wondering what the price of oil, natural gas, rare earth minerals, or even basic metals, has to be before we finally ger our act together.  We found out the hard way how a pandemic can cause havoc with supply chains which we all took for granted.

Anyone want to bet we haven't reverted to buying all our PPE from China and let the local producers go out of business?

21 hours ago, suds said:

Undoubtedly war would even be worse with the purposely targetting of a country's supply chains.

Guess how much of our medicines, including prescriptions, come from China?

21 hours ago, suds said:

We could be self sufficient in energy but we chose not to, and it puts all of us at risk.

Run a pipeline across the sacred homeland of the Kaybekers! Sacre-bleu! 

21 hours ago, suds said:

Right, so let's blow a $100 billion on high speed trains

We are not going to build that. We are just going to spend tens of millions on Liberal connected contractors to 'study' the idea.

 

Edited March 10 by I am Groot

[Moonbox]

1 hour ago, I am Groot said:

The reasons they're more expensive here ARE the government. While I agree we don't want to throw all the environmental rules into the garbage like China has, there has to be a way to refine these metals here while accepting 'some' degree of local, contained pollution.

That's a kind of a catch-all answer that people apply way too readily.  Yes, the government can and does make things more expensive and harder to do, but there are all sorts of other things beyond that.  Economies of scale, labour cost, environmental rules and other factors are involved as well.  

Canada doesn't build refineries for its crude here because of the government makes it too hard, for example.  It doesn't do it because it could never hope to compete with Houston etc on their massive economies of scale and decades long infrastructure advantage. 

1 hour ago, I am Groot said:

Subsidize them and tariff the ones from China if necessary. These are more important to be able to produce and refine locally than milk, which is HEAVILY subsidized and protected by tarriffs. 

I don't disagree at all.  I think it's appalling that we pay a 20-40% premium on dairy to subsidize dairy farmers.  

[herbie]

14 hours ago, ironstone said:

Carney works towards (finally)reaching a deal with the US? Or does he stay the course with the Trump as the boogeyman which helps Carney's polling numbers?

My guess is the latter.

If he does, it's for the best interest of Canada, if you watched that video it should be obvious the status quo is not the way to go. If govt involves itself in diversification it's gonna p1ss off the Mad Dog in the White House anyways.

The abandonment of PETs PetroCanada concept led us into the (foreign) private enterprise trap in the first place or we' have publicly owned pipelines, refineries and ports.

[Army Guy]

19 hours ago, John Johnston said:

Trump says now this is just an excursion. A different reason each hour from this extremely dangerous Psychopath with dementia. What does the American people get out of this? Maybe the world should send an invoice to Trump and Nutanyahoo. 

100% , Of course Iran makes the world a much better place, just look at how stable the middle east is with all the terrorist groups Iran funds and sends them off to do their bidding....Maybe this is exactly what the world needs for the US to loosen control and take out one of the worlds leading terrorist / psychopaths ....sometimes you just need to carry a big stick and be willing to use it...

Maybe it is time Canadian get educated on just how bad this Iranian leadership really is....

[John Johnston]

44 minutes ago, Army Guy said:

100% , Of course Iran makes the world a much better place, just look at how stable the middle east is with all the terrorist groups Iran funds and sends them off to do their bidding....Maybe this is exactly what the world needs for the US to loosen control and take out one of the worlds leading terrorist / psychopaths ....sometimes you just need to carry a big stick and be willing to use it...

Maybe it is time Canadian get educated on just how bad this Iranian leadership really is....

Trump and Israel just completely destabilized a huge country and it's almost 100 million occupants for political theatre. And everyone else pays the price. 

[Moonbox]

5 minutes ago, John Johnston said:

Trump and Israel just completely destabilized a huge country and it's almost 100 million occupants for political theatre.

That's the key.  It's political theatre.  He's just distracting from domestic failure and not actually accomplishing anything but pissing off and further entrenching Iranian belligerence.

[John Johnston]

2 minutes ago, Moonbox said:

That's the key.  It's political theatre.  He's just distracting from domestic failure and not actually accomplishing anything but pissing off and further entrenching Iranian belligerence.

Exactly. 

[I am Groot]

23 hours ago, paxamericana said:

Finally, a Canadian that actually understands. Ding ding ding 🛎️ . Get with the program Canucks

You know all this would have happened under the conservative if Trump had just kept his mouth shut, right?

[I am Groot]

2 hours ago, Army Guy said:

100% , Of course Iran makes the world a much better place, just look at how stable the middle east is with all the terrorist groups Iran funds and sends them off to do their bidding....Maybe this is exactly what the world needs for the US to loosen control and take out one of the worlds leading terrorist / psychopaths ....sometimes you just need to carry a big stick and be willing to use it...

Maybe it is time Canadian get educated on just how bad this Iranian leadership really is....

There are only two ways to remove the Iranian regime.

1. A military coup - and I see no likelihood of that.
2. Ground troops - and I see even less chance of that.

[paxamericana]

37 minutes ago, I am Groot said:

You know all this would have happened under the conservative if Trump had just kept his mouth shut, right?

sure but that’s not the only reason Canada needed punishment 

Edited March 10 by paxamericana

[eyeball]

6 hours ago, herbie said:

The abandonment of PETs PetroCanada concept led us into the (foreign) private enterprise trap in the first place or we' have publicly owned pipelines, refineries and ports.

JTs purchase and construction of Transmountain is almost like PetroCanada 2.0.

It certainly doesn't seem Alberta objects like it did with PetroCanada 1.0.

 

[herbie]

1 hour ago, eyeball said:

JTs purchase and construction of Transmountain is almost like PetroCanada 2.0.

And note how NO private consortium has even made an offer to buy it.
How Alberta refuses to consider expanding it, they'd rather flap their gums for another 40 years unless they can force a new one on BC cuz they're good conservatives.

Make someone else give up something, that's what's important.

[paxamericana]

13 hours ago, John Stone said:

What could go wrong?

Politics! 

The one thing holding back Canada is their delusion of not being Americans.