Posted Dec 30, 2022, 3:54 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,787
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
I think that's a very American take on the situation.
Because of the United States, Canada has always had to live in a position of compromise so as not to disturb the sleeping beast.
For example, I'm not too proud that we clung to being a dominion of Great Britain for as long as we did, but, in hindsight, I'm glad we were a domain of the world's largest power during those years between 1865-1918 when America was feeling particularly brawny, there were no international rules, and it saw the rest of the Western Hemisphere as its exploitable playground. To this day, where Canada can have a world presence at all, it's either in digging stuff out of the ground that just happen to be on our territory, in little niche industries that aren't of strategic importance - like film production - or in companies that own global assets that are managed elsewhere or provide unsexy services that have no public presence. Whenever there's anything remotely strategic, like aerospace or smartphones or telecommunications, it gets snuffed out. Some of that is the fault of shortsighted Canadian business attitudes, but I don't think we'll ever see a Canadian equivalent of TSMC or ASML or have a Canadian-owned company own a globally-significant share of cloud computing infrastructure.
We'll always be resigned to offering Americans medium-value goods and services in a country that's integrated into your supply chain and where you can pay workers about 75% of what you would back home. That means that our best and brightest - whether they're in industries that could vault us forward or cultural stars that could put us on the world stage - are yours for the taking.
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I think this is a bit of a misread of American culture and hegemonic history. Prior to WW1, the U.S. would pretty much only send its military to protect economic interests. The U.S. moved into Spanish colonies because the Spanish empire was in the midst of a messy collapse, and it threatened trade agreements between U.S. companies and suppliers in Spain's Caribbean territories. I'm not sure why the U.S. would've had a military conflict with Canada between 1865 and 1918. If anything, I think Canada participated in way more imperialistic endeavors during that period than did the United States...
Last edited by iheartthed; Dec 30, 2022 at 4:28 PM.
Reason: typo
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