Canada has always played a key role in defending North America's airspace, with nearly 4 million square miles of territory that offers a line of sight toward the North Pole, which is a huge gap in American air defenses, and its military has collaborated for decades on the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.

“What Canada really brings is terrain,” said retired Air Force general Glen VanHerck, who led the U.S. Northern Command until last year. “If we can position, or Canada positions, over-the-horizon radars further north in the Arctic, that dramatically increases the United States and Canada’s ability to see over the pole into Russia, into China and other places.”

Trump needs help from nation he's been bullying for his pet project: report

The Golden Dome partnership is in its infancy but Trump's demeaning and aggressive language towards Canada has certainly riled the Canadians who may well be in no mood to help the Americans. At least until a more  congenial figure is sat in the White House.

 

 

Canadians are weak and will cave. 

The head Goombah is going to regret upsetting most countries of the world, as he's making America less relevant by the day, and decimating the US economy in the process. 

 

Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities, pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the globe.

China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.

 

It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.

The Chinese electric carmaker BYD, which Mr. Trump’s political ally Elon Musk once laughed off as a joke, overtook Tesla last year in global sales, is building new factories around the world and in March reached a market value greater than that of Ford, GM and Volkswagen combined.

 

China is charging ahead in drug discoveries, especially cancer treatments, and installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. In semiconductors, the vital commodity of this century and a longtime weak point for China, it is building a self-reliant supply chain led by recent breakthroughs by Huawei. Critically, Chinese strength across these and other overlapping technologies is creating a virtuous cycle in which advances in multiple interlocking sectors reinforce and elevate one another.

Yet Mr. Trump remains fixated on tariffs. He doesn’t even seem to grasp the scale of the threat posed by China. Before the two countries’ announcement last Monday that they had agreed to slash trade tariffs, Mr. Trump dismissed concerns that his previous sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods would leave shelves empty in American stores. He said Americans could just get by with buying fewer dolls for their children — a characterization of China as a factory for toys and other cheap junk that is wildly out of date.

 

The United States needs to realize that neither tariffs nor other trade pressure will get China to abandon the state-driven economic playbook that has worked so well for it and suddenly adopt industrial and trade policies that Americans consider fair. If anything, Beijing is doubling down on its state-led approach, bringing a Manhattan Project-style focus to achieving dominance in high-tech industries.

 

Mr. Trump’s blinkered obsession with short-term Band-Aids like tariffs, while actively undermining what makes America strong, will only hasten the onset of a Chinese-dominated world.

If each nation’s current trajectory holds, China will likely end up completely dominating high-end manufacturing, from cars and chips to M.R.I. machines and commercial jets. The battle for A.I. supremacy will be fought not between the United States and China but between high-tech Chinese cities like Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Chinese factories around the world will reconfigure supply chains with China at the center, as the world’s pre-eminent technological and economic superpower.

 

America, by contrast, may end up as a profoundly diminished nation. Sheltered behind tariff walls, its companies will sell almost exclusively to domestic consumers. The loss of international sales will degrade corporate earnings, leaving companies with less money to invest in their businesses. American consumers will be stuck with U.S.-made goods that are of middling quality but more expensive than global products, owing to higher U.S. manufacturing costs. Working families will face rising inflation and stagnant incomes. Traditional high-value industries such as car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are already being lost to China; the important industries of the future will follow. Imagine Detroit or Cleveland on a national scale.

 

Avoiding that grim scenario means making policy choices — today — that should be obvious and already have bipartisan support: investing in research and development; supporting academic, scientific and corporate innovation; forging economic ties with countries around the world; and creating a welcoming and attractive climate for international talent and capital. Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite in each of those areas.

Whether this century will be Chinese or American is up to us. But the time to change course is quickly running out.

2 hours ago, blaze master said:

Canadians are weak and will cave. 

Go eat some yellow snow….elbows up my northern brothers and sisters most Americans think this is b$

I hear that the move by Albertans to become #51 is picking up steam.

 

50 minutes ago, Tug said:

Go eat some yellow snow….elbows up my northern brothers and sisters most Americans think this is b$

 

Of course you repeat the talking point. 

 

I wonder if you realize the irony of that elbows up saying......I'll save you the trouble

 

You don't. 

15 minutes ago, impulse said:

I hear that the move by Albertans to become #51 is picking up steam.

 

 

It is. They are in the process of changing laws in order to bring in a referendum. 

 

Any changes and I'll be moving to Alberta as soon as I can. No sales tax too sweet.

46 minutes ago, impulse said:

I hear that the move by Albertans to become #51 is picking up steam.

 

Alberta, I call it North Tennessee. Just as inbred as those in the South. Too bad the Albertans can't blame it on the civil war where a lot of the men were killed and the gene pool dried up...

 

Alberta will never be the 51st state. If they did happen to join it would be like Puerto Rico with no senators, etc, not a state.

3 minutes ago, gargamon said:

Alberta, I call it North Tennessee. Just as inbred as those in the South. Too bad the Albertans can't blame it on the civil war where a lot of the men were killed and the gene pool dried up...

 

Alberta will never be the 51st state. If they did happen to join it would be like Puerto Rico with no senators, etc, not a state.

 

Sticks and stones.  That's my favorite part of Canada.  Lose that, and (paraphrasing the '80s) the rest of Canadians would freeze in the dark.

 

 

1 hour ago, impulse said:

 

Sticks and stones.  That's my favorite part of Canada.  Lose that, and (paraphrasing the '80s) the rest of Canadians would freeze in the dark.

 

 

Try living there full time. Yes, it's pretty but the provincial government is screwed. I abandoned the place 40 years ago but kept up residency so I can still vote. I'll be a hard no on separation.

1 hour ago, gargamon said:

Try living there full time. Yes, it's pretty but the provincial government is screwed. I abandoned the place 40 years ago but kept up residency so I can still vote. I'll be a hard no on separation.

 

In fairness, I just went up to Calgary quite a few times on business and tried to tie in a weekend or even a week in Banff.

 

Edit:  I'd add that the locals reminded me of the locals in Wyoming, who I came to really like.  Though they were an acquired taste, being an outsider myself.

 

 

6 hours ago, impulse said:

 

In fairness, I just went up to Calgary quite a few times on business and tried to tie in a weekend or even a week in Banff.

 

Edit:  I'd add that the locals reminded me of the locals in Wyoming, who I came to really like.  Though they were an acquired taste, being an outsider myself.

 

 

Wyoming, Tennessee, Alberta, it's all the same. When I get off a plane there for some reason dueling banjos starts playing in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDlZLsJJkVA

nice Canadians ??

 

See who they elected a couple of weeks ago.

 

Do they still clobber baby seals ?

 

Let the thumbs down begin 😋

6 minutes ago, FlorC said:

nice Canadians ??

 

See who they elected a couple of weeks ago.

 

Do they still clobber baby seals ?

 

Let the thumbs down begin 😋

Trudeau was bad, but then they elected a central banker. Canada may hate the US, we just feel sorry for them

4 hours ago, hotsun said:

Trudeau was bad, but then they elected a central banker. Canada may hate the US, we just feel sorry for them

Don't feel sorry, Canadians have options :

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j1z14p57po

 

Your government will assist you till the very end.

Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8z174gk3jo

 

Quote

 

"This is a big deal for the King to do this," says Jeremy Kinsman, former Canadian high commissioner to the UK, as King Charles prepares for a historic visit showing support for Canada, which is facing pressure from US President Donald Trump.

"I hope that Trump understands," says Mr Kinsman, ahead of the King becoming the first monarch to open Canada's Parliament in almost 70 years.

So what can we expect from his speech as Canada's head of state, to be delivered in French and English in Ottawa on Tuesday?

It will be written on the advice of Canada's government. But along with the workaday lines on policy plans, Mr Kinsman expects a message, loud and clear, that Canada will not be the 51st US state.

"It's going to be very affirmative of Canadian sovereignty. And I can say personally that it's something that King Charles will celebrate saying. I have no doubt," says Mr Kinsman, who worked as a diplomat with the King when he was Prince of Wales.

"It will say the government will protect, pursue and preserve the sovereignty of Canada as an independent state," he predicts about the speech, which follows an election won by Mark Carney on a wave of anti-Trump sentiment.

The King's mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, was the last monarch to open Canada's Parliament in 1957 and was also the most recent to deliver the "speech from the throne" in 1977, in a ceremony that marks the start of a parliamentary session.

She began that speech with a few of her own personal comments - so there is scope for the King to add his own thoughts.