I was talking to a friend from out East (the GTA, in fact) and I wish that I could say that it was enlightening, but I had long known that he was an NPC. He honestly cannot comprehend why I keep talking Canada down when "it's the US and UK that are collapsing" when we have all these wonderful trade deals in the pipeline and the dear leader is making all of these investments. As such, he was critical of my position that the feds are doing nothing but putting on a show, claiming that I was demanding results too soon. The problem is, Carney promised that this country would be moving at speeds never seen before and I was holding him to that promise. My position is that Canada is highly exposed, but the powers that be in Ottawa act like it is business as usual rather than facing an existential threat.
Of course, his position is that it's all Trump's fault. If not his, then it's the Harper government, the opposition Conservatives for being obstructionist, or the provincial premiers for screwing everything up. Notice that nothing is ever the federal government's fault. Every scandal quietly swept under the rug with no consequences whatsoever. Agency requires both accountability and responsibility; the Liberal Party of Canada has avoided both for the last decade so I doubt that Canada as a whole has any agency whatsoever given how diffused responsibility is at the federal level. Our economic and military dependence on the United States exacerbates this to the point where Canada's sovereignty is questionable.
My friend was correct on one point: this trade deals take years to complete. Same with infrastructure projects, and with how slow the approval process is, it takes years with budget overruns as an inevitability. Look at the Trans-Mountain expansion as an example after Kinder Morgan bolted. Building a military-industrial complex takes decades, but here is the problem: time's up. Our government spent decades upon decades playing games with the American behemoth while getting lazy and complacent on the system American hegemony enabled since the end of the Cold War. Even if we double our trade to other markets (from 24% to 48%), the United States can still squeeze us hard.
That isn't even going the housing bubble, open drug use, increasing crime, cost-of-living crisis, fracturing national unity, and dozens upon dozens of other issues. All things my friend casually dismisses because it "isn't as bad here as it is elsewhere". No, it's worse and cheap promises and rhetoric. Carney famously said that "nostalgia is not a strategy" at Davos, but nostalgia for country that vanished years ago in tandem with irrational anti-Americanism is all people like my friend have left. No real desire to hold those in power to account and preferring to live in a fantasy, which is why I'm simply done with this country.
