I would just assume everyone has back doors in their equipment. Big country or not, it spies.

> not sure why this would be relevant here.

There is a strand of US politics which has tried to characterize Canada as uniquely authoritarian ever since the Ottawa protests. And it's been used increasingly as justification for external partisan "interventions"

They're very clearly aligned

If "70% of Canadian exports are to the US", that's probably why the US has so much leverage, and I can see why the Canadian government would like a change. Hence the need for a rebalancing of trade partnerships.

Because the US is going to throw Poland under the bus without even considering once if it yields a short-term benefit.

In 1960, 75% of Ireland's exports went to the UK, and 50% of its imports came from there. By 2000, it was 35% imports, 25% exports. Today it is 20% imports, 8% exports. There are a few things going on here, but a lot of it was EU membership giving Ireland options beyond its 'natural' trade partner (and then the big drop from 2000 to now was mostly Brexit).

Being in a situation where 70% of your exports go to one country is arguably pretty unhealthy; that is something that Canada would do well to work towards reducing, even _if_ the US administration wasn't openly hostile.

Deals right now are intended to increase the trades between Canada and reducing those with the US, in little improvement steps.

If in 10 years the ratio moves from 70/6 to 50/26, the situation will be vastly different.

The options are not black and white

Isn't the point that there already is one?

So the assumption is trading with Canada = trade war with US? Canada is abused pretty hard it seems...

Exports are really easy to move and replace, as has been proven again and again in the past two years. Turns out that imports can be far trickier and pose larger problems to an economy.

Because the US is wreaking havoc world wide. The US cannot be trusted anymore.

Better remove the bandaid now then wait until you are screwed.

People now see China as the reliable partner. This will be a multigenerational change.

It's not that they want to enter a trade war with Trump, it's that there's large room for growth in trade between Canada and Poland (your example).

Since Trump is hostile to trade with both parties there's an opportunity to replace lost US trade that's probably not coming back.

Trump has weakened himself and his allies where as mutual trade between Canada and the EU makes both stronger.

Because Trump is trade warring everyone.

The middle democracies will do better fighting together and not deal with US individually.

Funny, to justify Brexit numbers like these were meaningless

Polish export to US is about 3% of its total export and import - about 5% of Poland's total import. Not much to lose, honestly. We trade more with Czech Republic.

Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.

Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.

Because the US is likely to ally with Russia over Poland.

This has been brewing since George W Bush. Obama made a valiant attempt at normalising relations with Europe but I don't think any future US president has any hope of reversing this now.

Trump is a symptom not the disease, when he's gone the people who supported him and voted for him still exist and another Trump-like figure is almost inevitable given they've basically ploughed and planted that field to grow the next one and who's to say NeoTrump isn't going to be smarter.

The other democracies can no longer count on the US as a stable ally the way we have in the past (whether that trust was misplaced is a matter of perspective).

Simply put, you did it twice, We can't rely on them not doing it again.

It has very little to do with Trump. When he leaves, this shift isn't going away.

Trump is absolutely a malicious imbecile, but the US is a country that willingly voted him in twice.

Removing Trump doesn't remove fundamental issues with the US

We don’t do trade with Trump. We don’t get attacked by Trump.

We should keep open to the option that they might both loose.

In what way has "China already won"?

Imagine if China said that about the US in 1950.

This is being heavily downvoted, but it's dangerously close to true.

In ten years the downvoters will not only agree with this, but have moved on to "and that's a good thing".

Go do some research on China - it's economy is in the toilet and its leadership has destroyed much of it's success, foreign capital and companies have fled to India, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia.

Your lament of "Oh no China is the best in the world and only getting better!!!" is long long out of date.

> One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture

No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.

The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.

It's interesting to me that people generally see Europe's regulations as interfering with entrepreneurship, while they see American decisions that give more power to multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies as a normal part of a free market.

The CCP retains too much power over businesses and business leaders for me to consider them to "embrace entrepreneurship wholeheartedly."

"If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves."

If they were to change some within the citizenry would stand to gain at the expense of others. Inequality would increase.

Seems—for now—middle democracies aren't prepared to pay the high price of social upheaval such a policy would create.

The US _also_ embraces rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and the externalization of social and environmental costs as entrepreneurship.

Didn’t China force Meta to unwind Manus? In no way is China embracing entrepreneurs wholeheartedly.

You're getting downvoted now, but it's the Europeans who are running out of money for healthcare and public services (and voting for neo-fascist parties promising fixes that will never come).

European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never ever occurs to them to reconsider any priors. They'll huff copium on Reddit about how bad American healthcare is, while waiting for years for desperately needed surgeries, paying far more for healthcare by way of taxes than any American does.

Are their ideas out of touch? No, it's reality that's wrong.

This is just wrong. The US prioritizes billionaires over entrepreneurs.

The US was greenfield 2 centuries ago. It currently has a lot more technical (political?) debt than the EU. Some reforms are long overdue.

I want this one to succeed, but refactors often fail and revert to the original code structure :)

Ok but you have to accept that means an EU country works with a hand tied behind its back.

In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare. That company will have a lower upper bound on market size.

The EU might be a success in coordinating on regional issues, but I don’t think it’s yet an asset to the European economy.

> Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo.

Europe's biggest problem is that every decision can be vetoed by one of the member states. Which in practice means that the EU has very little power.

There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.

While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)

Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.

As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.

No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.

The EU is not a fiscal union. It is also not yet a single capital market.

> It's also the third largest economy in the world

If going by GDP (which this claim usually does), the EU as a whole beats out China for second place by ~10%. When going by individual countries Germany alone is the third place behind China, though with a large gap between the two.

> individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.

People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it.

First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty".

Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

> I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing,

What does this mean, concretely? What do the people not have? Who are those people? What would they have in the EU?

There is this odd fatalistic attitude about the US in this thread that seems divorced from the reality I’ve experienced in my travels.

Maybe, but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU.

Not because I think regulations are bad. But regulations need to be well designed with clears lines on what the Federal / State are allowed to do.

It is and it isn't. Around 15-20 years ago, the EU economy was actually bigger than the US economy in total terms (not per capita). The issue is that the EU has stagnated, as has canada while the USA has been pulling away. Growth has been pretty terrible for both for a long time.

It means shared values and a willingness to hold long-term commitments.

It's more about predictability.

America's become erratic and untrustworthy. America's made a deliberate choice make its reputation worse.

There is a friendly trusting common values part to this too.

Why not both?

Friendship is about values?

The true treasure is the friendship we made along the way.

> The Comanche, Apache and Navajo have learned too late that you can't trust Americans

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy probably learned this the strongest. And more even than the Loyalists help build this country. Or I'm more conscious of this as I live in a place where Joseph Brant's (Thayendanegea) name is all over the place.

But they -- and Britain's other indigenous "allies" in the US interior -- also learned the hard way that the British couldn't be trusted either. The Treaty of Ghent ended the war of 1812 but on terms that let the Americans commit genocide against the native populations to the west of them ; which the British were formerly allied with.

And while the Iroquois were granted all extensive lands along the Grand river as reward for helping fight the Americans in 1784 (Haldimand proclamation) -- they subsequently had that chipped away at for generations and it's just a tiny postage stamp of what it used to be.

No good guys.

You might want to look into Gretzky's political beliefs before "importing" him.

Blackberry might not be, but RIM are still around, QNX is still in use.

Je suis tellement heureux de constater que Carney bouge rapidement.

Au début des annonces des tarifs, plusieurs experts disaient que de se découpler des américains étaient impossible à court terme. Nos économies sont trop entrelacées pour changer de cap rapidement.

Je ne sais pas exactement ce que Carney a en tête , mais j’espère que ça va accélérer le découplage.

Salut ben fort d'Autriche ! On joue tous ensemble. Cheers to closer ties, Freunde.

1) it wasn’t millions (plural) 2) absolutely everyone would be better off if Leningrad was part of Finland

It’s not a pretty competition, but I’m pretty sure Russia "wins" vs Finland in number of deliberate civilian deaths over any time period.

Right Europe famously has never meddled

Not if we kick off WW3 as a last ditch attempt to hold on to the old order ;)

The collapse of the USA as the world leader was already happening, but plenty of countries were under the impression the USA and the other western countries were working together to save the sinking ship.

The USA did plenty of offensive stuff before that (like a full campaign labeling the French as cowards for not supporting their baseless war in the middle east), but it took until Trump and his unhinged behaviour for the world to see how bad the situation really was.

> Carney was asking for freedom of movement of goods, people and services, but without full monetary and legislative integration.

> no payments into each others budget.

Not going to happen!

To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment.

Even when the regimes are basically identical - eg the UK - then the EU doesn't permit it without budgetary contributions.

Canada will be competing in Eurovision 2027 in May. :)

Hey, Celine Dion won Eurovision already. We just need to get Switzerland to retroactively let her win stand for Canada :)

If it gets a free trade and freedom of movement system in place, I don't think anyone is going to object in Canada much. Unless they try to open up fisheries, which would get them a bunch of Maritime (and Quebec?) objections...

more than a half dozen Canadians have already competed in Eurovision, including one winner (Céline Dion). has Australia ever won?

What actually _is_ the deal? Nobody in this thread seems to have any idea what the specifics are, which matters a lot. It sounds like we're still at the "very early talks" stage? Less integration than even Norway (EEA)?

Freedom of movement with the EU and no border with the USA hm....

How is this different from the EEA (Norway/Switzerland/Iceland)?

The main negative of the EU is people can migrate through it to get to your country, like the UK's small boats crisis. Canada, being so far from the EU, doesn't have that unique disadvantage. Which is good news for Canada if this does end up working.

Being an Associate Country (or Associate State) doesn't guarantee visa-free travel (ask how we know), yet I'm sure that Canadians will get it served on a silver platter.

This requires likely an alignment of trade and product standards, so could still be demanding legally to get over the line. But the foundations are similar.

Maybe Canada could just join EFTA, that would be easier.

> Tighter integration than UK

Sounds like it could be a solution for the UK as well, which begs the question: why wasn’t a similar proposal worked out with the uk?

> ...wait for Australia to join first.

A possibility.

https://www.reuters.com/business/australia-on-same-page-cana...

So what about the CETA (trade agreement) between canada and europe that isn't ratified yet. This feels like a hollow announcement for politicians.

AFAIK Charles III is the monarch both for UK and Canada.

Doesn't this mean that Canada is, in a certain degree, dependent of UK?

I loved seeing "Le Vent du Nord" at Cambridge Folk Festival 2023, they'd probably make a decent Eurovision entry.

I fully support eurovision-based enrollment tbh

I'm curious how an integration into Schengen Area could actually work... Or does it just mean no passport controls?

Also, to be able to sell stuff, you gotta comply with the CE rules one way or another, there is no free card here.

About competition in Eurovision: absolutely, would love for them to participate, even if just as guest state :D

LMAO just googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_in_the_Eurovision_Song_...

> Although, no joke, a lot of peoples first reaction is: "They need to compete in Eurovision first. Otherwise they should wait for Australia to join first."

What? First time I hear of this. Honestly, Eurovision doesn't really have anything to do with the EU. We all know the main sponsor is from a non-EU country whose participation is much more controversial than Canada anyway.

He asked for phase 1. It would be foolish not to expect phase 2

Easier to fly to Europe from our privatized airports! Sounds great!

The funny thing is that we got this, instead of tangible and needed deregulation within Canada. Another announcement, instead of actual shovels in the ground and making life better for Canadians.

It has to be like Norway/Switzerland/Iceland or more to get any free movements of goods and services. Level of access goes hand in hand with integration in term of regulation, etc.

"Associate member" actually sounds like TIGHTER integration than Norway/Switzerland/Iceland, which are not members at all. Switzerland is not even in the EEA. It is a very bad term, actually as Canada cannot be an EU member (it isn't in Europe) and if they don't want or can't join the EEA then that leaves a Switzerland-like deal, which is purely bilateral.

>>So, easier to sell stuff, easier to buy stuff, free to just travel to/from Canada/EU and work there with no extra paperwork, free to buy and sell service from Canada to EU and vice versa.

>>No Euro, no vote in EU, no ECJ, no payments into each others budget.

This version of EU integration is more popular than EU itself in significant part of EU right now.

> and legislative integration

Does Canada's agricultural output follow EU's (quite strict) norms? Not sure if this falls under "legislative integration" but I'd say that it would be quite important to have settled. The same goes when it comes to Canada's work-related laws.

Eurovision being the primary point of contention between the US and the EU.

When several EU countries are already struggling with large Indian Subcontinent communities that don't integrate (and dodge taxes and food-processing regs--Indians where I am have their own large underground cash-only food economy among themselves), opening up flow of people from Canada's mobile classes which has seen vast demographic change seems like it would only exacerbate the problem.

Yup. Oh no, my meat isn't pumped full of hormones and vacuums aren't allowed to be hearing-damagingly loud. The horror..

Also re: OP, yes if you want to sell stuff in the EU, you will need to adhere to the same rules as EU companies.

Yeah, I'm curious about which ones are a problem. I could see there being some incompatibility, and the details are more interesting than sweeping statements.

Some regulations would have to be normalized and agreed upon between the countries for trade open up. Can't have different quality standards and ways of evaluating and declaring them.

As a Swede I have a bunch of grievances with the EU but when I look at the US I can't help but feel how lucky I am to live on this side of the pond.

How dare the EU try to preserve competitive open markets. We can’t have capitalism in the leveragist serfdom economy!

The biggest trade barriers between Canadian provinces are labor licensing laws. The biggest trade barriers between American states are labor licensing laws.

The second biggest trade barriers between Canada provinces are liquor regulations. The second biggest trade barriers between American states are likely car emission laws.

Fairly comparable, IMO.

Until you try shipping perfectly legal industrial hemp across the Idaho border. https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/hemp-truckers-strike-d...

The US also doesn't have free trade following the same criteria, labeling requirements differ by state, licensing regimes are different, the same kind of challenges that exist in Canada

What is a provenance WRT Canada? :-) But it is true, our provinces have trade barriers internally that is an ongoing source of dispute. There has been movement since the USA started falling apart to remove them. The dumbest one was that hay bales had to be re-arranged on the AB/BC border.

*Provinces (and territories)

Every "yank" I know is also pretty great. The problem is a political system that has entrenched an advantage for a party that would otherwise be consistently in the minority, reducing the ability of the center to moderate policy.

Canadians are right to be skeptical that the next presidency will be significantly better than the current one. A serious amount of goodwill has been burned and I think the average view up north is that it's time to build a very solid backup plan.

This is a nice vibe. Appreciate you.

Am Yank; feel the same about our politics and imperialism.

Seriously. Not to mention that Alberta is trending towards independence (still unlikely, I know).

> Canada's Bill C-22 Would Force Encryption Backdoors

> Signal, Windscribe, and NordVPN say they'll pull out of Canada before building surveillance infrastructure. The biggest threat to encrypted communications in a Western democracy since Australia's 2018 law.

https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/canada-bill-c22-lawful-...

There are way more benefits to being in EU than disadvantages.

Thanks - you are right and have the much more mature perspective. Many want to further drive a wedge between the US and Europe, presumably they live in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran.

I think this is speaking from the perspective of nations/governments rather than individual citizens.

For what it’s worth, as an American, I agree with them. The USA is proving to be unreliable, if not outright malicious, to our long term allies.

On day-to-day interactions with my coworkers, I had no problem working with Americans.

At the same time, a lot of them voted in favor of foreign policies that I very strongly disagree with.

Both can be true at the same time, and the former doesn't make me forget the latter. Especially when their president continues to voice threats against the sovereignty of my country.

The majority of US voters like the guy. He represents the country, like it or not. Most of his voters still agree with all the stuff he's doing, and the opposition seems intent on sabotaging themselves as much as possible so he will likely win again this year.

You're right, I am confused. It was clear what was going on under his first term... You guys voted him back in!!

As another of your, ah, problematic presidents once said:

> "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Like, if the US had just elected ol' minihands once, that would be one thing. But it did it _twice_. Ultimately, even if he's comprehensively put back in his box, there is an issue of long-term trust.

At this point, Pandora's Box has been opened; it has been established that the US president can just act like a crazy dictator and... none of the mechanisms which are supposed to prevent that actually really function. Even if the US elects the most normal, sensible, rule-of-law-focused president imaginable in 2028, Canada will still have to look to 2032. I'm not sure that anything short of constitutional change would really restore trust, and the US is set up such that changing the constitution is virtually impossible.

It was initially an effort from the conservatives, not the liberals.

Canadians are not using that as a real insult, no. “Child fucker” is an insult that is often used, however the USA does not consider that an insult.

Canadians who expect America to suddenly be friendly towards Canada in 2028 are ignorant of history and reality.

Why would a new "regime" affect this?

Trust has been broken. The US has lost its shine and hard-earned reputation. Most of the trust was that a person like Trump would never have been elected in the first place.

Can't unelect Trump. The damage has been done, and is ongoing.

That can’t happen though because they’d be without a currency in the interim period and it’s also baked in to the EU’s treaties to make this difficult else places like Catalonia and the Basque Country would break away and join the EU, so there are barriers in place to make this less than quick or easy.

They would then have a hard border with England, and would have to untangle their economy from the UK to some extent, which would be extremely disruptive. There will also be complex issues around who gets which citizenship, who would need work visas, a change of currency, etc.

It was known that there was likely to be a Brexit referendum at the time of the Scottish referendum: Cameron had promised one if the Conservatives won the 2015 election.

Trust won't come back immediately, but if the next 2 to 3 Presidents are "normal" then trust will come back slowly.

American here. Only a third of us are MAGA. Still plenty to ruin our country though.

War in Ukraine is still waging, can't comment, war in Iran showed the brilliance of importing LNG, ethics commission will find no wrongdoing, stupid idea, vaporware ...

CUSMA is just a trade deal, not a full-on organization like the EU.

If we're doing a trade deal measuring contest, I will just point out that the EU has the world's largest free trade network, including Canada (already), South Korea, most of Latin America, India etc etc.

"Annexing neighbour" is clearly a non-goal of the EU. One of the reason of its existence is to put an end to european countries invading each others all the time.

Iceland said no because they are afraid of overfishing in their water.

It isn't an unreasonable fear, especially given their dependance on that food source. Their "No" was perfectly reasonnable from what I can see.

Britain's "Leave" campain was drowning in lies, exageration, and british-empire nostalgia.

Those two situations are very different.

> The UK left

Yes, you can read all about how that came about, and how it's going.

> The EU does not have a military to annex any neighbours with. Individual states do, but non are really great powers any more.

You're projecting an American ideal. Not all nations are--nor want to be--America, and we're thankful for that.

Do you really think the USA could annex anything but (maybe) Cuba, after seeing how the Iran war is playing out?

There are millions of people who were born in Europe and currently live in the United States, mainly of working age. There are a comparatively much smaller number of Americans living in Europe, a significant portion of which are well-off retirees (well-off by European standards). This is a fairly typical migration pattern for two places at different levels of economic development. A larger group of economic migrants move to the richer region in search of a better life, while a much smaller group of retirees move to the poorer region in an effort to boost their spending power.

funny cuz i still cant buy european butter :P

best we can get is "european style"

id love to just move to somewhere in the eu and be able to freely work there. thats how it should be in every country btw. until then, it seems like more performance, which carney has seemingly mastered.

Another 40% is in Russia, good luck with that

Turkey has been floated as a serious EU candidate for decades now. Most of it is not in Europe of course, and it has a large population. Turkey refuses to address its past with the Armenians, Kurds and Greeks which is a major concern.

The other question is what its border control is like at the eastern end.

There are already large numbers of Turks in western Europe, particularly Germany, so presumably some of them would vote for it.

Sure, but Turkey is also an authoritarian autocracy, which I think might be a bit of a problem for the EU.

Talks with Turkey are currently dead because the current government does not wish to continue them; realistically they won't resume until, at the earliest, Erdogan is gone.

Fear that Turkey would be "imminently" joining the EU was one of the scare stories used by the Brexit campaign in the UK.

No, just too corrupt for the EU.

More like not culturally aligned enough.

Many European countries already have substantial Turkish migration. Notably Germany but also visible in the UK, where they seem to have cornerned the market for barbering.

If by screw things up you mean retain some level of governance then yes... Canada is a confederation, not a federation.

Where there's a will, there's a way. There hasn't been a will until now.

Canada has a proven, safe reactor technology[1] and Uranium to spare. This is a good synergy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

Those wind turbines are destroying the scenery, though.

I hear you, but the US is hardly the only country on the planet that’s had a few disruptive elections, including the EU BTW. Making generational decisions over one presidential cycle is rather short sighted.

> The EU has built the world's largest trade zone, from Mercosur to South Korea, Japan and India to Canada.

Which of those agreements are fully ratified by the EU?

Naïve American exceptionalism. It is going to be generations before Canadians could possibly be on as friendly terms as we were just 5 years ago.

No. The US has shown it is completely unreliable.

Even if Democrats were to be back in power and devote their 4 years to restore things and apologize, that wouldn’t be enough.

Americans have shown they can vote TWICE for a fascist regime that is willing and eager to generate chaos.

Their political system is foobar.

They'll undo like 30% of the damage and call that a win.

Canada isn't an abused spouse that's supposed to sit around and wait while their partner magically undoes all of its threats and (economic) violence. "Undoing" the tariffs in a few years won't magically fix the intense economic damage they've caused to Canadian citizens. The US government being forced to pay hundreds of millions of the illegal tariff money back to corporations didn't magically bring prices back down. The US has completely ruined its reputation in the eyes of most Canadians to the point where nearly every single person I know refuses to travel to the US and many refuse to purchase US goods.

I think the metaphor you're looking for is from the "USA as an abusive ex" angle, not a "bitter ex" metaphor that shifts blame to others...

Newsom is on the record stating he wouldn't undo all of the tariffs if he becomes president in 2028. And he's a leading Democratic candidate for the position.

There is no guarantee the Democrats are going to reverse the tariffs. And even if they do, the Republicans after that can just undo the undoing, and then do worse.

If you're still looking at this through the lens of party politics, you're missing the big picture. Most of US power comes not from its military, but its economic system. And that depends on trust and reliability. Both "sides" have been engaged in a project to scuttle that as hard and fast as they can since the end of the Cold War.

Both sides demonstrate that the United States can be consistently relied upon to break every deal they make, be it relating to international relations and borders, economics and debt, trade, military protection, and supply of arms.

Bush Sr and Clinton both broke the assurances made to Gorbachev that made the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union possible by marching NATO eastward and carving up fresh borders in the Balkans.

Clinton, Bush Jr, and even Biden were still talking about free trade agreements, less than a decade before we see an international tariff regime spring up, and the United States reserves subsidy carve-outs in every deal they make with other countries who they expect to open their markets.

US spending has been out of control for decades no matter who controls the White House or Congress, and is only getting worse. They're relying on the inertia of its massive economy to bear the inflationary burden by printing money. The biggest export of the US economy, Treasury Bonds - that is, debt - is now seen as unreliable, and other countries are dumping them like burning garbage. Indeed, the United States has already started defaulting on such loans to a growing number of nations, only they get to call it "sanctions" when they don't repay their loans. The rest of the world looks on in horror as they realise how much of their wealth is tied up in this make-believe that the United States can renege on or bully creditors into not divesting on a whim. This explains the skyrocketing price of gold.

Speaking of those creditors, a lot of them are gulf states. As in, Persian Gulf. They used to sell oil and buy Treasuries as investments. But since nearly every US base in the Persian Gulf has been effectively destroyed, every gulf state that participated in the war crimes against Iran has been punished into submission for that involvement. Resumption of hostilities like we saw in the opening month would see the infrastructure that those nations rely on to continue to function as countries destroyed within hours. Absent desalination and oil export facilities, those countries would just cease to exist as significant polities. The de facto government in Yemen (referred to perversely as the "rebels", while the legitimate government sits in Riyadh, capital of the country that has been bombing Yemen for 15 years or so) just delivered Saudi Arabia a major military defeat, while the President refused to help. Saudi Arabia, land of black gold, unable to export from either the Strait or the Red Sea, with one of the biggest oil pipelines in the world now burning, is being forced to borrow money! The United States, so called most powerful military the world has known, dares not send a large naval vessel within about 1000 km of the Strait of Hormuz, and two aircraft carriers have been forced to limp away. Meanwhile, trade through the Red Sea has also been strangled off. All of the US allies under the protection of Pax Americana have been humbled by a country that has been getting "strangled" in some form or another for the past 70 years by a superpower.

And after all that the US military is out of interceptor missiles. They can't spare any for West Asia or Ukraine, right when everyone wants them. They wasted thousands of million dollar missiles on thousand dollar drones, and cannot make more at a rate that matters.

If you think it's just tariffs and some hurt feelings, you haven't been paying attention.

Bitter ex? This is amazing.

The US is a completely broken country, and simply switching governments will not change that. Without a complete and utter change in how that entire country operates -- including dissolution -- no country should ever normalize relations with it again.

The US is by far the world's most dangerous rogue nation. It is a terroristic nation. It is a bully. It not only elected a rapist self-dealing criminal imbecile to president, it elected him again, seeking a round two after the utter debacle the first term was, and the disastrous results are exactly what everyone could predict, but you know...this is who America is now.

And a big reason Canada is moving on is that it's pretty clear that the US is a country in spectacular decline, and it is China's century now. Which is maybe why the US is electing disgusting garbage like Trump -- and he's certainly not alone, and there are various garbage "football coach" type creeps filling the entire US political class -- lamenting the position they once held, now going down the Russian/Putin path where they'll accelerate the crash just to reminisce about a past that mostly never existed.

EDIT: I should add that agreements with the US are worthless, and this has been amply demonstrated. As Carney noted, the US' signature is written in pencil, and even agreements signed by this very president mean nothing, and will be dishonoured at the earliest convenience. In recent trade negotiations, where Canada almost made a horrible mistake of accepting ridiculous terms to maintain the status quo as much as possible (sidenote: Canada absolutely must withdraw from USMCA, a Trump-signed and negotiated agreement that the US is in utter defiance of), they asked "so when we sign this, you'll then honour it?", and the US side couldn't even commit to that. They knew that it could be days before the rapist toddler had a twitter tantrum after one of the kleptocrats whispered in his ear and imposed new barriers, tariffs, etc. Like, what is even the point of negotiating with such a farce? A lawless cabal led by just the absolute worst human trash.