It's multiple things. Yes, the automotive manufacturers matter not just for business sense, but because manufacturing base is important to be able to leverage in case of a war. Manufacturing lines played key roles in WW2.
In addition to that, since we're on the car angle, Chinese EVs are basically just privacy nightmares. I mean, all cars are at this point, but that's why we definitely don't want Chinese ones coming across the Canadian border and ending up all over the place.
In the end there are in fact legitimate national security concerns that the tariffs address and Canada risks weakening those. So, that is the actual answer to why.
With NAFTA/USMCA it 100% is a backdoor. China couldn't give a rats ass about Canada the purpose of these proposed trade deal with Canada is to bypass USA tariffs into the USA market.
No it is not. Canada did not try to do anything resembling Free Trade with China. It is btw prohibited by NAFTA / CUSMA. Canada pursues reasonable targeted deals like every normal country should. Trump is just getting hysterical because some country does not want to suck his dick. He should learn to be civil when dealing with neighbors, well it might be too late for that.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
Tech's march towards vertical integration-powered cross-selling and turning everything into a digital-only product or perpetual subscription is sending a lot of people searching for alternatives. Just off the top of my head, I'm aware of growing interest in communities related to single purpose devices like:
- Retro gaming handhelds, which these days are capable of handling every console before the PS3, and their popularity is a clear rebuff to the Nintendo Switch's game pricing, not to mention the horrific microtransaction-riddled landscape of "mobile gaming".
- Standalone MP3 players, which are selling very well thanks to notification hell on our phones and dissatisfaction with music streaming giants.
- Portable DVD players, which can be bought online or thrifted cheaply, as frustration builds with constant licensing changes causing Netflix and the like to remove shows without warning. DVDs can be bought extremely cheaply, and a lot of users are not cinephiles who won't touch anything that's not at least 1080P.
2A is a historical relic of the settler colonial era when communities had to create their own security forces. It's strongest proponents today are those who want to create their own laws and have private militias to enforce it, in obvious contravention of state and federal laws which are decided through a democratic process with checks and balances (elections, legislatures and independent judiciaries).
The present federal government has co-opted the militia strategy and filled its ranks with the 2A absolutists, and given them a budget that rivals most countries' militaries.
Even more of a relic: those militias weren't just bands of yeoman farmers. They were veterans of the recent French-and-Indian war. Often who had served with the commanders of the British forces arrayed against them. George Howe brother of William who ultimately became CiC of British forces in America died in the arms of Israel Putnam, one of the continental army's first generals at the battle of Ticonderoga. They thought so highly of him, the Massachusetts assembly allocated funds for a memorial to Howe at Westminster. George Howe (unlike ICE, lol) often had a hard time bringing ultimate force to bear as he didn't really see the colonials as "enemy".
I'd submit it's a violation of the 2A to allow the Nat Guard (essentially the continuation of those militias) to be forcibly nationalized (it took quite a bit of negotiating to get them all to join the fledgling continental army)
The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.
Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).
I'd say it mostly has to do with limiting their own liability and reputational damage if an AI bot "hallucinates" and places hundreds of incorrect orders and sellers get hit with negative ratings and refund requests due to no fault of their own.
So what if it is? A Master's in Economics gets you diddly squat in the job market whereas an MBA opens doors everywhere. You could get a PhD in Economics and still only work at a university, your country's central bank or at a stretch, the IMF or the World Bank, which are hardly held up as the pinnacle of professional development. And even then they'd only take you if you studied monetary economics.
They're not criticizing someone for seeing the appeal of an MBA, they're criticizing that an MBA has those factors in the first place. It shouldn't be the degree you pick to open doors.
If past history is anything to go by, the US will elect the current opposition, who won't be nearly strong enough to enact the reforms that would prevent an extremist party from returning to power in 4 years' time.
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