Playing Canada’s Strongest Cards

For decades, Canada built its economy around the assumption that we would always have relatively open access to the enormous market next door.

That relationship has fundamentally changed, and we are now in a trade war.

You've described Canada's natural resources as some of the strongest cards that we hold.

What exactly does that mean, and how can Canada play its cards?

So I'm sure many of your listeners have listened to the prime minister talk about what's happening in the world right now.

We have two superpowers that are, as he calls them, hegemons that are battling it out for global supremacy.

And as they look at how they compete, they are increasingly using trade as a mode of competition.

So, for example, the US is restricting access to certain technologies to China.

They're not letting China have certain semiconductor chips.

The US is using access to the US dollar as a weapon.

They're limiting the access of the Russians or, say, the Iranians to using the US dollar, which is the primary currency that gets used around the world for trade.

What we're seeing is China is using critical minerals.

China has... because it has invested significantly in metals and mining over the last many years, as other countries have de-invested in metals and mining, China has become sort of omnipotent in the critical minerals area.

On many, many critical minerals, China controls 70, 80, 90% of the world's supply of these critical minerals.

We saw in the last year when the U.S. started using trade as a weapon, a form of coercion saying, hey, China, we're going to impose 100% tariffs on you.

China said, okay, we're not going to sell you critical minerals.

What did that mean? That meant that many factories were on the verge of shutting down after literally weeks.

Within a week or two of China imposing those restrictions, automobile factories were shutting down, defense manufacturing facilities were on the verge of shutting down, aerospace was on the verge of shutting down.

So you can see how important these critical minerals are.

Well, Canada has all these critical minerals.

And in a world where the hegemons are using these things to coerce others, when you have what they want, it gives you cards.

And what I tell all my constituents in my riding is we all saw President Trump lecturing President Zelensky in the White House about how he had no cards.

He had no cards and he needed to sign away Ukraine's critical minerals for 100 years to US if they wanted the US's help.

Well, Amber, every night I go to sleep and say, how do I make sure we're never in that situation? How do I make sure we always have the cards to play?

Let's talk about that situation in terms of what is the single biggest thing standing between the Canada that we have today and the one your government says it wants to build?