“We will not be pushed into accepting any old deal, and no deal might very well be better for Canada than a bad deal,” Mr. Trudeau said in Chicago
.. Trump’s threats to tear up the trade agreement, and his administration’s aggressive use of trade laws, may actually help prod export-dependent industries in Canada to finally look beyond the United States market to do business.
.. in the worst-case scenarios, Canadian companies would be facing duties of about 5 percent on shipments to American customers, and closer to 3 percent on many auto parts.
.. the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement .. could significantly expand business opportunities for Canadian companies across oceans.
.. some major Canadian industries have weaned themselves off a near-total reliance on Nafta markets for their exports.
.. British Columbia once sent nearly all of its softwood lumber exports to the United States
.. pork and poultry producer
.. Parts like pig’s feet, which have a relatively small market in North America, can fetch premium prices in Asia.
Canadian Tech Sector Thrives, but Struggles to Keep Its Talent
Government seek to attract investment from big foreign players while stopping the brain drain
Mr. Trudeau has lamented a “brain drain” of Canada’s best tech minds, saying at a recent Google event in Toronto, “Quite frankly, we’re tired of Google poaching our best graduates from the University of Waterloo and sucking them down to California.”
.. Trudeau wrote to Mr. Bezos, asking him to consider Canada because of its inclusiveness, single-payer health-care system, and an immigration system designed to attract high-skilled talent.
.. Canada is widely considered to be at the nucleus of some world-leading research in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
.. Seminal work published by University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton, University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and others has spawned advancements in voice recognition and automated driving. Mr. Hinton published breakthrough research on “deep learning” in 2007 and 2012 that ushered in a new wave of AI and the potential it could have for smartphones, self-driving cars and other devices.
.. Canada’s AI talent pool is also the third biggest in the world behind the U.S. and the U.K., with about 1,100 researchers in the country
.. An Amazon move to Toronto might also end up being a “Trojan horse” that would draw Canadian workers to the company’s Seattle base rather than improve Canada’s economy
.. “The best and brightest Canadian engineers or marketers that operate under Amazon Canada will see their career path head down to Seattle, not in Canada,”
.. He says companies like Facebook have different needs than startups, noting that staff at Facebook’s AI lab in Montreal are focused on more advanced research.
.. Cole Clifford, a 23-year-old machine-learning engineer at Toronto-based startup DeepLearni.ng , said he received about 50 recruiter emails in his LinkedIn account last month, most of them from Silicon Valley firms
.. the Canadian government spent C$125 million last March to set up new AI “superclusters” in Toronto
.. The goal is to keep researchers in Canada and create 1,000 AI graduates in the next five years
.. “We aren’t realizing that the intellectual property developed by these individuals and all of those economic benefits are rarely in Canada and not taxed in Canada,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “That’s the problem.”
.. One potential avenue for keeping foreign companies in check is for Canada to withhold R&D tax incentives
.. Another option is to create a government-backed sovereign patent fund, similar to what South Korea, Japan and France have launched in recent years, which would protect smaller startups from patent claims by foreign companies
Mugabe and Other Leftist Heroes
unleashed a war of atrocity against his ethnic rivals in the Ndebele tribe, promising that he would pursue his enemies “until all dissidents are eliminated
.. The scale of Mugabe’s killing, estimated as high as 20,000
.. When will they stop confusing national independence with individual freedom, liberation with liberty?
.. As for the other Mugabes, Fidel Castro tyrannized Cuba for decades, yet was paid flattering tributes on his death last year, including from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
.. Yasir Arafat’s turn on the world stage began and ended in terrorism, intermixed with corruption and human-rights abuses. Yet the rais never lacked for admirers on the left
.. Naomi Klein has any regrets about her fervent championship of the Bolivarian Revolution
.. Joseph Stiglitz has any second thoughts about his close ties to the ruinous Argentine government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
.. Western thinkers have been tempted by the prospect of influence abroad, along with the power that comes with it, particularly when both are denied to them at home.
.. The visiting economist calls for heavy deficit spending or a currency devaluation, but collects his speaking fee in dollars and doesn’t live through the eventual default.
.. Zimbabwe’s tragedy is just a fuller version of a post-colonial story of disastrous ideological experiments accompanied by foreigners who cheered those experiments and then looked the other way when they failed. There needs to be a reckoning with them, too.
Generation Y Takes Over
But immigration is a subset of a larger global problem. The dominant economic event of our era is the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and ended for the U.S. in 2009. Its status as a “great” economic downturn is attributed to its long aftermath of unemployment and, more important, underemployment.
As the U.S. and European economies failed to achieve pre-recession growth levels, which exacerbated social anxieties, the elites produced an explanation. They called it “the new normal.”
.. The new normal” theory, which in a wink became conventional wisdom among conventional economists and pundits, exists mainly to absolve them—and Barack Obama —of responsibility for weaker growth’s dire effects on national standards of living. What the theory failed to capture is that the new normal creates angry have-nots.
.. Voters everywhere are rebelling against the new normal. They won’t concede its implicit acceptance of flattened opportunities for younger Americans or Europeans still in their prime working years, who don’t have sinecures explaining to everyone else why this is as good as it will ever get. Increasingly, they are voting into office political outliers—from Trump to Macron to Kurz.
.. Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan should be seen as a proxy for what the next Democratic presidential nominee is likely to run on. Influenced by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers’s theories on “secular stagnation,” Mr. Trudeau is making massive outlays on infrastructure repair and modernization to revive demand inside Canada.
.. Donald Trump is an infrastructure guy, too, but his path out of the new normal’s long-term trap runs mainly through regulatory relief and reforming the U.S. tax system.
.. U.S. firms kept 71% of their foreign-earned profits abroad, “benefiting other nations’ workers.” What would be the effect, Mr. Hassett asked, if for the next eight years, those profits were repatriated and reinvested here through a tax regime designed to promote more capital investment in the domestic economy? Incomes would rise.