It's important for citizens to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian and US economy before they decide that the country needs a 'deal'. I've brought together a bunch of background info that I haven't heard much of from the legacy media. I think it suggests Canada is doing a whole lot better than America right now. https://billhulet.substack.com/p/my-hot-take-on-the-current-trade
I think your read on AI investment is quite far off. We are in the midst of a new industrial revolution, and the two players leading it are the US and China. Canada is basically on par with the US as a leading country in terms of uptake of AI and usage by consumers, but Canadians aren't using Canadian AI. How many people are using Cohere on a daily basis as compared to OpenAI or Anthropic? How many unsolved math equations are being solved by Cohere? There won't be any left for Cohere to solve because they're getting solved at the frontier and we are not there. This gap is not shrinking. Cohere's top model is on par with Haiku, not Fable. It's so far down it doesn't even appear in most rankings unless you look at very specific use cases, like having low hallucination rates on RAG. So, sure, we have exports like aluminum, O&G, REEs, and electricity that the US needs, but the frontier of innovation where all the new economic value is being generated is down south and in China, and a huge amount of the AI investment in Canada on AI data centres is with US capital and US tech. So, our relationship is not changing much in that regard. We have long been an exporter of inputs to higher value processes, and we look to be continuing as such while the US continues to drive the frontier of value creation and US corporates own the IP and the infrastructure.
And, btw, Chinese AI labs are not just focused on niche applications and there is massive investment in China towards building frontier chips and infrastructure, not to mention physical AI, and we should be glad of that. If not for Chinese labs pumping out near-frontier open models, the US labs could basically lock up the market right now. As Chinese chip fabs improve, their capacity to compete on chips will do the same in making hardware markets more open and competitive, and we should be very glad of that, too. We already face enormous pressure to just be a supplier of inputs to a US-controlled tech revolution. We are really the ones who are trying to compete on niches, like some quantum and narrow application AI models, while predominantly feeding inputs into the general purpose tech development driving demand.