Chad Bowne

I think there definitely is symbolism.

I wouldn't say it's economically huge, especially on the Canadian side.

It's an agreement by the Canadians to buy more of what the Chinese are really good at making right now, which is electric vehicles, that the United States has essentially said, we're not going to buy any of those.

So it is something that's actually quite symbolically important.

By itself, this is only 49,000 electric vehicles, so this is not a huge number.

But the North American automobile industry is hugely integrated.

So if this were part of a broader sign—

that Canada is saying, you know, we need to be more aligned with countries outside of North America, then that could have potentially really big implications for American-based auto production.

Thank you very much.

A lot of these countries like Canada are really, really small in an economic sense.

They need access to foreign markets to achieve scale in industries like automobiles to make their companies competitive.

And if the United States is no longer open, they're going to need to find alternative markets too.

And sometimes that's going to be China or other countries out there.

Absolutely not.

And I think many of these countries are now wide-eyed and realize the risks of engaging with China.

Even prior to the pandemic, they did acts of economic coercion to countries in Europe, to Brazil, cutting off their exports of significant products for them.

But when the United States is extraordinarily busy hitting those other partner countries with tariffs,

That doesn't give them any space and opportunity to figure out how to collaborate together on the bigger problem that is China.