This is silly. US is Canada's biggest trading partner and one of the largest borders in the world. 80% of people live within 1 hour of the border. Free trade has allowed both economies to prosper. Canada has everything to gain with free trade. You are right on over reliance, but free trade benefits everyone.
It takes 2 to make a trade, and the best strategy for an iterated prisoner's dilemma scenario is tit-for-tat. The party that started the silliness should end it, but until then, Canada should rightly consider stronger ties with the Europe - they do share a border with a European country after all.
Depending how you count "borders" and "European countries" they share a border with 2 (France via St Pierre and Miquelon, Denmark via Greenland) and share a landlord with a third.
The best strategy is tit-for-tat with eventual forgiveness attempts. It's way too soon for that (the US is still controlled by Republicans) but one eventually re-opening trade might be optimal, assuming there's still a USA to trade with.
Tit-for-tat inherently forgives the moment the other party stops defecting, in a game theoretic sense. It's "start friendly, every future move copies other party's previous move".
We had free trade. The US has, in a very short period of time, squandered what was a highly profitable and mutually beneficial trading relationship.
There was already a sentiment of distrust in Canada about being so dependent on American goodwill. You can see this in the debates from the 1998 federal election (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyYjRmM7RDY) on the establishment of CUSFTA, the precursor to NAFTA and later CUSMA. Brian Turner (red tie in that video) argued that free trade in Canada would lead inevitably 'reduce' Canada to becoming a 'colony' of the United States. He lost the election, and the agreement went through. Here we are almost three decades later and, as Canadians see it, those fears are at risk of coming true.
I'm not sure that Americans really understand that this has permanently damaged the relationship between our countries. It's going to be a generation before there will be the political will in Canada to consider going back to something similar to NAFTA/CUSMA again. Even assuming the United States returns to open trade policies again, the question forever on everyone's mind will be "what if another Trump gets elected?".
it is 2025, nothing takes a generation any longer unless you are implying donny and his apostoles will rule america for a generation. otherwise new administration will repair this fairly quickly
A new administration can not promise that somebody like Donald Trump will never be elected again. That's what it would take to repair this relationship.
But at this point, Trump has been re-elected with a greater margin so in terms of national interests one needs to assume the worst case (i.e. these tariffs/behaviour aren't going away).
Would it be better if they did? I think so, but as a European (but very very exposed to the US) I don't think that's an economically rational way to plan.
