Europe

[QV]

Carney has said the goal would be to double our non-US exports in 10yrs.

Taking that at face value, moving from 30ish% non-US to 60ish% would mean 40ish% still going to the US. A very ambitious goal in 10yrs. I'd consider it a 'win' if we can move it down to 53-55% in 10yrs.

I think a great number of internal barriers have been taken down, with Quebec being an outlier. I'm attributing this to be a result of their upcoming election. Dependent on who wins and if they have a solid majority, their reluctance to move over the summer will fall away.

1. Cross-border shipping - 9 provinces have agreed to allow alcohol to be shipped directly to consumers
2. Mutual recognition agreements around thousands of products has passed - less regulatory rules/testing
3. Commercial Trucking - streamlining
4. Creditanials and Licensing - recognizing cerfitifications across jurisdications

1 through 5 are not enough. Where are the massive energy export and internal movements infra commitments sitting? Quebec and BC will hold this all hostage for years and decades. Canada cannot be elbows up this whole time.

As for hitching a big chunk of our wagon to the EU, it just simply won't happen. Have a listen to Professor Ian Lee, he makes some very solid points:

Ian Lee - Sprott School of Business

I am an Associate Professor at Carleton University in the Sprott School where I started in 1988, teaching the 4th year and(later) the MBA Strategic Management capstone course, as well as related courses such as International Business Strategy, from then to now. After dropping out of grade 12 in...

sprott.carleton.ca

 

[Kirkhill]

It occurs to me that I have spent 50 years building robots. Specifically robots to process resources. Food is a renewable resource. Dairies, breweries, cheeseplants, surimi plants, slaughterhouses and oat mills are all robots.

They are static robots with their operators operating within the body of the robot.

The plants employ electric motors to convert agricultural resources harvested from field and sea and convert them into consumer products. For 50 years I built plants where my goal was to reduce the number of operators within the walls to two (2) per shift. My goal was two operators and a coffee pot.

Machine intelligence (clockwork, electro-mechanical, integrated circuitry based on transistors and computers) allowed me to make the next plant more efficient than the last one.

I also discovered that a plant with a small output costs about as much as a plant with a big output. This is because the cost of the plant is not dependent on the size of the motors. It is dependent on the number of motors and they, in turn, are dependent on the number of unit processes conducted by the robot within the plant.

This means that the cost of building a plant to service the 5,000,000 of the Alberta market is not substantially less than the cost of building a plant to service the US or China. The same logic applies to mines, farms and fisheries, or I daresay, forestry.

People are thrilled with dancing robo-dogs and somersaullting robo-warriors.

But the real magic is in getting 2 operators with a pot of coffee to supervise a bunch of motors harvesting resources and converting them into marketable goods that can be dumped into the hold of a ship or packaged in an ISO container and shipped around the world.

Canada shoots itself in the heart with its supply management programmes. In protecting their 40,000,000 market with trade barriers they prompt the rest of the world to isolate Canada by erecting their own trade barriers. Canada could be raising millions more cows and shipping cheese to Asia (they are lactose intolerant but are consumers of cheese which is lactose reduced because the lactose is strained off with the whey and the residual lactose is converted to the lactic acid that preserves the cheese).

New Zealand came to that conclusion decades ago and cancelled its supply management program.

We have yet to learn the lesson.

Our future is not in importing more cheap labour to staff the plants my grandfather sold in the 1930s. It is in building new plants that 2 of our kids, with a coffee put, can use to supply the rest of the world and make a buck that will supply them a living wage and free time.

 

[foresterab]

It occurs to me that I have spent 50 years building robots. Specifically robots to process resources. Food is a renewable resource. Dairies, breweries, cheeseplants, surimi plants, slaughterhouses and oat mills are all robots.

They are static robots with their operators operating within the body of the robot.

The plants employ electric motors to convert agricultural resources harvested from field and sea and convert them into consumer products. For 50 years I built plants where my goal was to reduce the number of operators within the walls to two (2) per shift. My goal was two operators and a coffee pot.

Machine intelligence (clockwork, electro-mechanical, integrated circuitry based on transistors and computers) allowed me to make the next plant more efficient than the last one.

I also discovered that a plant with a small output costs about as much as a plant with a big output. This is because the cost of the plant is not dependent on the size of the motors. It is dependent on the number of motors and they, in turn, are dependent on the number of unit processes conducted by the robot within the plant.

This means that the cost of building a plant to service the 5,000,000 of the Alberta market is not substantially less than the cost of building a plant to service the US or China. The same logic applies to mines, farms and fisheries, or I daresay, forestry.

People are thrilled with dancing robo-dogs and somersaullting robo-warriors.

But the real magic is in getting 2 operators with a pot of coffee to supervise a bunch of motors harvesting resources and converting them into marketable goods that can be dumped into the hold of a ship or packaged in an ISO container and shipped around the world.

Canada shoots itself in the heart with its supply management programmes. In protecting their 40,000,000 market with trade barriers they prompt the rest of the world to isolate Canada by erecting their own trade barriers. Canada could be raising millions more cows and shipping cheese to Asia (they are lactose intolerant but are consumers of cheese which is lactose reduced because the lactose is strained off with the whey and the residual lactose is converted to the lactic acid that preserves the cheese).

New Zealand came to that conclusion decades ago and cancelled its supply management program.

We have yet to learn the lesson.

Our future is not in importing more cheap labour to staff the plants my grandfather sold in the 1930s. It is in building new plants that 2 of our kids, with a coffee put, can use to supply the rest of the world and make a buck that will supply them a living wage and free time.

Some excellent points here and bang on in regards to the changes in the forestry sector. Many sites I know operate at 25-30% of the labour they had 15 years ago due to increased automation.

However regardless of how much product a plant can produce it still needs to be able to be shipped to the consumer timely and effeciently. This is a huge barrier nationally - while Oil and Gas are often in the news I instead think of the Nipigon, ONT bridge which is the sole road connection point on the Trans Canada highway. There is no Plan B unless shipping south to the USA.

You also need enough skilled staff to install and maintain the robots...often a different crew than the keepers of the coffee pot inside. So you need electricians, welders, engineers, data systems specialists, programmers, concrete finishers and many other folks to keep the robot going - but on an occasional basis - so needing more robots nearby to maintain skill sets. You start to see this in some areas where a plant goes down and a subset of the population leaves...but then a second closes and more leave. Suddenly you're left with one or two sites...but there isn't enough skilled folks to keep them going efficiently so they close as well.

 

[FormerEnlisted]

China deserves an "elbows up" relationship several orders of magnitude greater than the one some Canadians would like for the US.

100% agree.

 

[Kirkhill]

Some excellent points here and bang on in regards to the changes in the forestry sector. Many sites I know operate at 25-30% of the labour they had 15 years ago due to increased automation.

However regardless of how much product a plant can produce it still needs to be able to be shipped to the consumer timely and effeciently. This is a huge barrier nationally - while Oil and Gas are often in the news I instead think of the Nipigon, ONT bridge which is the sole road connection point on the Trans Canada highway. There is no Plan B unless shipping south to the USA.

You also need enough skilled staff to install and maintain the robots...often a different crew than the keepers of the coffee pot inside. So you need electricians, welders, engineers, data systems specialists, programmers, concrete finishers and many other folks to keep the robot going - but on an occasional basis - so needing more robots nearby to maintain skill sets. You start to see this in some areas where a plant goes down and a subset of the population leaves...but then a second closes and more leave. Suddenly you're left with one or two sites...but there isn't enough skilled folks to keep them going efficiently so they close as well.

No arguments.

The other jobs you mention though don't need to be tied to the production schedule. Assuming there is no re-introduction of the Just In Time silliness.

Better quality jobs, better schedules and more redundancy (electric motors, roads, ports and comms) permitting less to do more faster.

....

Most of my plants had at least two lines - an efficient mass production line and a smaller multi-purpose line that could sub in for the mainline if it went down. My European colleagues were routinely building plants with 3 lines at 66% efficiency so that all three could run at 200% or two operating at 100% could sustain 200% that pace.

Some Japanese plants I saw preferred to extend the principle even further choosing to operate 10 smaller lines in parallel.

More motors, less coffee pots.