You can take me out of Alberta, but you can't take the Alberta out of me. It's very true.
The world is shifting in profound ways. The fact that it's rather gradual doesn't mean that it isn't happening swiftly. When I left Beijing in 2004 to go to Taiwan, and it feels like forever now, the Chinese economy was roughly one-twelfth of what it is today. Twelve times in roughly 20 years. While there are a lot of serious doubts about the Chinese economy going forward, the idea that it's going to collapse and that it's not going to grow, assuming the global economy is stable, is something that's just not going to occur.
We have seen a relative diminution in U.S. strength and in the strength of western countries, generally. If you just look at the percentage of GDP in the G7, there's no sign that this change is going to.... We're going to be in a different world. We are in a different world of diminution, plus the Asia-Pacific region doesn't have a NATO. The groups we belong to, be it Francophonie or Commonwealth, don't have as much clout there. We have influence, but our cultural mindset, in my opinion, is still very much oriented toward Europe and the United States. It's easy to say, as it says in the IPS, two-thirds of operations in Asia are growing quickly, but it understates, in my view, the growth of China.
Yes, we can send our business people to southeast Asia and to ASEAN countries if we wish, but when they arrive there, they're going to find the infrastructure is often built by China. For the great majority of those Indo-Pacific countries, excluding the United States, China is the number one trading partner. Therefore, you can move from Burlington to Kuala Lumpur to open an office there, and you may be doing way more China business than you were doing back home.
China has half of the Asian economy. The reality, for anybody who's been an adult since 1945, has been that the west, the United States, has been in a dominant leading position, and I don't think we can automatically assume that. China is not going to go away. China is not going to be all-powerful, but we're now in a place where the U.S. can be challenged. The U.S. may choose not to engage. That creates real difficulties for us who live snugly along that U.S. border and are deeply dependent on the U.S. market. The idea that we cannot engage, as an option, is not there.
The U.S. is about 24% dependent on foreign trade. We're closer to 60%. China is somewhere in between. The idea that you can maintain the prosperity without being engaged globally is just not there. If that's where the growth is, that's where we need to be.