Thank you for your question. That's great.
As I think about Taiwan, I want to put it in a perspective that we can understand very clearly.
A conflict across the Taiwan Strait would cause between $10 trillion and $15 trillion U.S. in damage to the global economy. It would devastate the production networks in China. It would dramatically and negatively affect Southeast Asia and India. Southeast Asia and India's biggest FDI providers are Taiwan, China and Japan, the economies that would be devastated.
This is not to mention, as you said, the damage to semiconductor supply chains, as well as control of the first island chain, which would basically allow China to put submarines along the trench, keeping the United States, Canada and any other countries out of the Indo-Pacific region to ensure that those sea lanes are open for trade and energy. This is a priority, but as Canada thinks about the Taiwan issue, we should continue to invest in Taiwan as an international public good.
Avoid the “one China” question. What happens to Taiwan matters to Canada, matters to Germany, matters to Palau—it matters to every single country on the planet. We need to invest our diplomatic resources from that perspective to build alliances and partnerships that have a similar thinking about Taiwan as an international public good.
We also want it to have peace and stability, and we want to make sure that whatever happens to Taiwan is decided by the Taiwanese people. I want to reiterate this: Avoid talking about Taiwan through how China talks about Taiwan. Let's talk about Taiwan on our terms, and I think the terms we should be using include thinking of Taiwan as an international public good. We should invest our resources there, just as we invest in the Great Barrier Reef or invest in other international public goods.
Thank you very much for the question.