There are a few points I want to bring up.
I think there's a bit of a misconception about our reliance on the U.S. A lot of the trade statistics overstate our reliance on the U.S. There was a C.D. Howe report written recently that addresses this issue. I'll just raise the points that were made.
One is that we don't have good statistics on Canadian foreign affiliate operations in foreign countries. There's reason to believe these might be quite high in Europe and in non-U.S. countries, which would definitely mean that we're overstating our reliance on the U.S.
The second one is that we have difficulty measuring services trade. We don't know how this affects the Canada-U.S. data.
Finally, in our trade with the U.S. we have many intermediate inputs that go back and forth across the border several times and are counted each time. There have been efforts to fix this, but there are still things that get caught up, and this ends up overstating our trade relations with the U.S.
So we have to be careful when we're looking at the trade statistics and just looking at the number of exports going across our border.
Another point I wanted to make is that Canada has one of the lowest export market volatilities, even compared with a lot of European Union countries that have a quite diversified export market portfolio. So our reliance on the U.S. is actually a lot less volatile than we might think.