It's worth recognizing that a key driver of the Trump administration's policies—and indeed, the Biden administration's policies before that—is to promote the reindustrialization of the United States. Some of that is because they are looking to restore quality jobs in manufacturing. Realistically, though, with automation, the effect on employment is limited.
What it's more about is strategic purpose: to identify the key industries that the United States, Canada or any country needs in order to source and produce things either by itself, domestically, or—in the case of Canada, which doesn't necessarily have the scale of the United States—through a reliable partner or multiple reliable partners, to ensure that it can have those goods. These may be protective equipment during a pandemic, for example, machine tools, critical technology or silicon chips. In the case of a Taiwan conflict, is Silicon Valley ready to suddenly lose access to that quantity of microprocessors? I don't think so.
Canada needs to ensure that it has multiple partnerships with other reliable countries. Certainly, for high technology, the Indo-Pacific is a key place to do this. Whether it's through South Korea, Japan or Australia for certain specialized things; Southeast Asia for the production of lower-cost items; or European countries for other specialized items, Canada needs to ensure that it has secure supply chains. This currently means diversifying away from the United States. It also means not newly becoming more dependent on China for the supply of those things.
The tragedy of this, of course, from an economic perspective, is that it's expensive. The reason China became so dominant and we had this China shock is that it was cheap and easy to make everything in China and ship it elsewhere. That's okay until you have geopolitical differences and discover that Beijing likes to weaponize interdependence. This, unfortunately, requires Canada and other countries to absorb certain costs by diversifying their supply chains for critical technologies and choosing which ones they want to cultivate at home.
It's about stepping back and thinking about what kind of economy Canada wants to have. Do we want to be the Argentina of the 21st century, primarily reliant on agricultural commodities and energy, or do we want to have the advanced manufacturing sector and technological capacity of a G7 country?