Canada has huge reserves of oil, natural gas, minerals, timber. Americans need that.
Canada doesn’t need anything americans sell
Adobe Photoshop 👉 Use GIMP or Affinity.
Adobe Illustrator 👉 Use Inkscape or Affinity.
Word and Excel 👉 LibreOffice is better. No AI shit and it won’t spy on you.
Microsoft Windows 👉 Use Linux. It’s more secure anyway.
General Motors, Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, Tesla 👉 We don’t need shitty american cars. Buy Hyundai, Toyotas, Honda, Volkswagen.
Apple iPhone 👉 Buy a Samsung
Starbucks Coffee 👉 Just drink local coffee.
McDonalds 👉 Buy from A&W or Harveys
Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Four Seasons 👉 Go to Canadian hotels
Amazon 👉 Fuck Jeff Bezos. Buy from your local stores.
Maxwell House Coffee 👉 Balzac’s Coffee Roasters is Canadian
Tourism 👉 Visit Quebec, Banff National Park, Niagara Falls, Vancouver Island, Johnstone Strait, Yoho National Park. Go north to watch beautiful Arctic landscapes. At least you won’t be shot and killed.
Boeing 👉 Buy Airbus. At least they won’t crash.
What do americans sell that Canadians actually need? Nothing. They just sell convenience. Their products are often substandard
The CAD is correlated to the USD for macroeconomic reasons mostly, and BRICS isn’t an economic trade agreement that has a “join” process. It’s just a popular term for the largest non-US/EU centered economies. (But sure, let’s continue expanding the partnerships with Asia and Mercosul)
BRICS is an international organisation, and it does have a joining process. Canada can apply for membership, but Russia and/or Iran might veto.
I stand corrected, the thing did evolve indeed into an organization that has a formal membership process, and it now consists of 10 countries. TIL, and thank you for the link.
But then again, it is really not an economic trade agreement, and I don’t know if there’d be much benefit for Canada joining it, as we are enticing enough as a market for investments without getting BRICS funding for infrastructure projects.
It’s more a geo-political organisation than an economic one, closer parallels to G7 than NAFTA or ASEAN, but there are certainly economic agreements between its members.
The point however is that you’re basically correct that is not at all the organisation that the original comment implies it is.
Edit. There is no “BRICS funding” it’s not the EU. It’s a loose collective of countries who claim some alignment, although it’s really just more like Bender from Futurama saying “fine, you won’t let me join your club, then I’ll make my own with Blackjack and hookers”
This thread has shown that my understanding of BRICS is very outdated but, as far as I remember, one of the main things that come out of BRICS is direction on who’s getting infrastructure funding, like China, Brazil and India making investments on port building and logistics, which helps streamlining trade between them. That’s what I mean with funding, I don’t suppose there’s a “BRICS bank” but it’s the forum where you can convince China that the next port expansion project they pay for is yours.