Daryl

Agriculture is relevant only as far as you proclaim to to be. The discussion is neither about agriculture nor agricultural productivity. Yield per acre is now a much better indicator of agricultural success than farm labor productivity.

I have absolutely no idea where you got the notion that I thought Canada's educational system is inferior to that of America. That notion is just silly. What I am saying is that the government is not putting enough public money into our highly successful and highly effective apprenticeship programs. A program is only as influential to our economy as the number of students who can get into it.

Digging deeper, something is amiss with the reference the article sites.

https://nam.org/mfgdata/facts-about-manufacturing-expanded/

According to this cited article, Item 4 there are 13 million American manufacturing jobs.

Buried well down, item 15, foreign-owned firms employed 5.3 million workers in America in the manufacturing sector.

The way I was taught math, that represents around 40% of the American manufacturing jobs are in non-American-owned companies. Yet the article identifies this (minimizing the impact) as only 16.4%. Are Americans really this bad at math? Or this good at obfuscation? But 40% is really signifying 'branch plant economy', similar to Canada..

What has devastated the Canadian lumber industry are the forest fires and the Pine Bark Beetle.

The irony of this is that China is now doing this to the US - America is rapidly becoming a 'spoke' in the wheel of the Chinese 'hub'. For example, General Electric Appliance Division is now owned by a Chinese company Haier, and all GE Appliances built in America are now Chinese models, all profits going back to China. So even if America buys 'made-in-America', China still gets richer.

The value of the Canadian dollar is dependent on the CPI only to the extent that the market relies on the CPI to assess what the market is willing to pay for the dollar. Interest rates probably have a greater influence. The BoC can influence the exchange rate of the dollar to a limited extent by influencing supply/demand through the purchase/sale of Canadian debt instruments, but that is indirect through interest rates. China can influence the price of the Canadian dollar by either selling off or buying Canadian dollars in its foreign currency reserves.

In point of fact, China COULD theoretically tan the American dollar by selling off the trillion it has in American currency reserves, but that would be a one-shot weapon and it would also cause pain in China, since China now owns so much of American industry.

It depends on exactly what you mean by 'bricked'. Take over the operation of the car, or just cause it to stop functioning? Teslas are easy to disable remotely. Just botch up the navigation system. But to cause them to deliberately crash? Takeover the complete control of the car?

Not completely. Even given China's enormous manufacturing capacity, there are still gaps in it. China very definitely prioritizes the manufacturing, even after the opening up of the economy to private entrepreneurs. For instance, it has delegated cities of well over a million people each to a dedicated task - one to robotics and the other to quantum computing. Everything in the city - infrastructure, education, facilities, governance - is directed towards these focus centers of excellence.

If it is not high on the government priority list, it is fair game to outside countries to fill the gap. America just does not want to manufacture what China wants. If Canada decides to do so,the opportunities are there.

The way the currency is valued in China is very different than how it is valued in Canada. Canada still let the dollar float, meaning the market to a great extent determines its vale, The Canadian dollar is worth exactly what someone wants to buy/sell it for in another currency. China uses a fixed currency. It does not float. Canada used to have a fixed dollar against the US dollar.

The problem in Canada is that the apprentice program is government-controlled and monitored. If Canada put a lot more money into apprentice training, the Canadian tech industry would love to have them. It is not the wage rate that is the impediment, it is the training involved to get there. It is not the Canadian private sector that is the problem, it is the Conservative sector that just does not want to spend public money in training the work force. Private companies have absolutely no say in how Canadian high schools are operated, and what their spending priorities are.

And again agriculture and farming productivity has nothing to do with manufacturing productivity, nor with the statistics for the manufacturing sector.

'Farm workers' are not included in manufacturing, they are in agriculture. Mentioning farm workers makes the rest of your 'facts' suspect. In point of fact, the agricultural labor market in America is giving the manufacturing labor market a run for it money, in terms of 'total wages'.

As the article states, the remaining US industries are primarily automated, requiring fewer employees. Mexico is becoming highly automated, as the American corporate world is building the automated plants in Mecico, not America, and a lot of US manufacturing jobs are leaving for Mexico. The jobs left after automation are usually low-wage 'floor sweeper/packager' jobs.

However, all of the manufacturing jobs Trump is trying to get back are all in the low productivity range. He wants to bring back mining jobs, for instance, in an industry that is already highly automated, or steel industry hard labor jobs in mothballed obsolete steel plants that are just not viable anymore. The only way the US will bring back mining jobs is to start digging mines by hand again. On the other hand, most Canadian industries are already highly productive. If they were not, at the Canadian minimum wage they would not be competitive. Most of the Canadian auto industry jobs have gone high automation, just to be competitive. Canadian manufacturing wages are actually higher than American wages. American wages are in the bottom level of income. The Southern 'right to work' wage rate is below the poverty level. We pay our auto workers more, but they are far more productive than American workers.

The piece that is missing is that Canada by and large has a population that has obtained a much higher tech education level than the US. Whereas the US just does not have the population sufficiently educated enough to do the jobs required in the remaining high-tech high-productive manufacturing demands, Canada has the educated labor force to actually run these highly automated high production machines.

That is why China is beating the pants off the US when it comes to automation. Not only is China and Asia in general building a highly automated highly productive manufacturing base, they are producing the graduates who can design, build, run, and repair these machines.

The referenced article does address the issue that American manufacturing wages are declining into the slave labor category. The decline of unionization has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, Chinese manufacturing wages are going up, moving the employees into the middle income group.

The rule of thumb is not just bout population, but in applying it to other comparisons, so I think the 1 to 10 ratio is usually 'close enough'. Certainly, if the US closes their doors completely it immigration, and as well keeps removing 'aliens', that ratio will certainly skew more and more in Canada's favor.