Picking a fight with your nearest neighbour is generally not a good idea unless you plan to conquer it.
Israel is picking fights left and right, but it is conquering its neighbours, largely through fraud and trickery, but conquering nonetheless.
Ukraine under the Neo-Nazi regime picked a fight with Russia and lost.
For Canada to pick an economic fight with the United States is the height of folly.
Somebody in Ottawa should tell Carney that Don Diaper is 79 and will hit the skids soon, so it's best not to alienate Washington with tough talk. Canada can't afford it.
Only those who own tonnes of gold and possess big armies can poke giants.
II.
An excerpt from, "The British are coming—for our gold" by Alex Ballingall, Maclean's, April 26, 2012:
On April 2, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney stepped in front of a business crowd in Waterloo, Ont. to speak about the state of Canada’s foreign trade. His message, more or less, was this: we need to break our national reliance on exports to the U.S.–the country is a wounded behemoth, and we would do better to focus on trade with economic up-and-comers. By that the governor probably meant the likes of China and India. But by looking at our trade numbers, one would think Canadian exporters are taking it to mean the U.K. as well.
Over the past decade, the value of Canadian exports to the centre-piece of the Commonwealth have skyrocketed. In 2011, they hit a record high of $18.8 billion, up more than 324 per cent since 2002. The U.K. is now Canada’s second biggest export partner–while China is only third.
The Brits are importing a number of things from Canada: from uranium, nickel and sawdust, to sheets of newsprint and kidney beans. But the real story here is about gold. In 2011, Canada sold to the U.K. a whopping 63 per cent of the $16.8 billion-worth of non-monetary, unwrought gold (which includes gold powder, coins, bars and bullion) it exported worldwide. That was over four times the relatively paltry $2.8 billion of Canuck gold the U.K. bought in 2007.
An excerpt from, "Canada sells off most of its gold reserves" CBC News, February 11, 2016:
Canada is selling off most of its remaining gold reserves, mainly by selling gold coins, figures from the Bank of Canada and Finance Department show.
The country held just $19 million US worth of gold as of last Monday. Through most of 2015, the country's gold reserves stood at more than $100 million US.
Finance Department figures show that Canada sold 41,106 ounces of gold coins in December and another 32,860 ounces of gold coins in January.
. . .Back in the 1960s, Canada held more than 1,000 tonnes of gold. But it began steadily selling off its hoard, and by 2003, the country had just 3.4 tonnes.
Now, Canada has less than one tonne.
An excerpt from, "Which Country Owns the Most Gold? Gold Reserves By Nation" BullionVault.com, May 12, 2025:
At the start of the 21st Century, all of the Top 10 central bank gold nations were 'legacy' holders, sitting on massive reserves built during or in the years following World War Two.
Led then as now by the United States, eight of those Year 2000 giants were in Western Europe, and the other was Japan. Whereas today, Russia comes in 5th place, with China in 6th and India in 8th.
In fact, Turkey would be in 10th position, ahead of the Netherlands, if we counted commercial-bank gold holdings − needed to back their customers' gold investment accounts − as part of its sovereign-state reserves like the central bank in Ankara does on its official data.
What changed to drive this surge of non-Western gold buying?
First came the early 2000s' rush of globalization. It poured Western consumers' cash into emerging-market nations' central-bank reserves, buying gas and crude oil from Russia plus manufactured goods from China and India. It also coincided with ill-advised gold bullion sales by many Western nations, made at what proved to be the eve of gold's dramatic 21st Century gains to date.
Then, around 2010, the US and European financial crisis saw emerging-market central banks buy gold to spread their portfolio risk away from the Dollar. That move has since continued, but with a sharp geopolitical edge, since Russia was hit by Western financial sanctions over its invasions of Ukraine, first annexing the region of Crimea in 2014 and then attempting to take the whole country since 2022.
That has seen demand to buy gold for national central bank reserves spread among many smaller nations. Because Washington and Brussels have, in the eyes of many, chosen to 'weaponize' their currencies as a tool of geopolitical control. Gold, in contrast, is no one's to control through bank clearing systems or outright default. So it shines as a way of diversifying exposure to the Dollar, to the Euro, and to the political actions of Western governments.
