In the US, the federal government supersedes the individual states. In Canada, the federal government is only an equal to the provinces and must stay in its lane.
Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.
No. No US state has trade with Canada at more than 15% of state GDP <https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_tra...>, and Canada is a bigger trade partner for the US than China.
And while Canada is a bigger trade partner in total than China, I'm willing to bet that China is more evenly distributed between the states as a trade partner.
As of 2017, international trade was 65% of Canadian GDP, compared to 40% of GDP for interprovincial trade. <https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...>
Another way to think about this: <https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trad...>
I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so.
Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan )
But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company.
Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live )
Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )
Now I remember why I switched from cricket. From time to time, I need data in Europe. On my US phone. That being said I should just switch when appropriate.
Thanks for reminding that.
I took the opportunity to check what the prices are in France now.
€20/month, and €10/month if you bundle it with your internet connection. ( bringing to a total of €40 )
I just checked the operator that historically has the better price. ( free.fr )
Apparently Mint offers a US/Canada/Mexico plan for only a little more.
But when I travel internationally, I get a prepaid SIM when I land. It's cheap enough.
It seems likely that population density is playing a role not just regulations. Sure there’s gaps in every country, but companies need to do more than just cover major cities or what’s the point of having a cellphone?
Less and less, that’s true.
But regulation, borders, culture, habits, buying power, taste…
The first startup I worked for was wildly successful in France. We had dream of conquest of all Europe, of course.
Each new country was a headache, nothing to do with langage. ( language was the easy part )
People wanted different stuff. We were able to make it to Italy and the UK, got laughed out of the room in Germany. Never got more than mild traction in Spain and nobody talked to us in Portugal.
Randomly we got Chinese customers. Super hyped.
Then we realized that while doing all that … we had let our primary market down and that someone else was eating our lunch there.
Got bankrupt a year after.
It was poor execution. But I still think that expending from Nebraska to Missouri is easier :)
It is true you can do business in other states pretty easily.
I haven't been to Quebec for probably 20 years. If it was dramatically cheaper and easier to travel in this country maybe I wouldn't (even briefly) forget that millions of Canadians speak French as their first language.
But interesting point in that it underlines the problems that a Canadian company would have in diversifying across its own nation. A successful Ontarian company would induce significant cost in expanding to Quebec, a remarkably different jurisdiction with important language regulation that needs to be respected, while the same sort of company in Vermont would have less barriers expanding to all its surrounding states.
(Also for completeness sake, one should point out that there are areas of Canada where indigenous languages are significantly spoken (eg. Nunavut) but they are quite small in population)
- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.
Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.
Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.
As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.
Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.
Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.
In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.
Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.