Canadian Politics Today

Any country could, but China seems to have them more often than others.  Scientists have been saying since the 2003 SARS that China's wet markets and illegal trafficking in wild animals are a recipe for disaster.

Fair point.

But that's not even the main point. The main point is that while any country could have a disease outbreak, it's much less likely that two or more countries are shut down by disease outbreaks at the same time.  If your production line in China is quarantined,  your line in India might still be going.  Even with this pandemic, where everybody got shut down eventually, I believe that by the time India instituted their own lockdown, China's lockdown was already finished.

Ok but companies will likely see the wisdom in that themselves and make a better network... as part of regular DR (Disaster Recovery) risk assessment.

or... they will see the recent situation as a 'black swan' and deem it unnecessary to do that.

 

Is this check we're writing based on the premise that consumer goods would become more expensive? 

And that we would be all have less money, also.

Because there are actually lots of competitively priced products that don't come from China.  A lot of our textiles come from India and Bangladesh. A lot of our consumer electronics are manufactured in Korea or Vietnam or Malaysia.  If we're looking for cheap labor and dubious environmental practices to exploit, China isn't the only game in town.

But it's not up to us to tell Apple to move to Bangladesh, right ? 

I want to know what "stand up to China" means when we're talking about a country with a giant economy that is 20X our size and who frankly doesn't listen.  What exactly are we using to bargain with them ?

It seems to me that China's main threat is that they will stop buying our lumber and agricultural products... but they're already turning that screw during this Meng Wanzhou dispute.
 

And it costs us.  Our relationships with every government on earth involve trade-offs.   I feel I have to point that out when people start talking about getting tough with China.  Seems to me that Trump was in the best position to do that, and he didn't come away with much if anything.