this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
53 points (92.1% liked)
Canada
11715 readers
715 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Anmore (BC)
- Burnaby (BC)
- Calgary (AB)
- Comox Valley (BC)
- Edmonton (AB)
- East Gwillimbury (ON)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kingston (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Niagara Falls (ON)
- Niagara-on-the-Lake (ON)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Sarnia (ON)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Squamish (BC)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Whistler (BC)
- Windsor (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- Buy Canadian
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Canadian Skincare
- Churning Canada
- Quebec Finance
- Canada Grown Business
🗣️ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
🍁 Social / Culture
- Ask a Canadian
- Bières Québec
- Canada Francais
- Canadian Gaming
- EhVideos (Canadian video media)
- First Nations
- First Nations Languages
- Indigenous
- Inuit
- Logiciels libres au Québec
- Maple Music (music)
Rules
- Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am not sure why you posted all of those links that support what I stated, and then tried to argue exactly the opposite. I have never argued that the individual countries that make up BRICS are not doing very, very well. That is why China and America only make up about half of the world GDP. But nothing in any of your links indicates that the organization called BRICS is nothing more than a photo-op, as these countries are doing nothing but fighting each other, certainly there is no co-operation or consensus as to what to do. They would still rather cut each others' throats than do a co-operative venture. China is the only one pushing some form of common belt-and-road initiative.
And the links regarding China all point to what I said - China is turning towards its domestic market, and is looking to export high value items while switching low-value production to its home market. But even there, the other Asian countries are switching to the low-end consumer goods, and exporting them to China. China's middle income population, twice the size of the entire American population, is now creating a demand that actually out-strips the capacity of Chinese manufacturing to meet. Put another way, all of the manufacturing capacity that China was using to meet the American demand, is not even close to the capacity needed to meet the Chinese domestic demand. Every toaster that is shipped to the US is one less toaster for a Chinese family, and the Chinese really, really want that toaster.
And you completely missed that part about small scale nuclear reactors, that can be mass produced and are currently in production. Although Europe came late to the game, they are ramping up quickly, thanks to Russia cutting off the flow of cheap energy. Even Germany, that previously swore they would never have nuclear power, is pushing for the switchover. The timeline is 5 to 7 years from now.
https://www.trendingtopics.eu/eu-bets-e200-million-on-small-nuclear-reactors/
Actually, Canada doubled LNG sales out of BC in just one year.
https://shippingmatters.ca/lng-canada-brings-second-train-online-doubling-export-capacity/
And your links to the European manufacturing situation are out of date. The recovery has already started.
https://pluralia.com/en/news/eurozone-manufacturing-recovers/
What I keep pointing out here is that individual countries that make up BRICS are doing well because of BRICS. That's the system of trade they all participate in that's centred on China which is at the core of BRICS industrial development.
I've repeatedly explained that BRICS is not in a business of having ideological alignment, It's a trade org, plain and simple. The only thing you mentioned that's at all relevant is that BRICS still haven't agreed on a common currency. This stuff takes time to do, and the fact that it hasn't happened yet is certainly not an indication of BRICS not being functional.
Once again, you could've just googled the info yourself. But here are just a few examples for you.
You might be slightly misinterpreting the core concept behind the dual circulation strategy. It is definitely true that Beijing wants to boost domestic consumption and insulate their economy from geopolitical shocks but they are absolutely not doing that by sacrificing their global export engine. Dual circulation is basically designed to make the internal domestic market and the external international market reinforce each other rather than treating them as a zero sum game. The idea that Chinese manufacturing capacity cannot keep up with its own domestic demand and that exporting a toaster somehow takes a toaster away from a local family actually completely contradicts the current macroeconomic reality over there.
Right now China is dealing with massive structural overcapacity and significant deflationary pressures precisely because their factories produce vastly more goods than their domestic middle class can afford to absorb. Their existing capacity is exactly why they are currently flooding global markets with everything from everyday consumer items to advanced electric vehicles and green energy tech. They are definitely trying to move up the value chain and they are offshoring some low end production to places like Vietnam but they still need global export markets to keep their industrial base running and prevent domestic employment problems. So rather than turning inward and leaving the global market behind they are actually trying to dominate both spheres simultaneously by using a strong domestic base to build bulletproof supply chains while aggressively expanding their export footprint.
And the point you evidently missed is that Germany doesn't have 5 to 7 years. It's in a crisis right now with its industries collapsing. In 5-7 years Germany is going to be completely fucked. Also, it wasn't Russia that cut off the flow of cheap gas. It was the EU making an idiotic decision not to buy Russian gas directly. A pretty big difference there.
The second train online in Kitimat and hitting that 14 million tonnes per year mark might be a milestone for the Canadian economy but you really have to zoom out and look at the Middle East to understand the actual scale of the global gas trade. When you compare the BC setup to what Qatar was doing until Hormuz closed, the volume difference is staggering. LNG Canada is celebrating reaching its maximum current capacity of 14 million tonnes after years of complex development and billions in investment. Meanwhile Qatar is sitting on a baseline capacity of 77 million tonnes per annum and they were actively executing the massive North Field expansion project. That expansion alone was going to add several massive new trains that will push their total output to 126 million tonnes in the next couple of years and eventually to 142 million tonnes by the end of the decade. To put that into perspective the amount of brand new capacity Qatar was just bolting onto their existing infrastructure is essentially equivalent to building four or five entirely new LNG Canada facilities from scratch. Canada is like a boutique craft brewery operating in a market dominated by an industrial beverage conglomerate. It's not replacing the LNG that's off the market now, not even close.
Most of the links I gave you are from this year. Again, I keep explaining this, and you keep ignoring it. But structural issues have not gone away. Europe lost access to cheap energy, and that problem has not been solved. Therefore, no meaningful recovery is possible. If you look at the actual numbers in your link it's very clear there's no real change happening:
The deals you mentioned are routine between-country deals. They would have been made with or without BRICS the organization. Even in these cases, BRICS was just a photo op. to make it look like BRICS the organization was meaningful. You keep refining your definition, and each refinement comes closer and closer to my allegation that it is just a photo op. Did these countries REALLY make these deals just because of BRICS? They did so out of necessity and opportunity, not because of 'friendly camaraderie and BRICS organization relations'.
China does not have an overcapacity structural problem, it has an employment problem. The Chinese insist on full employment. In order to build the huge middle income group, it needed well-paying manufacturing jobs. So it encouraged investment in production capacity to create employment. That employment drove demand, to absorb the excess production. China is definitely having a problem with coordinating the two objectives. That is, the easiest way to reduce capacity is to close manufacturing lines. However, that leads to unemployment, which China can not tolerate. So it keeps the lines running. The easiest solution, of course, is to insist that the average Chinese citizen replaces their toaster (consumer goods) every year. The West did this by 'planned obsolescence' and 'designed weaknesses'. But China takes a different approach - they will maintain production, maintain employment, but continue to grow the middle income group to take up the slack.
The other problem China has, with regards to full employment, is that they have been extremely effective in introducing automation into almost everything, including tunneling, ship building, driverless transportation, and even road building. The more they introduce automation, the fewer jobs they need, and thus the more manufacturing capacity they need to absorb the work force. I suspect the solution will be a shorter work week.
(https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/china-employment-law-2025-996-is-no-longer-okay/)
They are also doing something that the West refused to do. They are heavily investing through loans in their Belt and Road initiative to raise the standard of living in the former third world countries, specifically to produce a larger export market for their goods. It remains to be seen if this strategy worked - Vietnamese, for instance, saw their standard of living escalate drastically, but they are now exporting to the same market the Chinese hoped to export to. The Law of Unintended Consequences.
All the deals I listed are done within the framework of BRICS. That's literally the whole point of BRICS, it brings countries together, and facilitates economic activity. You're basically making a straw man where you claim that BRICS needs to be something it's not, and then you argue that it's a failure because not this thing you declared it to be. And you refuse to engage with the reality of what it is and the actual purpose of the organization.
Meanwhile, the reality is that China is still a developing country. And it still has hundreds of millions of people who live in poverty. Their approach is to continue developing poor regions which is what's driving consumption. They don't need people to replace toasters very year, because they have plenty of legitimate development happening. And because they are working with the rest of the developing world and helping them raise their standard of living, they're literally creating future markets for their industries right now.
These are the BRI investments you're talking about, and it seems like a sound strategy. While countries benefiting from this are starting to take over lower ends, China is simply moving up the value chain here. I don't think this is some sort of an unintended or unforeseen consequence.
Finally, if automation does start replacing manual labor at scale, which is possible, I also expect shorter work week and reduction in work hours will be the outcome. This is a net positive for society. It's literally what having automation should result in, people having more free time to enjoy their lives.
The whole problem with automation only exists in a capitalist society where it's deemed that people have to work to live. China doesn't have this problem because people already own housing, food is cheap, and they have affordable healthcare and education that's not run for profit. If they end up in a situation where there's not enough work to go around, they can effectively implement universal basic services where everybody has necessities of life guaranteed as a human right. People who want to work and have skills that are useful will continue to apply themselves. This seems to be the whole goal with achieving basic socialist modernization that China set for 2035. http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2021-04/06/content_77380652_8.htm
It's important to understand that Chinese system is not just a mirror of western liberal capitalism. The decisions that would be made here in face of mass automation are not the same decisions China will make.