Canada will soon be Cuba:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/rusting-out-how-canadas-factories-are-falling-behind-rivals-and-how-to-turn-it-around-5997910?
“On factory floors across Canada, aging machinery hums in plants that are investing less and producing fewer goods than competitors. While other advanced economies upgrade and automate, Canada’s manufacturing sector has been losing ground for years, and experts warn it’s set to get worse without major policy changes.

Lagging productivity, heavy compliance burdens, provincial fragmentation, and trade instability are squeezing the manufacturing sector and clouding long-term planning, according to several experts The Epoch Times spoke to. Compounding those pressures is chronically low capital investment that has slowed modernization and weakened competitiveness.

“Our businesses are literally rusting out,” David Leis, CEO of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, told The Epoch Times. He argued that years of red tape, weak competition, and neglect have left many firms slower to modernize and less able to compete globally. In these conditions, productivity stalls, investment hesitates, and manufacturers gradually lose ground to more agile international rivals.

Real investment in industrial machinery and equipment dropped to its lowest level on record last year, and Bank of Canada data shows U.S. labour productivity running roughly 40 percent higher than Canada’s.
Leis says a key factor behind the decline of Canada’s manufacturing sector is a lack of investment, which he said is significantly lagging behind the United States.

He says that manufacturing competitiveness is firmly tied to capital investment in machinery, automation, software, upgrades, and plant expansion. “If capital has a choice between investing in Canada or investing in a low-regulation state in the United States, the choice is increasingly obvious,” he said.

Real investment in industrial machinery and equipment in Canada fell to its lowest point ever recorded in the second quarter of last year, according to a report from the National Bank of Canada.
The bank described Canada’s widening productivity gap with the United States as “appalling,” warning that the country’s declining performance could render its manufacturing sector increasingly “irrelevant” within global supply chains.

The National Bank’s report faulted “years of excessive regulation” and “a chronic lack of ambition by successive governments” to build domestic value-added manufacturing.

If firms don’t invest, productivity lags, leading to rising costs. Plants then decide to close, reduce hours, or relocate, says University of Calgary economist Garret Fellows.

“If there’s insufficient capital investment, conventional economics predicts that labour productivity will fall or at best it will grow more slowly, which is exactly what is happening if we compare Canada to the rest of the G7 economies,” Fellows said in an interview.

Tax and Regulations

On top of the trade turmoil, many manufacturers are hampered by regulatory, tax, and domestic trade barriers that prevent growth and discourage capital investment, according to Laure-Anna Bomal, an economist at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).
Interprovincial trade barriers coupled with extensive compliance requirements and regulations are a major constraint on manufacturing growth, she added