Wait so it's expensive to ship stuff with a truck on the same continent but not by truck in one continent then overseas to another continent then truck again to the destination. It could be cheap to do anything in Canada but it's not because of the government. The regulations in Canada are absurd. I used to know a close to executive at one of the largest companies in the world (American company) who was head of the Canadian division for the company. The company was in the process of strategically pulling out of Canada. They went from attempting growth to basically just a satellite maintain what they already had with 0 care for Canada. I asked him why. He explained it was because the cost of doing business in Canada due to meeting government regulations was just too high at every level of the business whether it be payroll, insurance, legal, compliance, etc... The rules were astronomical and just cost too much. He said that Canada is such a small player in the world in terms of commerce, especially since they only have 30m (40m now) people but the Canadian government acts as if they are on par with a country like the USA and demands companies follow all their stringent rules as if they have any leverage to demand this from companies but they really don't because these large companies have the rest of the world to compete for and Canada is small beans so it's not worth the effort given the costs the government puts on businesses.

For a large global company, that makes sense. Forget Canada. Canadian companies can't just forgo Canada so they're forced to playball with the government and these absurd rules and regulations make everything cost so much more.