For decades, Canada could live inside a bargain it did not manage. Taiwan made the chips. China threatened Taiwan. The United States kept the balance from breaking. Canada, like many countries, could assume American power and Asian manufacturing would keep the digital world running.
That bargain is weaker now. President Trump has described Taiwan arms sales as a “negotiating chip” in dealings with China.⁴ The phrase matters because it places Taiwan’s security inside the vocabulary of a transaction. The American industrial answer has also become harder to read. President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act committed tens of billions of dollars to rebuilding U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and research. The Trump administration has since reopened parts of those agreements, slowing some payments and turning what had looked like industrial policy into another negotiation.⁵
Canada does not need to declare the United States unreliable to see the risk. A country that depends on one island for the world’s most advanced chips, and one guarantor to keep that island safe, is depending on a narrow bridge over deep water.
A Taiwan crisis would arrive in Canada as shortage, then price, then dependence. Hospitals would wait for equipment. Automakers would wait for parts. Data centers would wait for processors. Defense planners would wait for systems. AI companies would wait for compute.
Waiting is what dependent countries do.
Canada can do something more useful.
It has spent years behaving like a country with semiconductor ingredients rather than semiconductor ambition. It has clean power, critical minerals, research universities, AI talent, immigration experience, relative institutional stability, and proximity to the American market. Those are industrial assets. They are not yet a strategy.
Canada’s semiconductor story already has a physical address. In Bromont, Quebec, IBM runs one of North America’s largest chip assembly and testing operations. Deb Pimentel, president of IBM Canada, has called advanced packaging “a crucial component” of the semiconductor industry and said IBM’s Bromont plant has “led the world in this process for decades.”⁶
That matters because a chip is not finished when a circuit is etched onto silicon. It still has to be packaged, connected, tested, protected, and integrated into a system. That work lacks the glamour of the leading-edge fab. It is still part of the bottleneck. It is also closer to what Canada can credibly build.
Canada does not need to become Taiwan. It needs to become useful before Taiwan becomes unreachable.
That means focusing on the parts of the chain where Canada can matter: advanced packaging, testing, photonics, compound semiconductors, materials, design support, secure compute, and talent. Canada has pieces of that system already. What it lacks is the discipline to assemble them.
The country also has scale, though scale should not become fantasy. Canada has almost twice Taiwan’s population and more than 240 times its land area. That gives it resources, distance, power options, and room for a larger semiconductor ecosystem. But empty-looking land is not empty. Much of it is northern, remote, expensive to service, environmentally fragile, or subject to Indigenous rights and title. Canada’s advantage is governed space, used carefully.
The first serious conversation should be with TSMC. Canada should not ask for the next Arizona.