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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kronovan" data-source="post: 9733336" data-attributes="member: 6775134">Well that's the way we had it here in Canada up until the early 90s, before the days of free trade. A number of USA and other Nation's transnational corps had corporate branches here - usually in Greater Toronto or Monreal. And there were distribution/trade centers attached to many of them. Some of the distribution centers were a consortium of a number of companies - especially true for corps that were HQ'd in emergent economies like Japan. And of course their were Canadian owned and established trade/distribution centers. All the major book publishers typically had a corporate branch here and IIRC many (certainly more than now) of their books were printed and bound here.The problem was that products always cost more than they did in their country of origin, even after accounting for the difference in exchange rate. The corporate branch and branch distribution center overhead no doubt added a lot of costs on top of the shipping. Some countries were much better at it though - Japan Corps in particular seemed to be true masters at making the system work for electronic products and autos. As well, we had far more access to products from the UK - my Canadian city was the pacific port for the British Empires' red line trade route, and the trade infrastructure built by it was still a factor in the 80s. It's one of my few regrets about N.A. free trade, that UK products have generally been less available and affordable since.</blockquote>

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