Could Canada have become a postwar shipbuilding giant?

Did government inaction and cheap American wartime ships doom other yards, or could Canada have competed?

Governments could not fully anticipate the wartime production surge; with more time before the war, Canada might have expanded into a major merchant-ship producer alongside the United States.

Blaming governments for failing to anticipate the flood of inexpensive American wartime merchant ships would require them to have foreseen the timing and scale of the Second World War. Canada already performed strongly with the yards and Victory-ship capacity it developed. If the war had begun later, that industrial expansion might have progressed far enough to make Canada a major shipbuilding power. In that counterfactual, Canadian and American yards together could have dominated the postwar merchant-ship supply. Hindsight about postwar industrial competition exceeds what policymakers could reasonably plan before the emergency existed.