Canada and the United States have lived next door for so long that proximity began to feel like infrastructure.

Customers were south. Capital was south. Supply chains were south. Markets were south. For decades, much of this arrangement felt less like strategy than geography.

Then somebody asks an uncomfortable question:

**What if the easiest door is no longer free?**

In six interconnected stories, a factory owner loses his largest market overnight, a pension fund debates whether resilience belongs in a portfolio, a western port tries to build a second exit, a technology company discovers the price of staying home, a government attempts to make one project move in one year, and an American customer returns with an offer that is almost too good to refuse.

Nobody gets a painless answer.

New routes cost money. Independence comes with paperwork. Domestic investment can become political investment. Faster approvals create their own risks. And the old relationship may still be the best relationship—once it is no longer the only one.

**CANADA WANTS A PRENUP** is not a forecast and not a prescription. It is a fictional economic thought experiment about comfort, dependence, bargaining power, and the strange moment when a country begins asking what it would actually cost to have another choice.

Because wanting your own key is easy.

Paying for the second door is something else.