I’d say “no” to both, but YMMV. They struggled with the launch (their server wasn’t able to handle the capacity, but they eventually upgraded it), and they are only providing minimal updates and some critical fixes. As far as I can tell, they haven’t added anything new. I don’t think Fawkes Games has the resources to make the game much better than it was.

My own personal experience is that it doesn’t crash too much (like, maybe once or twice out of 10-15 hours of playtime). Sometimes it could be server-side or client-side or network related. Best place for updates (ie. to check server status) is their Discord. There’s a subreddit, but, I don’t know if the devs participate or not ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Defiance/ ).

You can play for free, but, there are some limitations (eg. inventory space) that you will come up against fairly quickly. They have a the standard store thing where you buy in-game gems for real money and spend that on stuff (like inventory upgrades). I can’t remember what the costs of the original game were. But, with how they have the game set up, you definitely can “try before you buy”.

Yes I did. I think the original release version, as well as the 2050 update

Playing the revived Defiance game (by Fawkes Games). It’s not a very in-depth mmo, but, it can be fun

I’m not OP, but I’m guessing Fifteen Million Merits (S01E02)

One problem is that a lot of manufacturing has left Canada. So, with an increase in demand for Canadian products, it would take a while to ramp up production. Most likely what will happen is that we would just import more from other countries (most likely China). And, then, much like what happened after the government injected cash into the economy during the pandemic, we’ll suffer more inflation than what is healthy for Canada.

If we had the manufacturing capacity to be self sufficient (oil refinement and gasoline production is a big one that we let USA do), then your idea might work.

However, I don’t think that Canada’s purchasing power (on an individual consumer level) is strong enough to put a dent into USA manufacturing sales… Our population is only approx 1/10th that of the USA.