The tiny part of the country in Ontario, where American companies employ Canadians to make vehicles primarily for sale in the USA it seems, should never have been allowed to lobby for protectionist tariffs, thus blocking access to cheaper EVs for the entire country. At the very least, they should’ve HAD A PRODUCT that we could all buy instead, that was fully Canadian from a Canadian owned company. The tariffs that were put in place were uncalled for, and largely about Ford bending over for big American businesses. It’d be like saying no one in eastern Canada is allowed to import lumber from outside the country, cause BC has softwood lumber disputes with the US – except even that isn’t quite the same, as BC could provide lumber to other provinces. Ontario got this giant tariff blockade in place, offering nothing. Government shouldn’t elevate the interests of a small minority, especially one with foreign corporate owners, over the interests of the broader country.

One of the themes in Doug Fords own Anti-Tariff ad that’s caused Trump to get all pissy, is that Government shouldn’t be artificially protecting industries with tariffs – innovation requires competition. We’ve seen countless stories where US Car CEOs admit China and Asia in general has ‘beaten’ them in innovating in this space. The auto tariffs are exactly the kind of tariff that Ford is trying to make a case are ‘bad’ with his ad.

If GM and them don’t want to build EVs in Canada, have a crown corp or some other investment group pick up the factory space and set about getting a fully Canadian made EV, that can be provided to Canadians for a price competitive with foreign EVs – or at least in the same general ball park. It’d seem sensible, though I don’t know the specific requirements, that if the USA is currently ditching EVs, that these corporations may aswell move that whole production line up to Canada and/or Mexico. And if they don’t want to, or if they want to just ‘shut down’ plants and fire people… well, that’s a lot of industrial space, and trained workers, needing work. So put em to work.

Too bad we don’t have the know how or the capacity or resources to build our own EVs.

Oh wait…

It’s too bad nobody had the foresight to build a Canadian EV for everyone.

I doubt they’ll drop 'em completely as to not decimate Ontario’s auto sector, which I’m a part of. That would be a political suicide. I think we’ll see a foreign direct investment (FDI) promise plus some tariff adjustment that could help reverse this:

And help with that:

The financial picture for car buyers gets even uglier when you look at the average transaction price (meaning the actual selling price, excluding tax) for new vehicles. It was $53,100 in 2023, according to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants. That’s up 29 per cent from $41,200 in 2019 and up 59 per cent from $33,400 in 2014. Adjusting for inflation, the increase from 2014 and 2023 is 30 per cent (And no, cars have arguably not become 30 per cent better during that time.)

AutoTrader’s Canadian online data shows average new-vehicle asking prices (meaning advertised prices on AutoTrader) have finally started to soften, dropping to $65,219 at the end of 2024 from a peak of $67,817 in September, 2023. But, let me be clear, $65,219 is still a lot of money for a car.

Src

Either way it’ll be a sign for how this relationship reset will go forward. Whether it’ll be coercive, cooperative, etc.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

The US is abandoning EVs and they’re dropping their EV tooling which we were just investing in. And we’re mostly tied to them.

If we built the cars here it would be okay, but Subaru imports cars and are affordable, I don’t think China will bother building them here.

While you’re all trying to figure out China and the US and oil geopolitics and greenhouse gases and such, I’ll be riding in a European, Korean or Japanese EV M’kay? Kay.