Ontario Premier Doug Ford isn’t mincing words about Canada’s new electric vehicle deal with China, saying Friday that Chinese manufacturers are gaining a foothold in the country’s auto market at the expense of workers in this country.
“The federal government is inviting a flood of cheap made-in-China electric vehicles without any real guarantee of equal or immediate investments in Canada’s economy, auto sector or supply chain,” Ford said in a statement issued shortly after news of the deal broke.
“Worse, by lowering tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles this lopsided deal risks closing the door on Canadian automakers to the American market, our largest export destination, which would hurt our economy and lead to job losses.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, in a move that marks a major shift in the relationship between the two countries.
Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US. I get why Ford needs to make statements like this. There’s a huge risk of disruption letting Chinese EVs into Canada.
On the flip side, coupling our industry to a burgeoning fascist state that has shown little interest in respecting treaties, trade agreements, and Canada is a stupider and stupider arrangement as every day passes.
So, great, Doug, you’re speaking up for your constituents. It’s just that decades of ghoulish decisions have put Ontario in that position, and something has to give. Being at the whim of Detroit corporations is no way forward.
Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.
So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.
Imagine what could have been had Doug and the gang not canceled all the green projects and diversified our economy. But yay! we’re gonna get tunnels under cars to drive more cars so,we can make more cars to get to work to make more cars.
So instead, we choose to buy from an established dictatorship?
An established dictatorship that you can actually make a deal with and expect it to be respected, and that isn’t currently threatening to annex us with military force.
Better two assholes we can play off of each other than just one. Mongolia has made it work, somehow.
And of course as much trade and ties with Europe as possible.
One which isn’t threatening to destroy us overtly.
Covertly, sure. #oneBelt