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.
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.