GET YOUR HAND OFF MY CAUCUS!
This actually made me laugh. Thank you, I needed it.
US automakers broke their deals on running factories here. We have no native auto brands (other than attempted startups) building factories.
No need to protect US brand pricing anymore, let’s make cars affordable to Canadians
I agree with the sentiment, but there are a bunch of US car factories still running in Canada, despite Stellantis breaking their agreement.
The federal and Ontario governments will need to balance: keeping the jobs associated with existing factories, attracting Chinese factories, lowering costs for Canadian consumers, dealing with climate change, and placating Trump.
I don’t envy them.
Canadian auto-parts companies need to join together to make a Canadian car company. They built a demonstrator model, time to put that knowledge to work.
Yup. That’s a difficult balancing act. Thing is, nobody wants North American cars except North Americans. The rest of the world is going to EVS while we spend billions (which Stellantis is still in debt for IIRC) propping up and industry that has retrenched back to huge gas guzzlers.
It is reminiscent of the 1970s energy crisis. We bailed out Chrysler (and Ford?) while they surrendered market to smaller, more efficient, European and Japanese imports.
From what I can tell, car manufacturers outside North America are quietly being gobbled up by Chinese companies. Some of those manufacturers are producing EVs, which are often paid for with government subsidies. Meanwhile, we’re rolling back those subsidies and failing to build our EV infrastructure.
Seriously? your government can’t or won’t acknowledge the challenges of transitioning to renewables oriented vehicles so you complain that foreign companies aren’t investing to create the infrastructure you need. This, while you double down on oil sands, gas guzzlers from mercan designers and indicate in every way possible that you’re not interested in EVs.
God forbid regular people can afford to buy a daily driver EV
Copypasta:
We should be reducing our import of Chinese developed technology, “smart” devices, phones, and EVs in particular. Every Chinese business big enough to play at the global scale has the government in it’s power structure. They don’t necessarily dictate business decisions but every bit of data collected is by default accessible by the government.
Having a significant fraction of a country driving around in Chinese EVs gives an insane amount of information to the Chinese government for free. And it’s not just direct information either like the driver’s identity, with millions of cars on the road a lot can be inferred, like if the parking lots at military bases suddenly fill up on a Tuesday afternoon or traffic between a high value person’s home and an airport gets unusually slow.
Cars have cellular modems, they have wifi and bluetooth hardware, if a particular person’s device was identified, for example, at a political meeting then that person could be trivially tracked by the dozens of Chinese cars and “smart” devices that they pass in a day. The information could be smuggled home along with all the normal diagnostic, update and service info. It is not in our best interest to let the Chinese government track individuals, be it politicians, expats, or activists.
This could be done today by the our government, and it is to some extent, to identify, and locate, protesters and criminals by their mobile devices but it takes time and access to equipment and logs that the government does not always own. A competent adversary who owns millions of devices in your country can do in seconds what takes law enforcement weeks to accomplish via conventional means.
Remember that China was caught operating their own “police” force around the world not long ago, they will take advantage of any opportunity they are given to spy on other countries and gain political control.
China doesn’t plan for the next fiscal quarter they plan for the next quarter century, and Canada’s resources are in their sights.
See when trump says paid actors are protesting him, i think he’s funding this kind of shit.
Yes, this is incredibly non-controversial. Which cars do you replace them with? American ones?
Fuck man. This is such a shit situation.
We need new cars NOW. But what we ought to be doing is expanding rail infrastructure and public transit.
K, but transit takes 4-10 years to build and will still never be able to cover cases like transporting the truly frail and sickly, large amounts of stuff, or going to remote and sparse places, because the last mile edge of the network is still a last mile at minimum, especially in inclement weather.
Cars are still going to exist for the long term forseeable future, we can try and minimize their use by providing better alternatives but we still need to plan for a future where they exist.
Yeah, I mean it’s as Carney said in his speech:
We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be
The guy is in the big fucking chair. Right now he has the power to steer the future where we want it to be. But he ain’t going to do it because he can’t think outside the bank. We need someone with more vision and more guts.
Europe, Japan, Korea. They have their own problems too but it’s the USA and China that are actively threatening Canada.
It’s bizarre because the scales have really tipped.
3 years ago, China wanted to directly interfere with Canada for the purpose of stacking the government to be more “Pro-China”, and that’s an active threat for sure. The USA just wanted favorable trade conditions and general support on the world stage.
Fast forward to now, the USA is actively trying to destabilize and divide Canada. They want a weaker nation. Seed dissert. Makes the country easier to push around. China… still obviously wants Canada to be more “Pro-China”, but for Canada to be what they want… they still want a strong Canada. A strong Canada could be a vocal counterbalance. One in disarray can not.
So, while it’s true that both countries are actively threatening Canada, their idealized vision for a Canada that can be exploited are basically polar opposites. A strong Canada willing to break ranks w/ the USA, vs a fractured weakened country thar can’t afford to.
Did you never care until Trump that you were buying so many US cars? What threat is China to Canada?
Bicycle
