The future of continuing domestic auto manufacturing is over for Canada. It’s time to bite the bullet and open the door to Chinese EVs.
Talks about whether we should allow cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to be sold in Canada have been floating around as the federal government ponders how to address China’s canola tariffs and EV ultimatum.
The Canadian government has had a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese EVs for a while now, essentially blocking them from being sold here. This contrasts with other parts of the world, namely Asia and parts of Europe, that have a reduced tariff amount which allows for the sale of Chinese vehicles but at a state inflated value.
As it stands, most of Canada’s objections to Chinese EV sales have to do with domestic auto production and their unions. However, I don’t think that our reasoning is rational or long term on a national scale.
Simply put, auto manufacturing is done for in Canada. Canadian auto manufacturing tends to involve either American or Japanese car companies that function across the border with the United States, as both U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have readily shown that they are not interested in Canadians making any sort of profit through joint projects.
In his tariff campaign, Trump made it very clear that he thinks Canada is exploiting the American consumer market and has vehemently worked to make Canadian products hard to sell in the U.S.
This devolution in our relationship with the U.S. doesn’t bode well for continued auto production. Corporations like Stellantis have shown that they have no long-term loyalty to Canada with their recent move of a proposed plant from Brampton to Illinois, so why should we stay loyal to them long-term?
A bigger issue, though, is the fact that most auto manufacturers in Canada, namely GM and Stellantis, have failed to innovate past the 2000s in automotive technology and cannot be relied on to address climate concerns or even offer fair pricing.
Tariffs on foreign vehicles have essentially closed off the market and allowed what few manufacturers we have here to demand incredibly steep prices for subpar vehicles, simply because there aren’t that many options.
Tariffs like the decades-old chicken tax have stagnated U.S. auto innovation by preventing the sale of large foreign vehicles, essentially giving the big three manufacturers, Ford, GM and Stellantis, a monopoly over heavy vehicles like SUVs and pick-up trucks.
As a result, the big three no longer offer smaller vehicles (in other words, actual cars) and lack any competitive electric vehicle offerings.
Chinese vehicles, on the other hand, are leagues more advanced, especially with EVs. Since China controls most vast rare Earth metals and the nature of its command economy, they have managed to develop technologies such as dark factories, in which no human is present.
China’s advanced battery technology and incredible range of vehicles are all vastly cheaper than anything that Japan, Europe, Korea or the U.S. could produce, to the extent that certain regions where Chinese vehicles are allowed to be sold have specific competitor vehicles from those companies to compete directly with the Chinese vehicles.
What ends up happening in those regions is that competitor companies usually have to lower the cost of their vehicles because in those freer markets, as Chinese cars are simply too competitive. Take for example Hyundai’s new 30K elective SUV designed to compete with BYD and other Chinese automakers in Asia.
The North American car market is not a free market — in fact, it’s among the more restricted. We sustain fading and lackluster corporations like the big three with billions of taxpayer money while they continue to jack up the price of vehicles and make actual ownership even harder for everyday Canadians and Americans.
The prioritization of CEO bonus checks and legacy corporations have stagnated our nations and is something that needs to be eliminated from our political institutions.
Our reluctance to innovate and try something new is plaguing us and worsening our quality of life at all levels.
Canada is a G7 nation with alarmingly stagnating productivity. However, our leaders’ solution is to prioritize the real-estate values of legacy corporations — like the big four banks (Scotia Bank, RBC, TD and CIBC) — by forcing everyone back to the office, choking the roads.
This will result in lost productivity because of traffic, demoralization and unforgivable inefficiencies for a nation that needs to be more competitive.
Modern work culture means that companies are not in single offices, but inter-city and international, so teams are not and should not be concentrated in a single building if we want to put together the best of the best.
What results from this is the government forcing people to take an online meetings from commercial offices opposed to a home office, which is a huge waste of time and emissions, while completely without purpose and demoralizing since traffic is only getting worse and housing is only getting more expensive.
This archaic desire to avoid any progress and stick with what we’ve always done will sell our economic position to nations that do innovate. We may have at one point manufactured cars in this country, had everyone commute to an office and invested heavily in oil sands, but it’s time to start pivoting because that way of life is no longer compatible with modern demands.
We should be in the process of solving a housing, environment and cost of living multi-crisis. We cannot do that without radical and innovative change. Radical change means adopting new ideas and moving with the times.
Opening the market to Chinese EVs would help by reducing the cost of vehicle ownership, allowing people to own an EV which over its lifetime will be a cleaner climate solution and force innovation and competition in other auto-manufactures like in the rest of the world.
It’s clear that our political leaders do not believe in a vision for this country’s future. Instead, they see only a status quo and whichever CEO needs a bigger bonus. We are too caught up in legacy and nostalgia and have lost the pragmatism that made things work.
To illustrate this point, simply look at brutalist architecture. It was ugly, it was radical and people said it ruined the culture of the area, but guess what? It built the schools and hospitals that people needed, it put roofs over our heads, and it was efficient and affordable.
The solutions of tomorrow may be alien to you and I, but that’s how the world was built. We take brutalism for granted now and some of us maybe even admire it. It was an alien solution that the people hated back then, but their leaders had a vision for the future. Overall, the adoption of novel solutions is what created the golden era of the nostalgic past.
We cannot be afraid of change when the world isn’t afraid to change right in front of us.