Premier Doug Ford is angry, real angry, about Chinese-made EVs. Just ask him. Or don’t — he’ll bring it up. So it was at Monday’s Rural Ontario Municipalities Association conference in Toronto, where Ford railed against the deal, announced late last week, to reduce (not eliminate) the tariffs on some (not all) cars made in China (up to around 90,000 several years from now). Notwithstanding all those caveats, Ford is steamed.
“Promising they’ll manufacture… well, they aren’t going to be manufacturing over 200,000 vehicles anytime soon here in Ontario, and that’s the breakeven point for any auto manufacturer here,” Ford said, before pivoting to accusations about cybersecurity. “When you get on your cellphone, it’s the Chinese that are going to be listening to your — I’m not making this stuff up — they’re going to be listening to your telephone conversation.” (While Ford did have prepared remarks about the China deal, this digression was, perhaps unsurprisingly, adlibbed.)
Sorry to break it to you, folks, but if you drive a newish-model car, the manufacturer is spying on you. If China wants that data, they can buy it on the open market. And anything they can’t buy, they can collect at vastly lower cost via means more direct than “sell Canadians EVs and hope they drive around sensitive areas.” If Ford is suddenly seized with concerns about the privacy rights of Ontario motorists, I look forward to the introduction of a beefy personal-privacy law in the spring sitting of the legislature; I’m not holding my breath.
Perhaps the most amusing of Ford’s assertions is that, while under this agreement Chinese imports will be only 49,000 vehicles in the coming year — just a few per cent of Canada’s total auto production — this represents a whopping 33 per cent of electric-vehicles sales and is somehow a critical threat to the EV sector here.
There are a few words one could use to describe Ford’s sudden concern for the level of EV sales in this province and this country, but “chutzpah” is a relatively family friendly one I can use. The Tories came to power going to war against every measure aimed at making EVs more accessible to Ontario households — tearing out EV chargers, reversing building-code rules that would have made it easier to add home chargers — and even as their attitude has softened in recent years, they still can’t bring themselves to actually give their full-throated support to EVs. We know this because, earlier in Ford’s speech, he called on the federal government to eliminate the already-weakened federal regulations requiring automakers to make EVs available.
Yes, a trivial number of Chinese auto imports can represent a much larger share of the smaller EV sector. That’s precisely because the government of the largest province, representing 40 per cent of car buyers in this country, has been happy to benefit from other jurisdictions’ support for EVs, all while suffering from a kind of policymaking schizophrenia: it wants the jobs that EV manufacturing can bring but apparently doesn’t want anyone to actually buy EVs — certainly not if the price is even modest consumer subsidies.
The Ford government’s inconsistency isn’t new; it’s been a theme of at least the past year, as Ontario hoped that someone else would bail it out of the quandary it’s in. But Ford’s complaints just expose the more fundamental underlying problem with Ontario’s position in all this: “keep Chinese imports out forever” was a perfect example of an unsustainable policy.
By “unsustainable,” I don’t mean in the environmental sense of the word (though obstructing the adoption of electric vehicles is also unsustainable in that sense). I mean simply in the sense that, in the words of Hebert Stein, “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” We were always going to allow Chinese auto imports in at some point; the question was under what conditions and whether we could extract some advantage for Canada.
There’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about whether the deal announced last week maximizes the gain to Canada. But, on the face of it, allowing as many EVs in from China as we were allowing prior to 2024’s tariffs is hardly a radical measure. And in international relations, nothing is written in stone, particularly right now. If China doesn’t live up to its side of the bargain, we could always bring tariffs back.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s critics, including Ford, fear that once Chinese EVs have become widespread and an accepted part of the landscape here, they’ll be hard to displace. But that’s true only if consumers (who are also voters) come to accept or even demand them. In other words, the notion that this will be impossible to reverse already concedes that the Chinese are making better, cheaper cars than our coddled, subsidized domestic automakers are capable of. The next question has always been: “So what are we actually protecting Canadian consumers from?”
Ford had years to think of a compelling answer to an obvious question and failed to do so. That’s rough for him, but it doesn’t prove that Carney’s deal is a bad one.
Donate Now