Canadians don’t like buying things made in China despite buying the majority of our goods from China.
I have no idea if you think we should buy less from China, or stop complaining about buying from China, but either way you’re right about the hypocrisy, or at least lack of self awareness.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that a lot of things not-made-in-China simply don’t exist here.
In this instance, I think people need to separate the art from the artist so to speak. The Chinese EV’s are already doing well in other countries and it can’t only be because they are cheaper though I’ll admit that is likely a large factor. Why not buy the best product for your money?
We should remove tariffs for European cars as well. Why can’t I buy a small 4wd in Canada, when they have them all over?
6 foot bed, 2 seats, 4x4, electric. Why is that so much to ask? I don’t need a 45 foot surrogate penis to get to work and move furniture/landscaping/tools.
I think the tariff should come with a mandate to our domestic car manufacturers. They should have to produce an EV under some cost within a certain amount of time or they are going to cancel the tariff.
That’s not at all a bad idea; it certainly avoids Harley Davidson syndrome, which is what we’re looking down the tubes of right now.
What does the Harley Davidson syndrome refers to?
In the 1980s, faced with a crisis of their own making, Harley went crying to Ronald Reagan for tariffs on imported bikes. Reagan, free-market champion that he was, obliged.
This resulted in
- Harley getting a handicap, allowing them to keep doing what they were doing, selling uncompetitive and overpriced bikes and just prolonging the inevitable.
- Because Harley didn’t have to try nor evolve, and because their bikes were overpriced and uncompetitive, their international sales, which were never great, dried up.
- Honda et al, because they were at a cost disadvantage, had to make a better product for the same money, which they did. Basically every standard and cruiser product Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki and especially Honda made rubbed Harley’s nose in it, notably the Gold Wing.
- Because Harley didn’t have to try, while the JDM makes had to try extra hard and everything cost more, the motorcycle market as a whole collapsed
- Again, because Harleys were not competitive but were anachronistic and could get away with it because of Mama Reagan, what few bikes did sell to new riders weren’t Harleys, and Harley didn’t bother to try new things, missing out on the adventure-bike boom and losing at least two generations of street-bike riders.
Basically, it set Harley up for failure and nutured mediocrity.
Tariffs, if they don’t come with government pressure on the industry being protected, are basically corporate welfare that helps in the short term but results in long-term pain.
EVs will be similar. Protecting the North American industry in the short term isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would require the American and Canadian government to bust the balls of Ford, GM and Stellantis, as well as the domestic-produced imports: you get the tariffs and you get tax breaks, but in turn you have three years to produce a cheap, capable EV or, eg, we’ll make it happen without you.
Our governments won’t do this because they’re neoliberal chickenshits who lost their spine forty years ago.
The result will be EVs that are too expensive, sold to the most profitable niche domestically, with collapsing sales abroad. Which is what we have now, and it will get worse if we insulate lazy OEMs from market pressure.
China’s hands are not clean, but one thing they have done is invest in the long term. The North American OEMs resolutely refuse to do that, and tariffs would make that situation worse.
Thank you
I don’t want an EV, I want HSR, extensive local train networks, trams and LRTs, good buses and bikelanes.
Why? We don’t have any Canadian EV competition to protect.
The same people that are opposed to the carbon tax because it makes things more expensive, go figure…
Yah, and now we have China looking to restrict canola imports in retribution, something of actual value to the Canadian economy, unlike our non-existent EV industry. There will be massive costs to agriculture from this stupidity, and it’s all for image points, not anything useful.
For reference sake, agriculture contributed $42 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2023. I can’t find any numbers for EV because I suspect it doesn’t exist.
The total new car market for 2023 was almost $90 billion. Of that, EV sales count for about 10.7%, or about $9.5 billion. Stats Can provides the first number, electricautonomy.ca was the source for the second, although they got their info from Stats Can, too.
There are a number of possible errors with this data, such as the percentage of EV sales being total sales vs. dollar sales, which would increase the amount spent on EVs since they tend to be more expensive.
And how much of that is built or sourced in Canada? Thats what we would be trying to protect when we do this. And to my knowledge, its negligible. What we’re doing is appeasing the US at the cost of agricultural exports, exactly as we did when we arrested the Huawei exec that they had conveniently let across the border in order to create strife.
Here’s a link that gives some insight into the situation, courtesy of @[email protected] .
I’m not buying it. We have billions of dollars at stake right now and are risking it for the maybe, possibly chance of producing domestic EVs someday. But our track record at things like emerging technology has been pretty poor, as seen by the Ottawa silicon-valley attempt and nanotech throw a lot of money down the drain accomplishing nothing.
Gee, the LPC can’t get any traction west of Thunder Bay, I wonder why…
Govt: We’re switching to electric. Buy an EV!
Consumers: Buy Chinese affordable EV
Govt: Not like that!
Canadian consumers: I want to pay double.
Manufacturers: we’ll build more, even bigger SUVs and trucks!!
I’m in the “somewhat support the measure”
We do manufacture cars here. We are also building battery manufacturing infrastructure. We should be supporting local industry, because cars aren’t just one thing, they have complex supply chains that we should protect instead of finalizing the offshoring process.
That being said, where the heck have North American car manufacturers been on this? Electric cars are priced as luxury cars here. A Chevy Volt is $41,500. A BYD Seagull would cost $15,000, with about the same range. It’s no wonder they’re shitting their pants.
It’s not like BYD just showed up one day with a line of cars, where was Chevy’s research department the last decade?
Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it’s much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).
That’s still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it’s worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.
The BYD only costs $15k because the workers on it’s supply chain are making pennies on the dollar compared to NA, the quality control throughout the supply chain is garbage, and the Chinese government subsidises exports for the express purpose of killing the industry of other countries.
If we did all those things we could probably have a NA built EV for $15k as well.
The first two (labour and quality control) aren’t really what affect the MSRP. Labour makes a difference, but it’ materials cost that really drives price, and QA isn’t really the differentiator you might think.
But that last one–government support–that makes a massive difference. China has been, and continues to be, very strategic throughout the entire supply chain, from security raw materials at low cost, to building transport and energy infrastructure, to setting up hub-and-spoke centres for OEMs and suppliers, to securing a labour force. Non-Chinese OEMs, and especially Americans that depend on tax rebates little else, can’t compete.
It wouldn’t hurt the American and Canadian governments to twist the arm of industry and get them to think a little more long-term. They won’t, of course, because of neoliberal capture, but they could.
The first two (labour and quality control) aren’t really what affect the MSRP. Labour makes a difference, but it’ materials cost that really drives price, and QA isn’t really the differentiator you might think.
Uh, what, both of these have a massive affect on final price.
The fact that labour is so expensive in Canada, the US and Western Europe is a big reason we farm stuff out to cheaper places (like Mexico and China) that don’t have pesky things like high safety standards or employee benefits. I mean, shit, the fact the huge disparity in labour costs between the two countries is reason the TFW program even works. Not to mention that cost of labour is the main reason companies push for automation… it costs a lot less to have a couple guys maintianing robots than 20 guys on an assembly line.
You are correct in that QA itself is basically nothing on the MRSP but failures can cause the end user a lot of time and money to deal with… not a hassle I personally want and nobody else should either. QA is one of the biggest reasons I never buy any big ticket items made in China.
Plus there is the fact that buying literally anything Chinese is supporting an oppressive authoritarian regime.
Labour makes up about 15-20% of the cost of a vehicle. Curiously, that number doesn’t change all that much between jurisdictions.
And while ~18% is as lot, materials makes up most of the rest, and those costs don’t change with jurisdiction. So the OEMs relocate to save a few percent, but mostly they relocate because the overall supply chain is more cost effective. This is why China (and now Vietnam, and Thailand, and before China, Japan and South Korea) are able to do what they do: the government and industry are willing to think long-term and make huge investments to make it happen: slapping down power plants and steel mills and making trade deals with, eg, Africa or the middle east to secure resources at scale.
You’re falling for the modern version of blaming the working class–even in a roundabout way–for the capitalists’ failure to plan.
Companies seek out cheaper labour, sure, but you’re taking a very simplistic view of it:
Canada, the US and Western Europe is a big reason we farm stuff out to cheaper places (like Mexico and China) that don’t have pesky things like high safety standards or employee benefits.
This isn’t nearly the case any more, and hasn’t been since the 1970s. They actually do have roughly similar safety standards. Replacing workers is expensive, and churn costs a lot, and you really do want to run a plant as efficiently as possible, which means not burning people out. We’re not in the triangle shirtwaist era any more.
Workers don’t really have much of an impact on the cost or quality of the product because it’s cheaper to engineer your plant such that they don’t. Mistakes are expensive. Waste is expensive. Re-work is expensive.
If you had said environmental standards, yes, you’d be right. Those can be more lax. That’s something different, and also not nearly the gap it used to be.
the fact the huge disparity in labour costs between the two countries is reason the TFW program even works
Slinging donuts at Tim Hortons, answering support calls and/or writing shitty front-end web code is a different thing entirely, and yes the TFW program is a problem, but that’s not the issue with heavy industry.
Preface: I do not like what domestic autos are building. I do not like F-150, RAM. I do not like SUVs either. We’re building and driving way too large cars that impact us negatively in multiple ways. BTW almost all Japanese cars are made in North America too. Many of them in Canada.
I see a few people talk about the non-existence of a Canadian EV industry so writing here instead of replying individually.
From Wikipedia:
Automotive manufacturing is one of Canada’s largest industrial sectors, accounting for 10% of manufacturing GDP and 23% of manufacturing trade. Canada produces passenger vehicles, trucks and buses, auto parts and systems, truck bodies and trailers, as well as tires and machine, tools, dies and molds (MTDM). The auto industry directly employs more than 125,000 people in vehicle assembly and auto parts manufacturing, and another 380,000 in distribution and aftermarket sales and service.
Many of the manufacturing jobs are well paid union jobs and most will transition to building EVs long term.
EV manufacturing is still being built out. There is significant investment in the pipeline. There’s likely more to come (to Canada) if Harris wins the US election. Many are battery plants but those will feed into North American EVs whether built in Canada, US or Mexico. These vehicles will sell in North America too. If there’s no market for them, there’s no need for the battery manufacturing either. There’s no need for the jobs. The incomes that feed into the automaker adjacent communities dries up. Other parts of the local economies contract because of that. The extra income from the savings from buying Chinese EVs might not be enough to replace the loss. We also lose the ability to make EVs long term which increases our dependence on China, regardless of whether you like China or not.
Someone mentioned forcing domestic autos to make smaller and cheaper EVs. I think that’s a grand idea. Likely not gonna happen with an LPC/CPC gov’t but still.
Another way to get smaller and cheaper EVs without deindustrializing parts of Canada would be to force China’s EV makers to open factories in Canada. Cheap and small Canadian-made BYD would still be cheaper and smaller than large and expensive EVs. If the North American autos refuse to make them and fail at the hands of domestic BYD, the existing workers will be able to staff BYDs new factories at decent wages duo to collective bargaining and we’ll retain the ability to build EVs in Canada long term. If something happens with China in two decades and 95% of all vehicles come from these factories, we still have the factories and workers, we can run them without China if needed and keep our car-dependent economy going. So how do we force BYD to open up shop in Canada? Tariffs. This is already happening in the EU. BYD will be building factories in Hungary and Turkey. There’s talk of another in Italy.
If we made no vehicles in Canada, had no significant number of workers doing it, had no reasonable prospects of building the cars that will be driven 20 years from now, then tariffs on Chinese EVs today would be completely counterproductive.
People don’t understand tariffs.
Gotta protect all those Canadian car manufacturers like…like uhhh…Might-E Truck
Might-E Trucks are pretty awesome, but I’m definitely not going to be commuting on the TCH in one.
Too many people watching Donald Trump on TV. No matter what your politics, he has done just catastrophic damage to how people think tariffs work, who pays for them ( like actually pays the money directly ), and whose economy gets hurt as a result.
What’s horrible is that Trump’s misunderstanding of how tariffs work is only forgotten by how much he doesn’t understand about how viruses and vaccines and health policy works.
Had it not been for the pandemic, he was well on his way to crashing the global economy, between the reckless tax cuts, deregulation and slapdash tariffs. Ironically, the stimulus spending necessitated by the pandemic probably saved him–and all of us–from the second great depression.
Or subsidized industries.
It’s the zeitgeist, right? More protectionism, both for geopolitical reasons and (fake) economic reasons
