Die große Herausforderung für Doug Ford mit chinesischen Elektrofahrzeugen? Ontariorier könnten sie mögen | Der Ministerpräsident befürchtet, dass es schwierig sein wird, sie wieder loszuwerden, sobald wir sie hereinlassen. Aber das passiert nur, wenn die Fahrer es verlangen

Some highlights from this analysis:

>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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?”

The flip-flopping of the Ontario premier on these issues of EV manufacturing and EV adoption by Ontarians has been painful to watch. Instead of fighting tooth and nail against these vehicle manufacturers for the incumbents, it might be useful instead to look at our province’s history.

Recall that during the Reagan years tariffs were placed by his administration on Japanese vehicles, and recall also that there was a growth in the number of auto plants in Canada for Japanese car companies. In this era of tariffs against Chinese vehicles by the United States, there might be opportunities to bring some of that manufacturing and assembly capacity here as well.

Perhaps an effective negotiator for the province would be able to bring about some benefits to the province from these kinds of deals rather than just reject these deals out of hand. And perhaps one way to do this would be to properly support the electrification of the province and its transportation infrastructure.