A Quick Note: Psst. Did you know you can buy a paid subscription to my column and podcast? Subscribers receive A Sense of Pride and Accomplishment™! Buy it! BUY IT NOW!
Back in July, the CEOs of Ford Canada, GM Canada, and Stellantis Canada all met with Mark Carney, to tell him that they oppose the incoming EV mandate next year, and to ask if he would pretty please cancel it for them. This rather relaxed mandate would only require that 20% of cars sold in 2026 be a hybrid gas-electric car, slowly increasing to 100% by 2035.
At no point would new gas- or diesel-powered cars be banned from sale by 2035. What would be required is that they be a hybrid car, with a small electric battery. While solely electric cars don’t have the flexibility that every motorist requires, hybrid cars have more flexibility and utility than those powered solely by gas or diesel.
Nevertheless, doing so would require that the North American automotive industry innovate by changing up their product offerings. It would mean they actually have to be competitive with the products manufactured outside of North America. But these CEOs don’t actually want to invest in their own businesses; they want to keep making money without having to earn that money.
It wasn’t enough that under the Trudeau government last fall, the Liberals slapped a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Trudeau said it was to “level the playing field”, an absurd spin; Chinese EVs were very competitive on price, so Canada and the US made these cheap electric cars harder for people to afford in order to protect the uncompetitive products from North American companies.
No, now Mark Carney has decided to simply declare war on the electric car altogether, and cancel the modest and reasonable requirement for car manufacturers to sell hybrid models. Delightful.
As a socialist, the eternal irony that I witness in capitalists is how much they hate free markets, and despise competition. Sure, they’ll boast and brag about how those are their primary virtues as capitalists…until it becomes a threat to them making more money.
When you’re the underdog in the market, you want fair conditions, you want to be able to compete freely. But when you’re the established incumbent, with a large footprint and a rigid and inflexible business structure? You don’t want to change how you do things, nor do you want to entertain the idea of losing market share or reducing prices.
A capitalist wants to make money, and when they do make money they want to make more money. They want a free market that allows them to enter, but when they’re established they want to close the market and ensure nobody can do to them what they did to the previous incumbent.
Neither Ford nor Stellantis nor GM want to change how they make their cars, nor do they want to reduce their profit margins to compete with other companies. They want things to stay the same. They want to maintain a plutocratic system where they benefit from massive taxpayer subsidies, and favourable government regulations, without owing anything in response to society at large.
Are the executives at BYD in China any less capitalistic? No, of course not. They want to enter the Canadian market, gain market share, and then exploit a position of strength for increased profit once they edge out the incumbent. But that is the nature of capitalism, and in a capitalist system the government’s ostensible job is to stoke and fuel this cycle of competition, not to suppress the cycle entirely.
Of course, I’m a socialist because I don’t think that’s how it ever really works. I think the most competitive markets are ironically the ones where socialism is competing against capitalism. Saskatchewan regularly ranks among the cheapest provinces for cellular plans, because capitalists like the Rogers family are forced to offer lower prices to compete with the socialist crown corporation SaskTel.
While North American car manufacturers claim that it’s too hard to create new product lines and that customers don’t want EVs, in China nearly half of all new cars sold are EVs. While North America makes excuses for losing, China is winning. And rather than compete, companies like Ford and Stellantis and GM are throwing a tantrum like a toddler, while our worthless Prime Minister caves in and rewards these spoiled brats for throwing a fit.
China, for their part, has retaliated against Canada’s auto tariff with a tariff against Canadian canola, for which China is a large customer. I support China’s targeted retaliation against unreasonable Canadian tariffs, for the same reason I supported Canada’s targeted retaliation against America’s unreasonable tariffs; I believe in the merits of free trade, and how it ties the people of the world closer together.
And the consequence of Canada’s desire to engage in protectionism for Ontario’s auto industry is that it has now harmed farmers in the Prairies. The jobs of people in Ontario were placed above those of people in Western Canada, due to blatantly transparent political considerations over who would vote Liberal and who would not.
I don’t actually care about protecting Ontario’s auto industry. I don’t think it’s the job of the Canadian government to artificially boost private corporations that cannot convince the world to buy their products or services; if there’s something the taxpayer should subsidize, it should become a crown corporation so that the taxpayer can direct it to serve the public good.
And as an urbanist who takes public transit anywhere and everywhere, I don’t think personal vehicle ownership is good for the majority of people. I think we benefit a lot more from using our streets for frequent bus service, with tram and metro lines on the core arteries of our cities.
But let’s say you do care about those jobs, and you do want everyone to own their own car. Why should Canada keep giving automakers billions of dollars to open new plants, subsidies too large to generate a positive economic return, only for these companies to announce they’re putting the plans on hold, demanding even more money to not pack up and go south to America?
Protectionism hasn’t kept these companies from taking their profits and their jobs across the border after they’re done exploiting us for these bribes. It hasn’t benefitted the worker, nor the taxpayer, nor the end consumer of these products. All it has done is hurt the Canadian economy, and cut us off from global markets.
Canada should be joining the rest of the world in the EV revolution. Instead, Mark Carney is fucking over every electric car, making them more expensive for working Canadians to buy, because a few rich people told him to.
That’s our Prime Minister. Aren’t we proud?