* https://thebeaverton.com/2026/01/canada-chooses-lawful-evil-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...
Edit: A comment in /r/canada:
> TBF I would much rather work for Lex Luthor than The Joker if I had to choose one.
The US has turned into something much more vindictive and unpredictable, including threatening to invade Canada.
Probably about the same as the US when it was a developing nation. "How the United States Stopped Being a Pirate Nation and Learned to Love International Copyright":
> From the time of the first federal copyright law in 1790 until enactment of the International Copyright Act in 1891, U.S. copyright law did not apply to works by authors who were not citizens or residents of the United States. U.S. publishers took advantage of this lacuna in the law, and the demand among American readers for books by popular British authors, by reprinting the books of these authors without their authorization and without paying a negotiated royalty to them.
As it's often said, "There is no honor among thieves":
https://www.nber.org/digest/mar18/confiscation-german-copyri...
All current AI companies are closed. What benefit?
Most things from Uni are published openly.
BTW, did people in US pay royalty to China for inventing paper?
Problem has always been ensuring that people who have brilliant ideas get appropriately rewarded for their contribution to humanity - but not disproportionately.
Also does China publish it's companies IP publicly or is it just a one-sided relationship?
Couldn't the poor companies have simply chosen to not do business in China?
Stealing IPs from universities almost look quirky in comparison.
Does it surprise you to find out that a lot of old money families in the US made their money smuggling opium and other similarly unethical things? We are a nation of crooks and thieves and always have been.
I ask anyone reading this comment to please study history more frequently, it will help you understand the world better.
How many humans were stolen by USA alone?
Does it make it better? No.
But that's it. Everything is shit but while USA got rich through manufacturing in the past, now it's China turn
Oh no, the poor trillion-dollar multinationals and multi-billionaires, whatever would they do?
You would have to know all the above for it to be real.
The thing about China is that they are basically hard on the up slope of their advancement as a society/economy/nation, just like US was post ww2.
US on the other hand, has flatlined to the point where we think stuff like trans athletes in sports are a drastic enough reason to elect a president who is a convicted Felon.
China is def gonna outpace US in the next 10 years as the strongest economy, but the interesting thing is gonna be is if they are gonna fall in the same trap as US does in 20 or 30 years.
Oh, right, they were shipping cases of unmarked weapons to gangbangers in California....
(Obama administration, although not personally his fault)
We could also discuss the provision of Armalite rifles to terrorist groups in the UK, Iran-Contra (an early accountability failure paving the way for pardon abuse), and so on.
The problems with the USA political system are: electoral college, senate being 2 votes per state, and the supreme court being 7 people for life. But nothing can be done about the last two now. Especially now that the Supreme Court made a decision limiting how amendments can be ratified.
The American two-party system gave massive power to a tiny fraction of the population, which the large Republican party then retconned into most of their members as their party platform. Now they're a large fraction of the population. I'd choose the approach where the small faction remains its own small faction, even if they occasionally get to pull the levers of power.
As an American I keep trying to surmise what we're going to need to do to start repairing the damage from this massive self-own. It's kind of hard because we don't know where the bottom will be, but we at least need to start having these discussions on what constructive approaches might even look like - we can't have our milquetoast opposition party phoning it in yet again with entitlement as the less-bad option.
External context is key - one of the main goals of this hybrid warfare attack on the western world has been to disrupt our relationships with our allies, and also because other countries have developed Democracies that function way better than ours. So please know that at least some of us are listening.
Term and/or age maximums might also help.
America still wants to play hegemon, but since Bretton Woods 2.0 didn't happen, they're going to lock up the entire North and South American continents from Chinese and Russian influence. And it'll be fierce.
The next salvo is going to be US statehood for Alberta and Saskatchewan. There is already partisan support within those provinces, and Trump is going to offer money to push it. If that happens, Yukon and the Northwest Territories are next.
(Side note: these are Republican voters, which gives Republicans the Senate for years to come.)
Venezuela wasn't about drugs or oil, it was about China. And it wasn't Trump's thing, it was the career DoD folks. (Venezuela is within medium-range missile range of 50% of US oil refineries. The US doesn't want foreign basing there or in Cuba.)
The DoD is pushing Greenland too as it'll be a centerpiece of Arctic shipping in the coming century. And Cuba, as it's both extremely close to CONUS and a choke point for the gulf.
You can see the plays happening if you watch. The Chinese-owned Panama Ports Company being forcibly sold to BlackRock, the increasing trade and diplomatic ties between China and South American countries, etc.
My bet is that a Democratic president would continue this policy, just with less rudeness and more "cooperation". The Department of Defense -- apolitically -- doesn't want China to have the US within arms reach.
Trump is going to try to speed run it, though.
---
edit: downvotes rate limit my account, so I can't respond.
> I would love to hear how you think Trump will manage to get Alberta and Saskatchewan to become US states within this century.
It's going to nucleate from within Alberta and Saskatchewan.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11615147/alberta-separatists-prai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_separatism
This has been spoken about for years, but look at how much the conversation is starting to come back up recently:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/alberta-primetime/article/al...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-separation-po...
I see a dozen other articles about this published in the last week.
If Trump adds fuel to this fire, it's going to take over the headlines. The DoD is definitely whispering it into his ear.
Also, the downvotes are silly. I'm not advocating for this. I'm just pointing out what the US is doing and why it thinks this way.
My understanding is that US is going to shrink back a bit, takes care of its neighbours first, but keep its probing bases intact, so that it can slash some costs and be more flexible in next decades. China is going to reluctantly expand its power base gradually -- but I think it's going to be a slow expansion because any rapid one would either fail, or create a new power group within China, that may threaten the existing players.
Not sure about EU though, it better gear up quickly.
Greenland is happening, and will be underway soon. It's just a matter of how much international support it will have initially, and how the USA will strong arm support.
Canada is on the back burner after the realization that a country with a leader who was the Governor of the national banks of two major countries might know a thing or two about economic warfare.
Controlling all of these foreign lands is pointless if the country collapses then Balkanizes. The past decade has brought so many events that nobody thought could ever happen that we need to be rearrange our beliefs. It's very possible that those of us around in 10 years will see this time period as being part of the Second American Civil war.
The only thing keeping people almost pacified is the economy is not total dogshit yet. But that's tenuous at best.
There's going to be a post-trump power vacuum. It will likely be much more bloody than our current situation.
There are some cultural factors in Alberta which draw it closer to the US than to Ontario and Quebec. Libertarianism, pro-fossil fuels, differences wrt firearms, differences in attitudes to crime and punishment, etc... The perception is that previous compromises around these items are slowly frayed to appease voting blocks in other provinces (mostly Quebec).
Then, the dirty reality; the Canadian economy has never been "great", at least in my lifetime. Nearly my whole class at university wound up going to the US, because one couldn't get a decent paying job in Canada in a lot of fields. Even our current prime minister did a ton of his work abroad. If separating (IE: joining the US) was only an economic question, only a tiny elite would support remaining a part of Canada.
The question Alberta separatists wish to ask is much less dishonest than the Quebec separation question in 95, which leads me to believe they are much more confident about their success. I wouldn't rule it out.
Then Danielle moved the goalposts to make it easier for the Independence folks:
Signature collection period: January 3 to May 2, 2026 Number of signatures required for a successful petition: 177,732 (10% of the total number votes cast in the 2023 Provincial General Election).
There is small but loud group of chronic whiners who hate everything (often including each other) pushing the former.
Almost nobody is pushing the latter.
They aren't republican voters - there is sizable difference between the Canadian right and the US right. I think many Americans make this mistake (and Canadians too) - the republican positions on many things aren't that tenable to center of right (Canadian spectrum).
Also - There aren't many more things that are more toxic in Canada politics than Trump and Annexation. He single handedly handed the Federal election to the Liberals - it was the Conservatives who were going to win until he but his thumb on the scale.
Watching these discussions from the outside are statistics like four in ten (43%) Canadians age 18-34 would vote to be American if citizenship and conversion of assets to USD guaranteed [1]. I don't think the political similarities or differences between the American right and the Canadian right are what can result in one or more Canadian provinces joining the US; I think it's economic discontent.
[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/43-percent-canadians-would-vote-...
Venezuela happened because it makes him look good on TV, that's it. There's no grand strategizing, it's a petty, vain person doing shitty things to make himself look great. He believes he is entitled to rule as an absolute monarch and acquiring territory (Greenland, Canada, etc) is just a way for himself to make himself more grand. Sorry, no grand strategy there either. I'll go further and say that part of what makes him so successful is that there's a large contingent of people that can't see him as he is and instead engage in this strategy larp like your various theories.
I strongly disagree with most of what Trump says and does, but I can't root for an outcome that would make my kids' quality of life be much worse. I'd much rather see us right the ship.
mhm
https://electricautonomy.ca/data-trackers/ev-sales-data/2025...
"Canada recorded 45,366 new zero-emission vehicle registrations in Q3 2025, accounting for 9.4 per cent of all new vehicle registrations in the quarter, according to the latest report from Statistics Canada."
"Of the total, 26,792 units were battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), while 18,574 were plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). "
So this would represent about 1/4 of current annual EV sales.
For the average family, being able to spend significantly less on a car is a big deal.
But all the policy support that would have let North American automakers build up a competitive position with China is gone, so this is more about just acknowledging reality now.
As someone who's worked in the auto industry (in Canada) I have to 'hard disagree.' The big three have proven time and time again that we (Canadians) are second-class citizens when it comes to how they operate the facilities built here. Even before any of this nonsensical tariff nonsense, billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort to satisfy people in the short-term and thanking us by continuing their movement of production out of the country. Instead of trying to talk the president down from his pointlessly harmful tariffs, or doing what Toyota/Honda have done in pivoting to building worldwide models beside the domestic ones, the big three are gleefully taking the opportunity to expedite the closure or downsizing of facilities here.
Outside of the chuds who 'need' a pickup truck to satisfy their fragile ego, sales of "American" vehicles are starting to drop, with buyers choosing domestically-produced where possible (like the Toyota Rav4, Lexus NX/RX, or Honda Civic/CR-V).[0]
[0]: https://ca.investing.com/news/economy-news/market-share-of-u...
You could replace "Canada" with the "United States" and it's equally true. They aren't treating you any different than us.
It’s tough to convince most price-inelastic people they shouldn’t buy a car that is 1/2 price, even if it has fewer features.
Edit: to be clear I meant that the US did not compete, not that they could not compete
If all you have in town is a target, that’s where people will shop. If you open up a goodwill there might be some handwringing and “I would never” rhetoric. But many people will go to the goodwill even if they don’t admit it.
*To roughly quantify, I'd say mid-to-late 80s Ford/GM car, not 70s Ford/GM car. It never stranded me, but it did break a few times in inconvenient fashion.
This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success.
China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice.
(I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment)
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants.
Am I off base here?
The new bottom has been moving to Vietnam, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision...
Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments)
(Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)
China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while.
China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there.
Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.
As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
This is false. The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population. I want a cheap EV. I will buy a cheap EV from a US automaker. They do not want to sell cheap EVs. The US won't allow me to buy excellent, cheap Chinese EVs. The US population is being held economically hostage for legacy automaker profits and the fossil fuel industry. Why should the US consumer collectively have to pay more for these low quality decisions? I am incentivized to root for the destruction of US legacy auto so that I can eventually get a high quality, inexpensive Chinese EV, because that will be all who is left building them. China sells more EVs than the US sells entirely. It is only a matter of time as they continue to spin up manufacturing.
Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself (if unwilling to build EVs, which appears to be the case). Climate change does not care about nation state boundaries. Certainly, if you don't believe in climate change, or don't believe it to be pressing, there is no discussion to be had.
New data: EVs grew more in ’25 than ’24, despite constant lies saying otherwise - https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev... - January 14th, 2026
The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... | https://archive.today/p2hl1 - January 30th, 2024
Chinese manufacturers have an average labour cost per vehicle of $585. American manufacturers have an average cost of $1341.
You can't buy an equivalent American EV for an extra $756.
Source: https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-ve...
And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected.
This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice.
[1] Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw - December 4th, 2025
[2] Chinese EV makers accelerate robotics drive for ‘game-changing’ edge over US - https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chin... | https://archive.today/sJKKv - November 19th, 2025
[3] The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf - May 31st, 2025
[4] Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025
[5] HN Search: labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(TLDR Increase productivity with automation to compete with others who already have, buy robots, not share buybacks)
On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future).
Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more.
A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example.
Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596... (paywall)
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo... is a writeup of https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 which is paywalled.
Now we have U.S. automakers who are derefential to the current regime's leader and are pulling out. The Federal and Ontario government both tried to somehow make them happy, but you can't make that kind of monster happy. So it's time to move on.
Trump's message is loud and clear. The Canadian Prime Minister has said, "the past relationship with the US is over."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y41z4351qo
The US President: "US does not need cars made in Canada; free trade deal is irrelevant"
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/we-dont-need-cars-made-in-canada-trump-says-calls-cusma-irrelevant/
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sentinel-review-woodstock/20260116/281629606665800https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_case_of_Meng_Wanzh...
Feels like being dependent on both the Chinese _and_ the Americans to me, which doesn't exactly feel like a win.
That is exactly what they did.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
> The tariffs follow a May announcement by U.S. President Joe Biden of 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese-made EVs.
> Trudeau said on Sunday night that he had discussed China and other national geopolitical issues with U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan.
> smells like rolling out a Canadian auto market that is not dependent on the US
The last federal election was almost entirely decided by which leader made the best pitch to Canadians on who would be better equipped to handle Donald Trump and to make the economy less dependent on the USA as a whole.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/08/can...
Not that I'm condoning this at all, I think China is a very concerning actor on the world stage. But I can certainly understand the mindset of many Canadians to reflexively seek out alternatives to more USA interdependence, short sighted as some of that may be.
If the context changes, it is reasonable to change which issue you focus on.
If I was in Canadas position, I’d prefer trading with the guy with shitty practices over the guy actively threatening my sovereignty.
I don’t get the indignation you’re expressing. Do you work with people in your personal life after they threaten your existence?
China has been engaging in "unfair, non-market policies and practices and intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity and lack of rigorous labour and environmental standards" for decades, but Canada only changed their minds when Biden told them to.
"You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar" -- Justin Trudeau
Yeah, I'm sure he did it because he gives a fsck about human rights and fair markets.
There's probably enough political willpower in these provinces and money (paid by the US) to turn this into a real movement.
And from there, Yukon and the Northwest Territories are easy next dominoes.
I'm only trying to give a feel for them numbers, I did check the average selling price for a new BYD
Not such as huge shift in total, but EV’s are still a small percentage of total vehicle sales in Canada.
https://www.brokerlink.ca/blog/how-long-do-cars-last-in-cana...
> In 2020, the Automotive Industries Association of Canada (AIA Canada) reported the average age of Canadian vehicles was 9.7 years, though many industry experts believe that number is closer to 10.5 years today.
(if you look at a random sampling of 100 cars, 5 will be from this year, 5 from 2025, and so on until you've counted the 5 cars from 2005 ; the average age will be 10.5 years)
If you assume that there are more cars sold every year (due to demographics: way more humans are alive today than in 2005), then this is consistent with a useful lifespan of 25 years or more per car since the "10.5" average is skewed younger because of the age pyramid bias.
“The average car lifespan now is closer to 322,000 kilometres, which works out to around 10 to 12 years for most drivers.”
“While the average vehicle in Canada may be designed to last around a decade, there are several factors, some of which are within your control and some of which are not, that can impact how long your car lasts.”
My last two cars were scrapped at 13 years due to rust effects.
322,000 km / 15,200 = 21.2 years. Assuming nobody has multiple cars.
From that link: Here's a breakdown of the average annual kilometres driven in some provinces:
Ontario: 16,000 km Alberta: 15,200 km British Columbia: 13,100 km
So the numbers are calculated including traffic collisions in the life span calculation.
I wonder what the actual number is if you exclude traffic collisions? "How often should I expect to have to replace my car" and "How long should I expect a car to last" aren't quite the same question.
Cars in the north have major rust problems, even if you're exceptionally careful, from exposure to snow and road salt.
So because the number of new cars purchased each year is increasing the average age is significantly below 1/2 the average car’s lifespan.
The premier ("governor") of Ontario, where GM, Ford, Toyota, etc, have manufacturing plants feels otherwise:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-canadian-el...
https://www.thestar.com/news/canadian-ev-sales-fell-off-a-cl...
How many chinese EVs are in canada right now? If the answer is close enough to zero as to be insignificant, how is this saving canadians any money on chinese EVs?
If it helps, we can say something like: this adds $1-$2B gross revenue to china selling EVs to canada. Profit, probably less than a $1B. Needle still not moving.
It's a geopolitical needle move, not a purely financial one.
Cheaper car options in this country will be nice, and I say this as a certified car hater who's yet to own one despite pushing 40.
Its a dependency that I have to think almost all countries/businesses are evaluating. How do you do business and set up long term supply chains in a country can't trust that the economic policy of today exists in 3 months, they are actively trying to undermine their currency and the system of law is under heavy pressure to the point of failure.
It is tough to be supportive of the United States under this administration or that the future state of the US will be more sound. Having their formally closest trade partner looking over to China for trade is a massive signal.
The trade off is the market is large and strong financial (availability of capital) foundation - but I fear thats changing.
Rank and file GOP got rattled with that one.
But in that niche I can really see cheap EVs taking off. I know several people who live in Toronto whose cars have never been more than ~80 KM from home, and rarely been over 100 KM/h. That's a perfect EV user.
And a huge plus would be to get rid of the monster American trucks & SUVs that take four parking spots and two lanes at a time...
No, trucks are useful, but a massive modern pickup truck is much less useful in the urban context than a standard pickup truck from 30 years ago. The bed size has remained the same, the outside envelope of the vehicle has ballooned massively.
> You should get better transit so less people have cars.
Toronto has a very high (for north america) transit mode share
Toronto has good transit for North America, but there are plenty of ways to improve it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
It provides a deep-dive video into the history of how we got to the situation we're in today with American cars exploding in size. It actually has its origins in Obama-era legislation for emissions standards that made an exception for "light trucks". SUVs are legally classified as light trucks so the industry has massively pushed these tanks onto the consumer promising more safety.
It has led to a dramatic decrease in public safety and pedestrian deaths that is unique to the US. One contributor to these deaths is literally parents running over their own children in their own driveways. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT IS HAPPENING IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.
The video goes over the visibility issues with these trucks, how our safety regulations fail to account for them (light trucks only need to be tested in collision with other light trucks) and also covers how modern trucks have the same carrying capacity as pickup trucks from 30 years ago (the main thing that's increased is the hull and cabin size) while being harder to use for actual work since the bed is higher offer the ground
Market distortions favoring heavy trucks include:
* The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), enacted in Congress in 1975 under the Ford administration in reaction to the Arab oil embargo, with its tiered structure on passenger vehicles vs. trucks.
* The "Chicken Tax", tariffs on light trucks enacted by Lyndon Johnson as a reaction to French / West German tariffs on chickens. While much of this trade war was repealed, the light truck tariff never was.
* Section 179 tax deductions, which are biased in favor of heavy vehicles. As I understand it, this particular deduction was inserted into the tax code via the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 under Reagan, for the purpose of aiding small businesses that might rely on such.
So it's been, from my perspective, a fairly non-partisan desire from all of US politics, with protectionism as perhaps part of the goal, but perhaps due to other goals that had unintended effects.
Personally, I think that government regulations can only explain so much. Even with the market distortions, trucks tend to be rather expensive compared to smaller vehicles sedans, and that's before factoring in the bad gas mileage. My presumption is that America's vastly more rural landscape contributes just as much to the preference for trucks as government policy.
I do surmise from articles, though, that the above US policies have impacted the ability for lighter pickup trucks to entering the market. I suspect that some smaller pickups, like the small "kei trucks" that seem to have a bit of a following in the US even with all the regulatory hassle, would be much more present if a lot of these protections were removed.
According to this study, most F-150s on the road are not used for work
https://www.powernationtv.com/post/most-pickup-truck-owners-...
Most professional builders drive big Savannah vans, which can not only carry full sheets of plywood, but also keep them dry. Plus, the front blindspot is less than one meter.
I don't disagree about transit though.
This is why the folks I know personally who are actually in the position to need to haul dimensional for work all seem to drive white pickup trucks that they bought from resales of leased fleets.
The _useless_ short bed trucks are driven mostly by young men who were too eager to pile on the personal debt in a show of vanity.
Also, somehow other countries in the rest of the world seem to get by just fine without these massive trucks.
I literally can't buy any subcompact car these days in USA or Canada, since Spark (petrol) was discontinued in 2022, Prius C (subcompact hybrid) discontinued, and Bolt EV (bigger but still small) discontinued and will be replaced with something even bigger.
Looking forward to inexpensive BYD Seagulls flooding Canada and hopefully encouraging dealers to bring in existing subcompacts that they sell everywhere else in the world.
And even then, he didn't lead with "China is!" but wandered his way into offering the assessment.
The context makes his comment on this seem less nakedly provocative (not that it'll matter either way - the headline will be the headline, and the Trump admin will use it however they see fit as usual).
I find it bizzare that liberals in Canada are happy about doing anything with China considering they are anti liberalism, anti west and have many examples of large scale human right abuse.
As a Canadian, it's not really relevant to me that a country we trade with isn't liberal, and I don't agree with the premise that China is inheriently anti-west. Anti-western values, yes, but China does not threaten west violently in anyway that I can see. They mostly threaten western dominance economically.
IMO, Canada should just do what's best for its citizen, which is get good trade deals, and ensure that our values don't morph into something unrecognizable. What other countries do in their own borders is largely irrelevant.
Chinese car companies face far more ruthless competition than western ones so could end up making better cars as a result, imo.
There are over 100 brands in china selling electric cars
This is these companies own fault. These companies have grown cozy rent seeking with little competition and have completely missed the electrification of cars as a result. Cheaper cars will hurt those workers, but all of society will be better off when one of their largest expenses decreases.
Keep doing you, Canada.
https://youtube.com/shorts/IEbl6RIJeDc?si=pNol1UkjxRwML9Dz
I suspect the same thing will happen for northern states buying from Canada!
https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1100?language=en_...
Even though they are tariffed as hell they often come as better to European counterparts here at similar pricing.
US has thrived economically for 5 decades after becoming an import economy.
This whole export/import balance is such a lame reasoning...yes you've spent a certain amount of $...and got plenty of stuff in exchange.
Last but not least, services are never included in these trade balance arguments. How much money flows to US through their financial and IT services alone...?
China has at least 2 key advantages in manufacturing -- cheaper labor and laxer regulations. If the US were to embrace and extend robotics and automation more vigorously that first point could become moot. Also the second point as far as labor regulations go, and if environmental regulations were properly priced then that too would be moot.
That is no longer the case through the actions of the new US Government.
Accordingly it no longer makes sense for Canada to mirror US tariffs against China.
BYD, for reference, got almost 30% of their 2024 income from the Chinese state (~$1.4b).
But this is always difficult to judge because most nations help local industry to some degree, and it can be quite difficult to compare.
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/...
Many countries actively lose money for those jobs, Serbia is an example. They go to extreme lengths to underbid competition for stellantis factories and get a net negative impact.
If you can't survive without taxpayers paying the bills, just die ffs.
e.g. https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/366599/chinese-evs-banned...
We see this in other domains: I recently talked to someone from an asset inspection (think flying around bridges to check for fractures) company. They can't use DJI drones because of security concerns.
The actual reality, which people like your asset inspection firm are dealing with, is the Chinese have leapfrogged the west in so many important respects, but to preserve security we have to live in an expensive technological backwater since the leaders of our society are so resistant to internal disruptive competition that may result in other people displacing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93Mercosur_Associatio...
India-EU have deepened ties since long ago too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93European_Union_r...
Sure the details were negotiated in 2019, but it isn't even in effect yet. It still needs to be approved by legislative bodies on both sides of the Atlantic. Which will probably happen sometime this year.
Besides which Canadian manufacturers have been extremely reluctant to make EVs, so I really don't see that there's a domestic "EV market" we should be protecting.
Volvo could be an immediate beneficiary. The Canadian EX30 was going to be cheaper because they could make them in China, but after the 100% US/Canada tariff was announced they had to switch to ones produced in Belgium iirc.
edit: Something I just read that I haven't seen reported elsewhere is that the imported EVs have to cost $33,000 or less. The EX30 currently starts at about $54,000, so... maybe not.
American car manufacturing is destroying itself just fine.
Fuck em they are fighting EV mandates while complaining that Chinese manufacturers will undercut their EV sales. They can go to bankruptcy for being liars.
I live in Ontario and support auto workers but not their lying employers.
I don't think China can be held responsible for America voting for Donald Trump, one of whose main goals in life has been the destruction of every trading and soft-power partnership that the US has built over the past 80 years.
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car
> As a general rule, motor vehicles less than 25 years old must comply with all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) in order to be imported permanently into the United States.
Without homologation there is 0 chance you'd be able to import and register one of these.
Sorry but was this truly a good faith question? Kind of hard to see how it is.
> Nonresidents may import a vehicle duty-free for personal use up to (1) one year if the vehicle is imported in conjunction with the owner's arrival. Vehicles imported under this provision that do not conform to U.S. safety and emission standards must be exported within one year and may not be sold in the U.S. There is no exemption or extension of the export requirements.
There's certainly a question of if it's personal use if your canadian friend leaves their vehicle at your place and you drive it around. But your friend can certainly get it over the border and I don't know how much enforcement you'll get after that. You will want the vehicle to return to Canada before the year is up.
Canadian and US car safety standards are very closely aligned, other than some pretty minor differences. (e.g. DRL required in Canada, TPMS required in the US, etc.)
Musk and crew know how to make cheap stuff - they've chosen high margin for Tesla however.
TBH, Tesla is in a tough position with their EVs in NA. They can't really build a cheap enough crossover/suv to compete directly with ICE RAV4, and virtually anything they do at >$50k would negatively impact their existing product sales. The base Model 3/Y are too expensive compared to ICE and have met tepid reviews because of their slightly odd mix of price and features.
So they've chosen instead to focus on autonomy and car hiring. I can't blame them for that. There's a huge potential for recurring revenue in that space and they've been positioning themselves to be in an excellent position to capture a lot of it over the next five years.
Doesn't the Model Y start at 40K? That's more expensive than the base model RAV4, but the Tesla is probably aimed at a slightly different market segment too. My guess is they could compete head-to-head on price if they needed to, but they don't think the math works out better that direction yet.
They just can't compete with luxury brands that don't sympathize with fascism. People just don't want to advocate for their own demise.
And whatever happened to that mysterious one-day $50 million in tesla rebates?
I'm not saying that's happening, just that it makes more sense than this chaotic self-destruction of the American empire.
... everyone knows Trump is being blackmailed by Russia ;-)
Unfortunately, this is probably what is necessary at this point.
- I'm still not over how great it feels to have confidence that Carney has a strong understanding of the economics of these political manouvers. Not only is he not a !@#$ing moron, he's a deeply experience economist more than he's a politician.
- Stratification of trading partners is nothing but good.
- This feels like safe toe-dip. Both sides have agreed to terms that are temporary, meaning there is no surprise rug-pull moment. Which is something the Americans are using more and more to keep everyone so !@#$ing wound up.
- This could be a long-term play for China: establish a presence in the North American auto market. The U.S. is right there. (Watch the Americans ban Chinese EVs from border crossing)
- Even better long-term play: establish North American manufacturing. How about Ontario builds Japanese and Chinese cars, turns CAMI and others into a Roshel or other military vehicle plant, and says good riddance to the American auto makers that have been rug-pulling long before Trump got into politics.
- A great opportunity to start improving trade lines for Canola. Possibly a trial balloon for other primary and secondary resources?
- Canada cannot stand on its own geopolitically. We must be closely tied to a major power. Intuitively that choice is the EU But I fear that China can move much faster and we'll find ourselves de-facto in their sphere while the EU is still debating this and that.
I'm absolutely relieved that Poilievre didn't win the election (or his original seat). Setting aside just how far to the right he is, I've heard him described as an idiot both by another MP and by someone (who is himself pretty conservative) who met him at some social event.
The less we depend on Trumpistan the better.
Trump threatening invasion of Greenland is also aimed against Canada; the USA would have more and more military bases threatening Canada, so Trump's anti-Greenland policy is heavily aimed at threatening Canada rather than China or Russia. One can see how he helps Putin versus Ukraine - one can not trust Trump.
I get that this is seen as a "practical" move north-of-the-border, but understand, this is the kind of move that guys like Trump, Putin, and Xi all require. They want this kind of thing to happen, because it shows the real issue was never one of democratic values and human rights. If Canadians valued that then their PM wouldn't be inking a deal with China in response to what Trump is doing. There would be some sort of deal with Europe, perhaps, but not China.
The next time the Canadian government brings up some sort of issue with the treatment of Canadians by ICE or some other kind of issue, you can bet that the horse trading will involve a reference to the fact that this deal happened.
That's already more-or-less the rationale in Trump's dealings with Europe: for all of the complaining about Russia as a threat or the sanctity of NATO and how the Greenland affair threatens all of that, there was a solid 15-year-long run where the continent was more than happy to buy petroleum products off the Russians while ignoring escalating human rights violations in Russia along with incursions into South Ossetia and the Donbas.
He picks up on these sorts of deals as hypocrisy based in realpolitik, and will exploit it.
And so what if he turns around and goes "ha your values are worthless". Trump is a literal paedophile and a literal rapist. Why should we accept being brow beat by such a man? So? We're moving on without you.
No, not of the kayfabe goals that serve as rallying cries for his dwindling band of cultists. But rather success of the goals of our adversaries who helped put Trump in power and seem to primarily inform his policy.
(edit to answer the question below, as throttling has set in: China, obviously)
Do you have any specifics? Which adversary of yours wants lower-tariff Chinese EVs in Canada?
What concerns me is why does the west think China is trustworthy? Why are we all fighting one another? Culture is important. China knows this, and is unequivocally Chinese relative to the Europeans.
Let me be clear: here in Canada, the idea we are ever going to have anything like the same relationship with the United States again is held by a small and shrinking minority. And with every day, with the shit show that's happening down south, this becomes more true. The old adage is true, trust takes years to build and seconds to break.
As for China, I doubt anyone among the Canadian leadership, and most people here, "trusts" China, but it has nothing to do with trust but with cold hard calculus of who we can sell our stuff to. China is a big market, and speaking of trust, China has not threatened us with annexation. Words matter, as do deeds.
Culture is important, but has relatively little to do with geopolitics. Europe had thousands of years of shared history and values, and 2 world wars.
well, the president of the united states of america and the human slimeball he sent as an ambassador to Canada have been threatening our sovereignty for a year. Hope this helps.
Despite the issues that Trump has caused Canada still does more trade with the US, on more favourable terms, than China...
But that doesn't make China trustworthy, which this move implies.
It seems like there's some "narcissism of small differences" kind of thing going on here. Trump may not share Canada/Europe's values to the same degree of prior US presidents, but China does not share those values at all and never has. It's really questionable judgement to throw your lot in with China if you're not happy with the leadership of the US.
Yes, it was also to protect car manufacturing in Ontario, but Trump has sent a clear signal that as long as Canada isn't a US state, this industry is going to die. So, why bother with a tariff at all?
This has nothing to do with China's trustworthiness.
Per you GGP: China was previously considered untrustworthy, so its products tariffed to exclude them. It implies more trust if now those tariffs are being removed to allow them in. And it's especially off of the motivation is some evaluation of the US's trustworthiness, because those two things are completely independent.
> Yes, it was also to protect car manufacturing in Ontario, but Trump has sent a clear signal that as long as Canada isn't a US state, this industry is going to die. So, why bother with a tariff at all?
If that were the motivation, it would make way more sense to partner with the Europeans. IMHO. There's a better alignment of values there.
European cars can't compete here because they're not cheap enough. Chinese car are. They're the one disrupting the global market now.
Because of the Chinese/Russian asset that got into the highest leadership position of the western world, and is now using that position to create and inflame fighting amongst ourselves. We had it too good, for too long, people got too entitled, became out of touch with what actually made our society great, and our adversaries took advantage of that.
As an American, I am truly sorry to all of our allies and friends who didn't even get to vote on the matter.
Do you want the west to stick together mainly to preserve disneyified European fables in cinema as opposed to Chinese three-kingdoms drama?
We'll see how BYD's handle the bone chilling Montreal winters... Unless they're an absolute flop, I can see some fairly solid future prospects.
(I live in Ontario, but I've been to Le Belle Province quite a bit ;) )
https://www.quebec.ca/en/transports/electric-transportation/...
https://www.quebec.ca/en/transports/electric-transportation/...
On the other hand, the traction control is fantastic and they tend to have the best preconditioning features so that you never have to get into a cold car for your commute.
For a lot of people, that second paragraph is far more important than that first for at least one of the cars in their household inventory.
One of the more popular locations for the Ford Lightning is Toronto. They seem to do fine. Canadian politics echoes American politics a bit, but they are not quite so ideological about EVs as we are.
Every Chinese business big enough to play at the global scale has the government in it's power structure. They don't necessarily dictate business decisions but every bit of data collected is by default accessible by the government.
Having a significant fraction of a country driving around in Chinese EVs gives an insane amount of information to the Chinese government for free. It's not just direct information either like the driver's identity and personals, with millions of cars on the road a lot can be inferred, like if the parking lots at military bases suddenly fill up on a Tuesday afternoon or traffic between a high value person's home and an airport gets unusually slow.
These correlation attacks are not just theoretical, Strava leaked the location and layout of a military base in Afghanistan, accidentally, by showing the most commonly jogged routes by users on their public map.
These cars have cellular modems, they will have wifi and bluetooth hardware, if a particular person's device was identified at, for example, a political meeting or business conference then that person could be trivially tracked by the dozens of Chinese cars that they pass in a day. The information could be smuggled home along with all the normal diagnostic, update and service info that streams out of a modern car.
This could be done today by the American government, and it is to some extent, to identify, and locate, protesters and criminals by their mobile devices but it takes time, access to equipment/logs that the government does not always own.
And it may sound paranoid but remember that China was caught operating their own "police" force around the world not long ago, they will take advantage of any opportunity they are given to spy on other countries.
edit: HN seems to have a short memory. Which country was investigated for tampering with a Canadian federal election recently?
Have you heard about ICE? That one's not a paranoid thought. It's a very real personal police designed for oppression. I'd much much rather chineses EVs flooding the market over Teslas.
The more relevant discussion is the lack of policy/legislation to prohibit government agencies from sidestepping the 4th amendment and purchasing access from private corps, like Flock, to surveil individuals without a warrant. It’s ICE today, maybe DEA tomorrow, and the FDA in some broken future. In a decade or two, when nearly all vehicles are inherently advanced optical sensors with wheels, what stops auto manufactures becoming real-time surveillance companies, like Flock?
And the US's stance and actions around Venezuela and Greenland are also both illegal and a threat to a country's sovereignty.
Tariff threats is another example.
Oh, come on. ICE may be behaving badly right now, and you might be mad at them, but that's not an excuse for flights of fancy. Stay grounded in the truth. ICE is not "personal police designed for oppression," they're police designed to enforce immigration and customs laws (ICE literally stands for "immigration and customs enforcement").
Canada and every other country has some kind of police force that serves those roles: for instance: https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/security-securite/rem-ren-eng.ht...:
> The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) removals program contributes to upholding the integrity of Canada’s immigration system by removing people who are inadmissible to enter or stay in Canada.
> ... The CBSA also prioritizes the removal of failed refugee claimants who entered Canada irregularly between points of entry. These cases are prioritized due to their significant impact on program integrity and on Canada’s asylum system.
I'm under the impression that Canada has historically actually been much more strict with enforcing immigration laws and deporting people than the US had been.
We have ample evidence that US intelligence siphons data from literally every meaningful company it can tap, is willing to share that data with partners abroad and uses such things without even public sanction against targets picked by the president (see Venezuela).
Sure, the US is still the devil you know, but if Americans want to claim the moral high ground then at least credible pretending is required, and under the current administration we wont even get that.