Canada’s electric vehicle industry faces multiple threats

From the Fraser Institute

While Trump’s trade war continues to grab all the headlines, Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) industry may be steaming toward an iceberg, due mainly to shifts in policy south of the border.

Specifically, the Trump administration has withdrew from the Paris Agreement (and its net-zero 2050 framework) and eliminated the U.S. EV mandate, which required upwards of 56 per cent of new vehicles sold in the United States. to be EV and 13 per cent be plug-in hybrids by 2032. These moves represent an existential threat to Canada’s EV investments and the viability of the large EV battery plants under various stages of planning and construction in Ontario and Quebec.

Indeed, the Trudeau government, along with the Ontario and Quebec governments, negotiated several significant battery manufacturing deals, which included subsidies and construction funding totalling $4.6 billion for the Northvolt AB plant near Montreal, $13.2 billion for the Volkswagen plant in Saint Thomas, Ontario, $15 billion for the Stellantis plant in Windsor, Ontario and $1.6 billion for the Japanese battery company Asahi Kasei plant in Port Colborne, Ontario. (Although both Northvolt AB and Stellantis are reconsidering their EV battery investments in Canada—Northvolt AB is approaching bankruptcy and Stellantis thinks that current federal subsidies are insufficient to justify its investment.)

According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, taxpayer subsidies (a.k.a. corporate welfare) for these deals will cost Canadians up to $44 billion between 2022/23 and 2032/33. In the U.S., EV sales in 2024 were 1.2 million (7 per cent of auto total sales) buoyed by an EV tax credit of US$7,500 per new vehicle, which translates into US$9 billion in EV consumer subsidies that year alone.

All of this raises the question: can the EV industry stand on its own without massive subsidies from taxpayers?

In 2023, of the two largest EV producers (Tesla and Ford), only Tesla would break even without the EV tax credit subsidies. According to Reuters, Tesla earned approximately US$8,300 in profit per EV in 2023, and of the 1.8 million Tesla vehicles produced globally, only 400,000 were produced in the U.S. Meanwhile, even after the subsidies, Ford lost US$64,700 per EV in 2023 and US$32,700 in 2024. (It’s also worth noting that Ford, with the second-highest EV production in the U.S., produced a mere 72,000 vehicles in 2023.)

While Ford still plans to make EVs, it recently announced plans to shift production at its Oakville, Ontario factory from electric sports vehicles to gas-powered pickup trucks. The news came shortly after General Motors announced it would trim its forecast of EVs produced in 2024 by 50,000.

Clearly, U.S. legacy automakers are worried about overproducing against sluggish consumer demand, knowing that their profitability and fiscal viability resides in their internal combustion engine vehicle production lines. Numerous large European automotive manufacturers also saw a decline in EV sales in 2024 and are re-investing in their combustion engine production lines to protect profits.

Finally, beyond only EVs, Canada’s automotive manufacturing sector is in decline. Between 2014 and 2023, automotive production fell from 2.4 million to 1.5 million vehicles while automobile imports increased from $57 billion to $82 billion. Of the 1.5 million vehicles produced in Canada in 2023, 88 per cent were exported to the U.S., leaving the industry highly vulnerable to shifts in American policy (which currently include President Trump’s threat of a 100 per cent tariff on automobile exports).

The iceberg is in view. The new Carney government and our provincial governments must take stock of the decline in the automotive manufacturing sector, its near total dependence on U.S. exports, and uncertain government-driven EV investments. And they should ask if the push to electrify the automotive manufacturing base is in the long-term best interests of Canadians.

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Automotive

Big Auto Wants Your Data. Trump and Congress Aren’t Having It.

Published on October 5, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Ken Blackwell

Congress is not going to allow Big Auto to sideline consumer privacy and safety while getting subsidized massively by the federal government.

That is because, in late September, by an overwhelming vote of 50 to 1, Chairman Brett Guthrie’s (R-KY) House Energy & Commerce Committee joined the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in passing the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.

This legislation is in response to some automakers removing AM radios from new model vehicles despite pleas from America’s public safety community not to do so.

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Advisors to President Trump have argued they continue doing so for financial reasons — because they want to force increased traffic onto their infotainment systems, which collects drivers’ personal information and sells it to third parties.

“They’d rather force consumers to use their infotainment devices — which collect and sell their third-party data — than protect American lives,” Corey Lewandowski, President Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and senior adviser to his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, stated.

No one in Congress likes that the auto companies are doing this. That is why the bill has broad bipartisan support with over 300 cosponsors in the House as well as a filibuster-proof level of support in the Senate.

The entirety of America’s public safety community spanning the federal, state, and local levels, insists AM radio remaining in cars is critical for protecting the nation’s emergency alerting systems. These systems rely heavily upon AM radio, the only communication method that has stayed reliably accessible during many disasters such as the Sept.11 terrorist attack and major disasters like Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and most recently, Helene.

Brendan Carr, the current chairman of President Trump’s FCC, nominated by President Trump, has also endorsed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. In a statement, Carr said that “millions of Americans depend on the value of AM radio and the local news that AM broadcasters offer in communities across the country.” He also recounted hearing firsthand stories of Hurricane Helene victims who “could only access lifesaving information in the days following the storm by tuning into their AM radios.”

AM radio also serves another purpose that the elites in Silicon Valley and Detroit often forget: it keeps rural and working-class America connected. Millions of people outside the big cities rely on AM for local news, farm reports, weather alerts, and even community events. For many small towns, AM stations are a lifeline—far more reliable than expensive streaming services or spotty cell coverage. Pulling it out of cars is yet another way of telling Middle America: “you don’t matter.”

Of course, no good idea in Washington is safe from special interests.

Despite the broad support within Congress, the administration, and throughout the public safety and first responder communities, the bill has faced a full-court press by the musicFIRST Coalition — a group backed by the Recording Industry of America — to tank the legislation unless it is tied to unrelated music royalty reform legislation. That’s cronyism politics at its worst—holding public safety hostage to squeeze out another payday.

However, now that the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has passed both committees by overwhelming margins, the only stop left for the legislation is the House and Senate Floor — meaning Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) must call it up for a roll call vote.

At the heart of this fight is more than just whether a radio dial stays in your dashboard. It’s about whether Americans can trust that their safety won’t be sacrificed for corporate profit.

It’s also about data privacy. Automakers and Big Tech are eager to funnel drivers into infotainment systems that monitor every move, harvest personal information, and sell it to the highest bidder. AM radio doesn’t spy on you. It doesn’t crash when the grid goes down. It doesn’t put profit ahead of people. It just works.

For the sake of both public safety and personal freedom, Congress should make sure it stays that way.

Ken Blackwell (@KenBlackwell) is an adviser to the Family Research Council and a chair at the America First Policy Institute. He is a former Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio Treasurer and Secretary of State, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He is also a former member of the Trump transition team.

Automotive

Canada’s EV subsidies are wracking up billions in losses for taxpayers, and not just in the auto industry

Published on October 2, 2025

Dan McTeague

By Dan McTeague

To anyone who thought that the Liberals’ decision to postpone enforcement of their Electric Vehicle (EV) mandate by one year was part of a well-thought-out plan to get that disastrous program back on track, well, every day brings with it news that you were wrong. In fact, the whole project seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Here’s the latest crisis Mark Carney and his carnival of ideologues are having to deal with. Late last year, the Liberal party instituted a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs. The idea was to protect the Canadian EV industry from China dumping their vehicles into our country, at prices far lower than Canadian companies can afford due to their massive state subsidies. This has been a major problem in the EU, which is also attempting to force a transition to EVs.

But Beijing wasn’t going to take that lying down. Taking advantage of Western environmentalist sentiment is an important part of their economic plans — see, for instance, how they’ve cornered the global solar panel market, though the factories making them are powered by massive amounts of coal. So they retaliated with a 75% duty on Canadian canola seed and a 100% tariff on canola oil and canola meal.

This was big enough to really hurt Canadian farmers, and Ottawa was forced to respond with more than $300 million in new relief programs for canola producers. Even so, our farmers have warned that short-term relief from the government will do little if the tariffs are here for the long-term.

With pressure on Carney mounting, his Industry Minister Melanie Joly announced that the government was “looking at” dropping tariffs on Chinese EVs in the hope that China would ease off on their canola tariffs.

That may be good news for canola producers, but how about the automotive companies? They’ve grown increasingly unhappy with the EV mandate, as Canadian consumers have been slow to embrace them, and they’ve been confronted with the prospect of paying significant fines unless they raise prices on the gas-and-diesel driven vehicles which consumers actually want to make the EVs that they don’t really want more attractive.

That’s the context for Brian Kingston, CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, saying that dropping these tariffs “would be a disaster.”

“China has engaged in state-supported industrial policy to create massive overcapacity in EV production, and that plan is coming to fruition now,” Kingston said. “When you combine that with weak labour and environmental standards, Chinese manufacturers are not competing with Canadian, American, or Mexican manufacturers on a level playing field. We simply cannot allow those vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian market.”

The auto manufacturers Kingston represents are understandably upset about suddenly having to compete with underpriced Chinese EVs. After all, with the government forcing everyone to buy a product they really don’t want, are most people going to patriotically pay more for that product, or will they just grab whichever one is cheaper? I know which one I think is more likely.

And then there’s a related problem — the federal and provincial governments have “invested” somewhere in the neighborhood of $52.5 billion to make Canada a cog in the global EV supply chain. In response to Joly’s announcement, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has gone “all in” on EVs, wrote an open letter to the prime minister saying that canceling the tariffs would mean losing out on that “investment,” and put 157,000 Canadian automotive jobs at risk.

Now, it’s worth noting that automakers all over Ontario have already been cutting jobs while scaling back their EV pledges. So even with the tariffs, this “investment” hasn’t been paying out particularly well. Keeping them in place just to save Doug Ford’s bacon seems like the worst of all options.

But it seems to me that the key to untangling this whole mess has been the option I’ve been advocating from the beginning: repeal the EV mandate. That makes Canada less of a mark for China. It benefits the taxpayers by not incentivizing our provincial and federal governments to throw good money after bad, attempting to subsidize companies to protect a shrinking number of EV manufacturing jobs.

The heart of this trade war is an entirely artificial demand for EVs. Removing the mandate from the equation would lower the stakes.

In the end, the best policy is to trust Canadians to make their own decisions. Let the market decide.