Tariff threats are already driving investment out of Canada
Tariff threats are already driving investment out of Canada
"Whether or not they ever be put into place, the damage is done," said Greig Mordue, a former auto industry executive and associate professor at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology at McMaster University.
He says Trump's threats have already changed the landscape. Whether he goes ahead with the tariffs or not, or whether he carves out specific exemptions, the threat alone will drive investment out of Canada and into the U.S.
"For at least the next four years, there will be no serious investment in the Canadian automotive industry," said Mordue.
Keep in mind that we don't need private investment to do anything. We can always replace any amount of private investment with public. We cannot run out of Canadian dollars so financial capital is never a limiting factor unless we are ideologically opposed to public investment. Real economic resources such as people, materials, factories, know-how and so on are the limit and those haven't changed much. Talk about fleeting financial capital presumes the primacy of private capital. This position is purely ideological. Canada itself has a history of relying on public investment to build the country and its services in the form of crown corporations, many of which got privatized with the ideological shift in the neoliberal era. Nothing except this entrenched ideology is stopping us from doing that again.
A nice little addition is that we control most of the raw resources that goes into producing almost everything we need in the first place, so a weakened dollar due to borrowing and printing for the sake of massive public investments into our own industries actually makes us more competitive on the world market, especially for high end manufacturing or low and medium end that has very little labour input.
And such build-up will benefit the country massively in the long term as well, presuming that we're not neglectful in keeping them up to date as technology moves on. Not to mention all the employment opportunities this brings.
Canada is a superpower when it comes to energy, minerals, lumber, and agriculture. Not to mention that we've done surprisingly little in value added production of our raw resources, especially for selling oil without refining any of it. And delivering to the world market is easy, thanks to the build-up of the St Lawrence over the previous century, as well as BC's harbours.
Real economic resources such as people, materials, factories, know-how and so on are the limit and those haven’t changed much.
Yes but, well basically that. The government doesn't have all that shit, and is so stripped to the bone they can't even fund a website without getting conned by their contractors.
This is a reason the dip is self-limiting, and we shouldn't completely panic. This isn't a reason to go full Mao.
When I refer to us having those resources, I'm referring to the overall Canadian economy, not whether the government alone has them. If the money that mobilize those resources (e.g. someone from the Bay area paying me to do work) goes away and to a different country, the Canadian government can replace that money and get me to do work, directly or indirectly. For example building some of them gov't websites. Or working for some startup that got public funding. Among other possibilities.
So are we able to get business to turn those existing plants into plants that can build Asian or European cars over here? Might be an opportunity there, or not. Perhaps we need to do what China did and start to build our cars for our own people.
We already have a Canadian-made EV in the works.
That's awesome 👍
Personally, I think it has the same issue loads of other current EV offerings have. It's trying too hard to look futuristic. Which, again this my personal opinion on what I want in a vehicle, that type of look is just bad. I really hate it. It looks like something a highschool student designed as their first CAD project.
Again, personal preference for car design, not trying to start an argument.I think it's really important that Canada starts building up our own brands again. We used to have a bunch, they all got bought by American companies. We need to have our own brands.....
The government seems to be wanting to foster a domestic EV battery production industry. Might as well make entire cars while we're at it.
They could. For example the Chrysler plant many years back switched to running Volkswagen also. But would other brands come here is the question
I doubt it would make sense, as our marketplace isn't large enough to support it alone. You would only do this to give you more access to the North American marketplace.
I keep seeing this talking point. Is it true?
Consider that Australia has a similar population, similar geographic issues and they have domestic auto production.
South Korea is only slightly larger than us in terms of population and has 3 domestic companies building cars. We could certainly do like Korea and export vehicles.
The only thing stopping us from having a Canadian domestic auto industry is the pervasive and false belief that we can't because we need to sell to the US.
We don't. We can sell to anyone willing to buy.
Edit: To add. My first new car was built by an independent plant that manufactured for multiple car companies.
I don't know if I'd be mad if the auto industry crashed. Maybe that would incentivise our government to invest in more mass transit infrastructure.
I think the crash is inevitable. Auto sales has plummeted in the western world as people are driving less due to having less money to pay for it. Not to mention that so many eastern countries are building auto factories that can sell equal quality cars at a fraction of the price, it's hard to see any future in the industry even if all this never happened.
We need to move on from auto manufacturing to some sort of higher tech product that is harder to brute force with cheap labour.