By Dan McTeague

Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry.

There’s no doubt about it: Donald Trump’s threat of a blanket 25% tariff on Canadian goods (to be established if the Canadian government fails to take sufficient action to combat drug trafficking and illegal crossings over our southern border) would be catastrophic for our nation’s economy. More than $3 billion in goods move between the U.S. and Canada on a daily basis. If enacted, the Trump tariff would likely result in a full-blown recession.

It falls upon Canada’s leaders to prevent that from happening. That’s why Justin Trudeau flew to Florida two weeks ago to point out to the president-elect that the trade relationship between our countries is mutually beneficial.

This is true, but Trudeau isn’t the best person to make that case to Trump, since he has been trashing the once and future president, and his supporters, both in public and private, for years. He did so again at an appearance just the other day, in which he implied that American voters were sexist for once again failing to elect the nation’s first female president, and said that Trump’s election amounted to an assault on women’s rights.

Consequently, the meeting with Trump didn’t go well.

But Trudeau isn’t Canada’s only politician, and in recent days we’ve seen some contrasting approaches to this serious matter from our provincial leaders.

First up was Doug Ford, who followed up a phone call with Trudeau earlier this week by saying that Canadians have to prepare for a trade war. “Folks, this is coming, it’s not ‘if,’ it is — it’s coming… and we need to be prepared.”

Ford said that he’s working with Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to put together a retaliatory tariff list. Spokesmen for his government floated the idea of banning the LCBO from buying American alcohol, and restricting the export of critical minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries (I’m sure Trump is terrified about that last one).

But Ford’s most dramatic threat was his announcement that Ontario is prepared to shut down energy exports to the U.S., specifically to Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, if Trump follows through with his plan. “We’re sending a message to the U.S. You come and attack Ontario, you attack the livelihoods of Ontario and Canadians, we’re going to use every tool in our toolbox to defend Ontarians and Canadians across the border,” Ford said.

Now, unfortunately, all of this chest-thumping rings hollow. Ontario does almost $500 billion per year in trade with the U.S., and the province’s supply chains are highly integrated with America’s. The idea of just cutting off the power, as if you could just flip a switch, is actually impossible. It’s a bluff, and Trump has already called him on it. When told about Ford’s threat by a reporter this week, Trump replied “That’s okay if he does that. That’s fine.”

And Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry. Just over the past year Ford and Trudeau have been seen side by side announcing their $5 billion commitment to Honda, or their $28.2 billion in subsidies for new Stellantis and Volkswagen electric vehicle battery plants.

Their assumption was that the U.S. would be a major market for Canadian EVs. Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,”according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”

But Trump ran on abolishing the Biden administration’s de facto EV mandate. Now that he’s back in the White House, the market for those EVs that Trudeau and Ford invested in so heavily is going to be much softer. Perhaps they’d like to be able to blame Trump’s tariffs for the coming downturn rather than their own misjudgment.

In any event, Ford’s tactic stands in stark contrast to the response from Alberta, Canada’s true energy superpower. Premier Danielle Smith made it clear that her province “will not support cutting off our Alberta energy exports to the U.S., nor will we support a tariff war with our largest trading partner and closest ally.”

Smith spoke about this topic at length at an event announcing a new $29-million border patrol team charged with combatting drug trafficking, at which said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” Her deputy premier Mike Ellis was quoted as saying, “The concerns that president-elect Trump has expressed regarding fentanyl are, quite frankly, the same concerns that I and the premier have had.” Smith and Ellis also criticized Ottawa’s progressively lenient approach to drug crimes.

(For what it’s worth, a recent Léger poll found that “Just 29 per cent of [Canadians] believe Trump’s concerns about illegal immigration and drug trafficking from Canada to the U.S. are unwarranted.” Perhaps that’s why some recent polls have found that Trudeau is currently less popular in Canada than Trump at the moment.)

Smith said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” And on X/Twitter she said, “Now is the time to… reach out to our friends and allies in the U.S. to remind them just how much Americans and Canadians mutually benefit from our trade relationship – and what we can do to grow that partnership further,” adding, “Tariffs just hurt Americans and Canadians on both sides of the border. Let’s make sure they don’t happen.”

This is exactly the right approach. Smith knows there is a lot at stake in this fight, and is not willing to step into the ring in a fight that Canada simply can’t win, and will cause a great deal of hardship for all involved along the way.

While Trudeau indulges in virtue signaling and Ford in sabre rattling, Danielle Smith is engaging in true statesmanship. That’s something that is in short supply in our country these days.

As I’ve written before, Trump is playing chess while Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are playing checkers. They should take note of Smith’s strategy. Honey will attract more than vinegar, and if the long history of our two countries tell us anything, it’s that diplomacy is more effective than idle threats.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

It doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy. In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.

What does Donald Trump’s resounding win in the recent U.S. election mean for Canada? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been much thought about the answer to this question in Ottawa, because the vast majority of our political and pundit class expected his opponent to be victorious. Suddenly they’re all having to process this unwelcome intrusion of reality into their narrow mental picture.

Well, what does it mean?

It is early days, and it will take some time to sift through the various policy commitments of the incoming Trump Administration to unpack the Canadian angle. But one thing we do know is that a Trump presidency will be no friend to the electric vehicle industry.

A Harris administration would have been. But, Trump spent much of his campaign slamming EV subsidies and mandates, pledging at the Republican National Convention in July that he will “end the electric vehicle mandate on day one.”

This line was so effective, especially in must-win Michigan, with its hundreds of thousands of autoworkers, that Kamala Harris was forced to assure everyone who listened that the U.S. has no EV mandate, and that she has no intention of introducing one.

Of course, this wasn’t strictly true.

First, the Biden Administration, of which Harris was a part, issued an Executive Order with the explicit goal of a “50% Electric Vehicle Sales Share” by 2030. The Biden-Harris Administration (to use their own formulation) instructed their Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to introduce increasingly stringent tailpipe emission regulations on cars and light trucks with an eye towards pushing automakers to manufacture and sell more electric and hybrid vehicles.

Their EPA also issued a waiver which allows California to enact auto emissions regulations that are tougher than the federal government’s, which functions as a kind of back-door EV mandate nationally. After all, auto companies aren’t going to manufacture one set of vehicles for California, the most populous state, and another for the rest of the country.

And as for intentions, though the Harris camp consistently held that her prior policy positions shouldn’t be held against her, it’s hard to forget that as senator she’d co-sponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, which would have mandated that all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be “zero emission” by 2040. During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris accelerated that proposed timeline, saying that the auto market should be all-electric by 2035.

In other words, she seemed pretty fond of the EV policies which Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault have foisted upon Canada.

For Trump, all of these policies can be filed under “green new scam” climate policies, which stifle American resource development and endanger national prosperity. Now that he’s retaken the White House, it is expected that he will issue his own executive orders to the EPA, rescinding Biden’s tailpipe instructions and scrapping their waiver for California. And though he will be hindered somewhat by Congress, he’s likely to do everything in his power to roll back the EV subsidies contained in the (terribly named) Inflation Reduction Act and lobby for changes limiting which EVs qualify for tax credits, and how much.

All of this will be devastating for the EV industry, which is utterly reliant on the carrots and sticks of subsidies and mandates. And it’s particularly bad news for the Trudeau government (and Doug Ford’s government in Ontario), which have gone all-in on EVs, investing billions of taxpayer dollars to convince automakers to build their EVs and batteries here.

Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,” according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”

Canada’s EV subsidies were pitched as an “investment” in an evolving auto market, but that assumes that those pre-existing lines of trade will remain essentially unchanged. If American EV demand collapses, or significantly contracts without mandates or tax incentives, we’ll be up the river without a paddle.

And that will be true, even if the U.S. EV market proves more resilient than I expect it to. That is because of Trump’s commitment to “Making America Great Again” by boosting American manufacturing and the jobs it provides. He campaigned on a blanket tariff of 10 percent on all foreign imports, with no exceptions mentioned. This would have a massive impact on Canada, since the U.S. is our largest trading partner.

Though Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have been saying to everyone who will listen how excited they are to work with the Trump Administration again, and “Canada will be fine,” it doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy.

In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.

The optimism that existed under the Biden administration that Canada could significantly increase its export capacity to the USA is going down the drain. The hope that “Canada could reestablish its export sector as a key driver of growth by positioning itself as a leader in electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, along with other areas in cleantech,” in the words of an RBC report, is swiftly fading. It seems more likely now that Canada will be left holding the bag on a dying industry in which we’re invested heavily.

The Trudeau Liberals’ aggressive push, driven by ideology and not market forces, to force Electric Vehicles on everyone is already backfiring on the Canadian taxpayer. Pierre Poilievre must take note — EV mandates and subsidies are bad for our country, and as Trump has demonstrated, they’re not a winning policy. He should act accordingly.