Canada cuts tariff on Chinese EVs from 100% to 6%!

[thewayne]

This is going to majorly PO American auto makers! Breaks my little heart. But that wasn't the reason for the deal.

Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and Canada followed suit. China's cars are very wide in range in features: some are utter crap, some make a Tesla look like a Tonka, but Tesla hasn't really been updating their cars like they should. And above all, Chinese EVs are VERY inexpensive! How? Cheap labor, possibly even prison labor. But as a result of these prices, China has greatly reduced their use of fossil fuels and EV sales are soaring over there.

When Canada put in the tariff, China retaliated with a high tariff on Canadian canola seeds, a major farm export. With this drop in the EV tariff, China is dropping theirs from 84% to 15%. There were other items taxed in China's retaliation, I suppose those are still being negotiated.

But here's the telling bit: "Carney [Canadian Prime Minister] said China has become a more predictable partner to deal with than the U.S, the country’s neighbor and longtime ally.

“Our relationship has progressed in recent months with China. It is more predictable and you see results coming from that,” Carney said.

Carney hasn’t been able to reach a deal with U.S. President Trump to reduce some tariffs that are punishing some key sectors of the Canadian economy and Trump has previously talked about making Canada the 51st state."

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jan/16/canada-cuts-chinese-ev-tariff-100-exchange-lower-canola-tariffs/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/16/2112255/canada-reverses-tariff-on-chinese-evs

Comments

[graydon]

It's a lot more than that.

The US is the Oil Empire. (There's only ever been one, and only will be one.)

As a result, everything is structured around fossil carbon consumption; society is set up so you must buy gas, and attempts to buy less gas are met with increasingly larger vehicles so the total gas/mile rate tends to increase. (And increasingly distant housing, and making sure you have to drive to buy food, and so on.)

This is Carney moving Canada away from that structural position; society won't be structured around forcing people to buy gas. (More realistically, signalling a willingness to change the social structure. It'll take a lot more than EVs, which are just a stopgap on the way to a walkable society, but it wasn't a thinkable change two years ago.)

This has made some Premiers very mad, because they're committed to the "you exist to buy gas" social structure, but if solar panels come with EVs in the low tariff bracket, this is in the nature of a lasting change.

[thewayne]

Indeed so.  Definitely something that has needed to be done for some time, and I'm glad to see Carney leading the way.  Norway now either is selling more EVs than IC cars, or has more registered EVs than IC, can't remember which.  Odds are very high that our next car will be an EV.  We just saw our first solar farm completed in our area, on the road to our favorite Mexican food place.  We also have a lot of wind generation in the north central part of New Mexico, but also a lot of petroleum production, mainly NG extraction, in the eastern part where we border with Texas.

[richardf8]

Oh, and in other news, after 25 years of dithering, the EU and Mercosur have finally inked a trade pact.

Looks like Trump has liberated the US from having trading partners.

[ranunculus]

This is an absolutely predictable outcome of Trump policies. I know Republicans who are crowing: the "doom and gloom" about Trump policies hasn't materialized on and on. To me it feels like that period just before the tech meltdown when everyone was pushing balloon payments on loans and anyone with a pulse could get a loan. This time it will be much worse.

[thewayne]

I just saw a headline that Drumpf is levying tariffs against any country that opposes his takeover of Greenland.  What a world in which we live.  Sigh.

[pondhopper]

Yep. That will end up being all of the EU. All for one and one for all...this is uniting all us EUers .

[disneydream06]

I saw that number drop earlier tonight. WOWZA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[ionelv]

Re: "This is going to majorly PO American auto makers", not true for two big reasons:
1. US auto makers are getting off the EV train fast.
2. Carney capped Chinese EVs at 49k per year. Given that 2M cars were sold in Canada in 2025 of which no more than 120k were ZEVs (compared to 264k in 2024), 49k seems like a small concession.

[thewayne]

Interesting.  Personally, I think the American Big 3 are making a big mistake, but perhaps that's just the way the market is right now.  They've been advertising and convincing the public that they want big trucks and SUVs for so long that that's where a majority of the sales are.  Odds are that our next vehicle will be a EV.

[ionelv]

I don't know about your neck of the woods, but in mine (Ontario), we have what is called the Ultra-Low Overnight electricity rates plan and I am sure we saved even more money than without it. I did a price comparison going back one year between the regular TOU plan and the ULO, and we got the same cost (BEFORE we bought our EV which we have charged 93% of those kwh during those 11pm-7am hours at home vs charging at other hours or away from home). To give you an idea, I calculated that we paid C$733 last year to charge 7500kwh our Tesla-Y during which we put 32,875 km on it. Even though this is a poor comparison, we spent C$3,400 (2,200 liters of unleaded 87 octane) to gas up our Dodge Ram 1500 while driving ~16,000 km with it last year. Of course, if you install solar or other renewable, that EV cost/km driven will go down even more :)

[thewayne]

Very nice!  Unfortunately I've been quite lax updating my records on our gas consumption so I can't tell you how much we've been spending.  Right now at home we can get regular unleaded at about $2/gallon.  Phoenix is around $3 as they have a ridiculous amount of stadium taxes and levies that don't go towards the things that they're supposed to.  We fill up in Tucson and try to reduce our petrol spending while we're here, but it's not easy.

[silveradept]

The US is going to look even more like an international fool than it already does as it continues to ally itself with petrostates and insist that the only vehicles that could ever be worth anything are mobile tanks meant to burn gallons of fuel to move several inches. An electric would suit my purposes entirely well, if I could just get the resources gathered in one place to be able to manage it and to get all of the electric updates and installations as well. As always, all it takes is money, but who knows when that will be around.