If it's really about fighting climate change, let cheap Chinese EVs into Canada

The website of the Toronto International AutoShow, which opens next week, boasts a section called Electric City, but don’t look for any of China’s low-cost electric brands there. As the world seems to be heading for a global electric vehicle trade war, one wonders whether we will ever see cheaper made-in-China EVs on the roads of Canada. Maybe not, if the current Canadian and global EV policy regimes remain in place.

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The international auto market has never been a model of free trade perfection, but the current upheaval may turn out to be a major reversal in national and international trade policy and a threat to global stability. The main shift is the transformation of the auto industry into a major battleground for state economic intervention and control.

Is the EV part of a Marxist plot? I ask only partially in jest. Historically, the spectacular world-changing technologies of the past were developed and brought to market by bottom-up inventors and entrepreneurs — airplanes, printing presses, automobiles, telephones, electricity, semiconductors, computers, television, the internet, steam engines. As British writer Matt Ridley put it, ”Innovation is a bottom-up phenomenon.”

The EV industry is the opposite, a top-down phenomenon that attempts to overthrow that free market model. Today, the self-appointed modern masters of technological invention are politicians and climate powercrats who have decided to impose their version of a technological revolution on the world’s population.

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Instead of letting inventors, investors and ordinary consumers decide the future of electric vehicle technology........

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