Here’s a sobering thought. Canada produced about 1.3 million vehicles last year. The U.S. has excess vehicle assembly capacity of 1.6 million units.
How hard could it be for the U.S. to absorb total Canadian vehicle assembly with its existing plants?
That is, of course, an ardent wish of U.S. President Donald Trump.
“We don’t really want Canada to make cars for us, to put it bluntly,” Trump said in April. “We want to make our own cars.”
Canada exports almost all its vehicle production to the U.S. For now, most of it enters the U.S. duty free because it complies with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
But CUSMA comes up for review next year. And in the meantime, the mercurial Trump can scrap the tariff waiver on CUSMA-compliant U.S. imports at any time.
The Ontario-based vehicle assembly industry is still considered to be the heart of Canada’s manufacturing sector.
Yet it has shrunk by 55 per cent since 2000, when it produced 2.9 million vehicles. Production fell by 13 per cent last year. It fell by 23 per cent in April, the first month that Trump’s auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico were in force.
It now accounts for just 8.3 per cent of North American production, to America’s 66.2 per cent and Mexico’s 25.5 per cent.
The governments of Canada and Ontario have subsidized the industry for decades, most recently with some $50 billion in federal supports alone to create an electric vehicle (EV) supply chain.
Trump’s tariff regime has barely begun and already planned Canadian auto industry investments have been postponed. Some automakers have relocated Canadian production to the U.S. And others have committed billions of dollars to new U.S. plants. All in response to the Trump tariffs.
The Canadian sector has already lost several thousand jobs.
If we thought the U.S. industry would go to bat for us, given that the industry is highly integrated among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, we best forget about that.
In May, GM CEO Mary Barra, publicly endorsed Trump’s auto tariffs.
It’s time to think of Canada without a vehicle assembly industry and what might replace it, if anything.
Bear in mind that our G20 peer Australia ceased auto production in 2017. Eight years later, Australia’s per capita GDP is still higher than that of Canada.
We should examine how Australia has adjusted, and Britain as well, where auto production last year, at 905,233 units, was at 52 per cent of its peak level in 1972.
We have options and now is when we should be considering them.
Plan A is to hope for the best in Canada’s current trade negotiations with the U.S.
We could emerge from those talks with something approaching the status quo but with a new Canadian guarantee of preferential access to Canadian critical metals and minerals, such as aluminum, nickel and zinc, for North American automakers provided they continue to assemble vehicles in Canada.
The U.S. auto industry is heavily reliant on Canadian aluminum, for instance.
Another adjustment to the status quo would create a co-ordinated, mutually enforced system of regulatory protections from any harms caused by advanced digital technologies embedded in vehicles.
They include artificial intelligence (AI) applications, autonomous operation, grid connectivity and data transmission.
Those two adjustments would provide North American-built vehicles with a competitive advantage and address national security and privacy concerns in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
But for Trump, the end game is the death of Canadian vehicle production. That would not be difficult to achieve, if Trump acts on a threat he made earlier this year to raise tariffs on Canadian vehicles to 100 per cent if necessary.
“Assuming the (U.S.) administration leaves its current tariff policies in place, we will likely see a protracted decoupling of the North American automotive industry,” said economist Andrew Foran of TD Economics in a May report.
Plan B, a Canadian auto sector that goes its own way, would become the leading supplier of trucks and other vehicles to all orders of government in Canada, from municipalities to the Canadian Armed Forces.
It would also make heavy equipment for the Canadian farming, construction, mining and forestry sectors, almost all of which is currently imported.
Plan B would likely require that the vehicle assembly industry be nationalized and protected with high tariffs against the likes of Caterpillar, Deere and Komatsu.
Plan B would rescue and repatriate a Canadian vehicle assembly industry that has been foreign owned for most of its 128-year history.
That protectionist, government-directed approach would be akin to how China became the world’s second-largest economy.
It would also conflict with Canada’s open market, private-sector ethos, however. Canadians would have to decide if it was a worthy enough cause to set a potentially undesirable precedent.
But we should at least be thinking about it. And it belongs on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s list of national projects.
