A Chinese made 2024 Foxtron Model B electric vehicle.
A Chinese made 2024 Foxtron Model B electric vehicle. Credit: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons Credit: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons

It must have nearly killed Danielle Smith Tuesday to come out and advocate for Canada to drop its 100-per-cent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Admittedly, Alberta’s premier did so half-heartedly. Still, the intent of her message to the masses was clear: Canada must remove the tariff on Chinese EVs in hopes the Chinese will drop the 75.8-per-cent tariff on Canadian canola products.

Hitherto, Smith has been no friend of the concept of electrification that is sweeping the world – all except a few backward MAGA bits of North America, including Alberta, that continue to insist the internal combustion engine was handed down to Adam by God and must therefore remain in use forever, powered by Alberta’s anointed if carbon-intensive ethical oil. 

Or, at least, as long as cheap and reliable Chinese-built EVs aren’t available in Canada thanks to that tariff that former president of the United States instructed our previous prime minister to impose on China back when the present president was still the former president. Ironically, Canadian officials felt at the time that if they didn’t go along with the Biden White House demand, the response could devastate the Canadian auto industry. 

There was Smith’s “temporary” ban on renewable energy projects that thanks to the application of reams of red tape – a United Conservative Party (UCP) specialty when it doesn’t like something or someone for any reason – cost the province something in the order of $33-billion in investment and has turned into a semi-permanent state of affairs.

Likewise, there was her whimsically punitive tax on EVs because they’re, you know, really heavy – as if giant pickup trucks used as commuter vehicles here in Wildrose Country are not.

However, that was then, and this is somewhat post-then!

“China just hit Alberta’s farmers with a crushing 75.8% tariff on even more canola products, on top of the 100% tariffs already in place,” Smith said on the social media site previously known as Twitter, accurately for once. “This threatens to shut Alberta producers out of one of our most valuable markets almost entirely.

“China is Alberta’s second largest agricultural export market worth $2.4 BILLION last year and nearly 70% of our canola seed exports go there,” she went on, channelling her American hero’s use of ALL CAPS to emphasize a point on social media. 

“These tariffs are in response to the federal government’s imposition of 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs and 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum,” she continued, working reluctantly up to her point. “Now, Alberta’s farmers, ranchers, and processors are paying the price.

“We need immediate federal action to resolve this dispute and reopen access to this critical market before more livelihoods are destroyed,” she said, getting to it. 

Agriculture Minister RJ (“Junior”*) Sigurdson issued a nearly identical statement on the government’s official website, giving it the quality of Holy Writ – at least for as long as it remains on this side of the Memory Hole. Well, like the internal combustion engine, the Internet is forever, so I guess historians may get to argue about who really said it.

However, to add that special Alberta touch, Sigurdson insisted in his little screed that Canada’s current trade problems with China were created entirely by the Liberal Government in Ottawa, a point of view that some might dismiss as tendentious.

Nevertheless, for once Smith and Sigurdson are mostly right about EV tariffs, at least in the sense that the tariff was put there in significant part to protect the U.S. auto industry at the request of the United States – the very same United States, as it happens that is now beating the crap out of Canada with tariffs and taking actions that have the potential to destroy the Canadian auto industry. 

So it’s possible that, if handled with finesse, the removal of the EV tariff on China could kill several metaphorical birds with one proverbial stone: Repair our trade relationship with the world’s largest economy (that is, China’s, if you go by purchasing power parity), hasten the trend to electrification, help Canadian consumers, maybe even encourage the production of electric vehicles in Canada, and flip the bird to U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

The sounds emanating from the Carney Government in Ottawa are not promising, alas. The Globe and Mail’s agriculture reporter quoted the federal agriculture minister saying Ottawa “will hold off on making concessions until it knows Beijing will respond in kind.”

“We want to make sure that when we make a final decision … we’re going to get a result back from it,” Heath MacDonald told the newspaper. As if you can’t trust a trade deal made in Beijing but you can trust one made in Washington.

What this really means, presumably, is that Ottawa is worried about the temper tantrum that Mr. Trump might respond with. So don’t hold your breath expecting to be able to buy a BYD in Alberta any time soon. Pity. 

If nothing else, to stick with Orwellian metaphors, this certainly illustrates how the UCP has so perfected the art and science of doublethink that its leaders can execute a screeching smuggler’s turn without making a sound!

Doublethink, as the British author George Orwell explained in his novel 1984, which was mostly written in 1948, is the ability to simultaneously hold two opinions that cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing them both anyway.

And it’s why the owners of those giant pickup trucks racing up and down the highways of Alberta don’t need to worry about being electrified out of existence any time soon, no matter what Ms. Smith is saying this week. 

*I don’t actually know for a verified fact that RJ Sigurdson’s nickname is “Junior,” but if the Wikipedia is telling the truth and his legal name really is Richard Junior Sigurdson, how could it not be? DJC 

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...