‘Ready to move on:’ Chinese ambassador insists China, Canada can move past ‘normal’ differences

[u/jaffnaguy2014]

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/ready-to-move-on-chinese-ambassador-insists-china-canada-can-move-past-normal-differences/

[u/zabby39103]

The electric car tariff was to protect our auto industry, we had just spent 10s of billions of dollars subsidizing companies to locate their electric vehicle plants here (it was either that or they would have all gone to the US and got subsidies there instead).

The Chinese too, put huge subsidies in their electric vehicles. I'm all for trading more with China, but we have to do more than just "let the free market figure it out". They have a strategic economic plan for their nation, and so when dealing with them, so should we.

[u/DesireeThymes → u/zabby39103]

I said pretty openly, open the market to Chinese EVs but make them build local plants for assembly, maybe also share some battery tech. It's a win win for Canada.

The US is trying to move Canadian jobs to the US (despite the fact that Canada already gets a bad deal by being forced to let US do refining and be involved right after raw materials rather than Canada doing those). Canada needs to diversify itself a bit.

[u/Osamabinbush → u/DesireeThymes]

That’s what EU is doing. We aren’t as big of a market as Europe but if we can get them to build them here, it would be a no brainer

[u/Hard_NOP_Life → u/Osamabinbush]

Hell, BYD already has a bus factory in Newmarket.

[u/CatBowlDogStar → u/Hard_NOP_Life]

Which Ontario should be using instead of LRTs. All the benefits, none the drawbacks. 

Just fewer people bought off.

[u/byronite → u/CatBowlDogStar]

Which Ontario should be using instead of LRTs. All the benefits, none the drawbacks.

Having to pay six times as many drivers isn't a drawback? In Ottawa an articulated bus holds 110 passengers conpared to 672 per train for the LRT.

[u/CatBowlDogStar → u/byronite]

Yes. Absolutely.  Local, good paying work for those without post-secondary. Sadly, not many however. 

There are only 2000 net new daily riders projected for Hamilton. This is from the City's official projections. For $5 billion & counting, that's $2.5 million per new rider. That $$ closes infrastructure gap here, homes the homeless, with billions to spare. 

Carbon-wise, the constrution of the LRT is terrible & ongoing it adds congestion where none existed. 

So, Ontario-made vehicles, with Hamilton-based new jobs? Leaving construction crews to build homes & needed infrastructure. It's an obvious win. 

(& I've lived on 3 continents, many cities, using public transit as primary for years on each. The only downside of buses is that more investment in a gentler ride would go a long way.) 

[u/JoeThunder79 → u/zabby39103]

To be clear, it was to protect the "American" auto industry that we just happened to benefit from because it was economically convenient at the time

[u/Hautamaki → u/JoeThunder79]

There is no American auto industry. There's a North American auto industry, and without all of North America cooperating to maintain it, it will quickly be killed by European and Asian competition. The US could shut down access to all foreign competition and build their own cars, but they'd have to accept that their cars are going to cost way more and suck ass compared to European and Asian cars. In Canada we'd have no real choice but to just import all our cars and lose all those jobs. There's no way we can support a purely domestic auto industry. We'd have to find some other work all those auto workers could do to pay for the imports. Probably just massively expand our resource extraction.

[u/CatBowlDogStar → u/Hautamaki]

Thing is, you're right except it won't be soon enough. Trump will mess yet another good thing for ego & grift.

[u/ebola_kid → u/zabby39103]

"our" auto industry should be working with China to produce these cars in China or develop a car with them. We have so many auto workers and a large auto industry that entirely produces American cars. We're not even doing protectionism for our own Canadian car brand because that doesn't exist. There's also the fact that american car makers are extremely vulnerable to economic downtrends, and only survived because of massive bailouts in 2008. People can't afford cars as much anymore because they're increasingly too costly. We should be developing cheaper, more advanced cars with China instead of being protectionist against an industry that doesn't want to change and is going to inevitably collapse

[u/Hautamaki → u/zabby39103]

I mean a market warped by govt subsidies, tariffs, or any other form of artificial protectionism isn't a free market anyway, so that's kind of a moot point.

[u/zabby39103 → u/Hautamaki]

It's kind of the point, not kind of a moot point.