Canada, California, and Chinese Electric Cars

On his recent trip to Beijing, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney praised the leadership of Xi Jinping and announced plans to bring 49,000 Chinese electric cars into Canada. In several ways that escaped notice, Carney was following in the footsteps of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

As David Frum notes, Trudeau “traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities,” a reference to the Moscow Economic Conference in April, 1952. Stalin’s USSR came billed as a workers’ state based on the “scientific” principles of Marxism-Leninism, as opposed to the “bourgeois” nations with their market economies. The regime’s admirers assumed that the Communist regime’s products would be superior, but it didn’t turn out that way.

In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Trudeau allowed the USSR to sell the Soviet-built Lada in Canada. Like all cars produced by Communist regimes, the Lada was an inferior vehicle that failed to catch on with Canadians in a significant way. The “plagiarized Fiat,” as one reviewer called it, was built in the USSR, so the deal did not benefit Canadian auto workers, then struggling to compete with the surging Japanese.

The Trabant, built in East Germany, was probably the most inferior automobile ever manufactured. By 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, many had been consigned to dumpsters. In 1991, the Soviet Union passed into history, and the Marxist-Leninist torch was passed on to China. Jump ahead to Canada in November 2013.

Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin, proclaimed, “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Actually, it doesn’t, as Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek showed in The Road To Serfdom, first published in 1944, during the heyday of Stalinism.

Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister in 2015 and in 2025 succeeded by Mark Carney. Canada’s new PM is an apostle of John Kenneth Galbraith, not fond of Hayek, but like Pierre Trudeau, a big fan of the USSR. In 1984, Galbraith wrote, “It is evident that the Soviet economy has made great material progress in recent years,” when, for all but the willfully blind, it hadn’t.

By the time of the USSR’s collapse, Japanese and European cars had made huge inroads in North America. Toyota, Subaru, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen now manufacture automobiles in the United States. The Chinese EVs Carney will bring into Canada are made in the People’s Republic of China, so his “landmark” deal will not benefit Canadian auto workers. On the other hand, Carney’s deal is sure to delight California Governor Gavin Newsom.

China’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles is Build Your Dreams (BYD). As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018, BYD buses ran out of charge before their designated range and had trouble scaling the hills of Los Angeles, which are not particularly steep.

In April 2020, Newsom struck a no-bid $1 billion deal with Build Your Dreams for masks. That year, Newsom issued an executive order mandating that by 2035, EVs would account for all new sales of cars and light trucks in California. The governor, who in 2023 hosted Xi Jinping in San Francisco, doubtless sees BYD as the major EV supplier, but there’s a problem here.

California’s electric grid has trouble keeping up with demand. In the summer of 2022, California called on drivers not to charge their electric cars from 4-9 p.m., a common time for EV drivers to plug in. Back on December 20, a massive power outage in San Francisco left Waymo self-driving cars stranded, shut down two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations, and affected commuter trains and traffic lights.

While these problems endure, California was far ahead of Canada on a deal to benefit China, at the expense of American workers. For the new span of the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, California, a Chinese company used Chinese steel and brought Chinese welders and engineers aboard. The project came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and riddled with corrosion, cracked rods, and such, raising safety concerns.

UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhasaan Astaneh-Asi told reporters he declined to use the bridge and warned about faulty design. “If a single component fails, the whole thing comes down,” the professor explained.

Last November, a landslide caused China’s new Hongqi bridge to fracture and collapse, not the first such structure in the PRC to fail. In 2024, a bridge in China’s Shaanxi province collapsed, killing 15 people.

Meanwhile, as David Frum explains, Pierre Trudeau, “to the extent he could, tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance.” With the pronouncement that Canada’s relationship with the USA “is over,” and his call for a new order, Prime Minister Carney seems to be pushing the same shift. If Canadians, especially the nation’s auto workers, see Carney as the second coming of Pierre Trudeau, it would be hard to blame them.