> Remove the 100% on Chinese EV's, but impose 100% on Tesla no matter where it comes from.
Have them stop buttressing a protectionist scheme and let their citizen get access to affordable EV from companies who care about making affordable ones.
That’s not a better suggestion. That is propping up an authoritarian dictatorship that commits all kinds of human rights violations, isn’t for free speech or democracy, etc. It’s ridiculous to get so triggered by tariffs that you help a far more dangerous adversary. There’s ZERO equivalency between the US, under Trump or Biden or Harris or anyone else, and China.
As a Canadian, I prefer China to the US simply because China isn’t threatening to annex us. I hope we will strike a deal with China for military containment of our enemy, the US.
As a Canadian also I want you to know that you absolutely do not speak for all of us, and I strongly hope that you don't represent anything remotely like a majority here
Canada-US relationships may be strained right now but the USA is not our enemy, and neither are Americans
I'm going to walk the middle ground here as another Canadian.
The US has been our 'closest friend and ally' for 70+, hell nearly 100 years now. We've sought economic and military integration, to our benefits certainly, but also to our detriment.
It has gone too far, and all it takes is a bully being elected to slap on unjustified tariffs and destabilize the relationship with the goal to squeeze more out of allies rather than negotiating a fair deal for all. Hell he's doing it a second time, and now with the more nefarious undertones of political annexation which the vast majority of Canadians do not want.
Our goal moving forward should be to continue being polite and friendly as we are to most other counties, yet also to divorce our military and economy from American control at every step.
Does that mean in some cases trading more with China? Yes, but we should focus on commonwealth and European integration with like minded countries that value democracy and their citizens.
In 2023, China's export to Canada was 45.1 billion dollars.
China's export to the US was 501 billion dollars.
So why is the US propping up China's authoritarian dictatorship? Is this "Only the US gets to prop up dictators in the world, Canada should just follow orders!" kind of deal?
China may be an issue and I am not downplaying that. But: we live in one planet, and the tarrifs on Chinese EVs is absolutely slowing down adoption for the sake of propping up legacy automakers who couldn’t be bothered to be serious about EVs.
Canada has no domestic car manufacturers. It has branch plants from several companies, but that’s all they are, branch plants. All the tarrifs do is protect the interests of other countries, one of which is getting increasingly hostile to it’s northern neighbor.
Xi Jinping is a dictator. His very existence is hostile to all democracy in all countries everywhere
This may be the worse regime America has ever had but let's not pretend it's as bad as regimes in countries that have actual active concentration camps right now
> Xi Jinping is a dictator. His very existence is hostile to all democracy in all countries everywhere
This is true, but three difference (1) Xi has proven himself to not be stupid and (2) he isn't an autocrat pretending to be pro-democracy, and (3) he isn't in the thrall of a hostile foreign power.
China is exactly what it appears to be, which is much safer than whatever mess America is right now.
He is an obvious hostile foreign power, no one doubts that Xi Jinping is beholden to Xi Jinping, he doesn't have a secret relationship with Putin or Kim Jong Un.
The hard fact is that China is less _dangerous_ to Canada than the US’s current posturing makes it appear to be. The US has squandered soft power built up over the course of a century or so in a couple of months at this point. China (and the EU, and probably India, though who knows with Modi) will absolutely attempt to fill the gap; how could they not?
This isn’t a serious comparison. China has literally killed tens of millions. All of America’s alleged war crimes would not come anywhere close, not even within an order of magnitude. That’s leaving aside that the US and its technological innovation - which has mostly been shared with the rest of the world - has saved a lot more lives.
Lets put comparisons aside then. Trade partners want economic stability and consistency. The US cannot offer that, for the next four years. China has been authoritarian for decades, do you think it matters now? It doesn’t. Will they be consistent and rational? Certainly more than the US. The American Exceptionalism marketing falls on deaf ears.
Any other comparison of historic positions seems pretty pointless compared to the actual reality of 2025.
Reflect on how badly you have to have screwed up to make Canadians feel this way. They are looking at a brutal dictatorship and assessing it as a better option than the USA.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I imagine an actual order to attack Canada would not go over very well with the American military, or large parts of the American population
I'm not remotely worried about America invading my country and I don't think my government should be behaving as if that is likely to happen
While I agree that specific scenario is unlikely, the antagonism itself is a threat.
To illustrate: Imagine a person promises to climb through your window and kill you in your sleep, and you know they're a coward and that they physically can't scale 20 floors up the exterior of the apartment-building.
While that specific scenario isn't credible, you still need to be on-guard, since they could easily settle for finding your parked car and smashing all of the windows with a brick.
Completely agree that dropping the tariffs on Chinese EVs instead would be the sensible move. Turning EVs into a culture war effigy was a horrible development for the future of the planet when the right did it, and it's no different now that the left is getting in on it. We have a technology that would be a key part of switching to clean energy, and should be doing everything possible to embrace it, but the political class has turned it into a football for their culture war game instead. Depressing stuff.
That would be totally amazing for Canadians, they are facing rising prices in so many things. The Chinese cars are half the price. I saw that BYD expects to sell 100k vehicles into Mexico this year, that's double the 50k they sold last year.
The long range PHEVs china has been building would also be ideal for Canada. Plenty of daily range even in winter and no range or infrastructure anxiety when you need more distance.
I've recently become aware of a distinction between PHEV and EREV. The PHEV doesn't have enough power alone in the electric motors to go pure EV all the time. There a mechanical transfer case where both ICE and electric motor combine their torque. The EREV is a serial combination, more like the Diesel electric trains in current use. Some examples of EREV's are the Volt, BMW i3, and the Ram charger coming out this year.
PHEV have plenty of motor power to go electric only for extended periods; the only limit is battery capacity. The key distinction is the plug in part of phev.
Mild hybrids cannot go electric only
Hybrids can go electric only for very short distance.
PHEV can go electric long distance and use wall power. Most can mechanically couple the combustion engine to the wheels and do so in certain circumstances, like long distance highway use.
EREV is an emerging term for vehicles that have a combustion engine not mechanically connected to the wheels that only drives a generator. BMW i3 is one of the oldest examples. Volt is not; it can put mechanical power to the road.
Fun fact on i3. California zero emissions rules offered more credit for vehicles with more battery range than gas, so bmw artificially limited the tank using software for i3 sold in North America. Owners can flash the euro firmware to unlock physically present tank space as usable.
You've been repeatedly posting these ideological/nationalistic flamewar comments. Can you please stop? It's tedious and not what HN conversations are for.
Edit: we've had to ask you several times already. Eventually we have to ban this sort of account. In fact it looks like I banned you the other day and then had second thoughts—but your comments since then are making me wonder whether that wasn't the right call.
I can see how my comment above is snarky. Apologies for that. I am not able to edit it (the option doesn’t appear).
But I’m surprised about the “ideological/nationalistic flamewar comments” part. A lot of current issues in the news and on HN are political and especially geopolitical. Tariffs, Nvidia chips, DOGE, Ukraine/Russia war, for example. So there will be lots of comments that are ideological or nationalistic because that’s what is at the core of these issues. I guess what I’m asking is - are substantive politely worded comments that are still “ideological” or “nationalistic” (if I am using these words the same way) allowed?
Another thought: it looks like these types of stories have stopped being removed due to flags (like the DOGE ones), and with that change I see lots of comments in those discussions that I would consider tedious or just ideological (to me anyways). But they seem to allowed to stand because they’re the popular view on HN - maybe they don’t get downvoted or flagged as much so they don’t get attention from mods. Do you think the typical flagging and voting patterns result in more moderation on the less popular views on HN?
Whoa, that's not helpful.* We have to ban users that attack others like this, regardless of how wrong the others are or you feel they are.
If you're going to respond in cases like this, please make sure you aren't breaking the site guidelines yourself, because that only makes things worse.
* btw, it also makes moderation a lot harder when people post like this. I'm not saying you need to care about that if you don't want to, but some readers might find it interesting to know: if you think that another account ought to be moderated, the worst thing you can do to inhibit that is to post an attack in the threads.
china is a better option, because they're not on our border claiming that it wouldn't be so bad if we were annexed
edit: i have friends in taiwan. EU trade partners are better than china. but US is currently the worse option, because they're directly threatening us, we're in an active trade war, and there's no ocean in between us
Oh, and Russia isn't a dictatorship at all? And Traitor Trump doesn't idolize Putin and doesn't want to give the USA (and Canada) to his lord and master?
Russia is a dictatorship and Putin needs to be replaced by a real democracy with freedoms for its people. But that has nothing to do with the discussion around Canada, US, and China. The conspiracy theory that Trump works for Putin just doesn’t make sense. It seems obvious that gestures towards Russia are just Trump bringing Russia to the table to settle the war and to pull them away from China after that.
I’d make sure a tariff on Tesla includes both parts on service so that existing owners aren’t benefitting from increased residual value. (I’d expect that the residual value would be offset given appropriately higher maintenance costs.)
Because you care about people? What, should we just give up on people addicted to drugs for example? Or should we help save them from their bad decision to use dangerous drugs?
We take drug addicts to rehab. We don’t just give them money so they don’t need to steal to get high. But we can’t take them to rehab until they admit to themselves that they have a problem.
I believe parent-poster intended something more like: "The subset of Americans who opposed the nonsense."
The purpose of the deterrent pain response is ultimately to change American policy, and that means influencing people whose positions can changed by it into a positive direction.
Why doesn’t Canada just go nuclear and proliferate nuclear technology to any country which the US imposes tariffs upon? If you’re a country with free will, play the game all the way.
Canada already made that choice, sided with the British and provided plans and materials to the United States that initiated and sustained the Manhatten Project.
They are the OG's of nuclear weapons proliferation.
> If you elected a businessman or a lawyer, he/she'd tell you that Canadian exports to the US are 2x the imports from the US,
An honest one wouldn't, because it's categorically untrue.
"U.S. exports were $441 billion, while imports were $482 billion, resulting in a United States $41 billion trade deficit with Canada."
This doesn't even count the multinational tech corporations providing services in Canada through a local subsidiary, something that is not counted in balance of payments.
But this is probably culture-specific. When Finnish media describes someone as (the Finnish equivalent of) a businessman, he is almost certainly doing some shady stuff and has often also committed crimes. People described as entrepreneurs tend to be more respectable and more likely just doing legitimate business.
I'm from Lithuania and lots of people would do the same. I assumed this is some brainrot relic from soviet union, but thinking about this more, most of europe have same weird sentiment.
So you're entire point is the US economy and population is larger, so it can bully its allies and economic partners more despite having a trade surplus in excess of 90 billion (including services which simpy makes sense, especially considering the size dichotomy you point out). That's a salient point in today's political climate, the US doesn't have allies or partners anymore.
Showing just how uninformed you are, Prime Minister Trudeau resigned already, and mostly unrelated to the US. Canadians were going to vote the out the Liberals largely over increasing dissatisfaction with his leadership long before the election. His resignation is allowing new leadership to take over the liberal party (being voted on this week), and then federally we will likely be going to the polls in the coming months to decide between them and the Conservatives (who are closer to your Democrats than most of you realize)
Whichever party wins, all of them are unified in standing strong against bullying tactics. You can hurt us, but you'll be surprised how resilient we are and how willing we are to fight economically or otherwise.
We look forward to being friends with most of you again after this bullshit is over.
Trudeau does a lot of silly things. And maybe he's injected a little bit of extra drama here.
But Canada has absolutely tried negotiating. There's been a continuous stream of Canadian politicians visiting DC and trying to talk to someone - anyone. If all the provincial premiers and the minister of foreign affairs show up and the best you can offer is your assistant chief of staff of personnel or whatever, then clearly you weren't in the mood to chat/negotiate.
If your more powerful neighbor's ruler publicly threatens to annex your country, the correct course of action is to prepare for war. If anything, Trudeau is not being dramatic enough yet.
Not to pile on, but it is hard to negotiate when the other party is not clear as to what they want. In the press conference, Trudeau said as much, and added that he has reached out to Trump for further discussions and is open to good-faith negotiations.
Meanwhile, the actual stated reason for the tariffs is fentanyl, yet only 1% of it comes from Canada, and even then Canada has agreed to US demands of further securing the border.
Is it about trade deficits? Seems hard to believe, given that the USMCA was negotiated by Trump in 2018, and he hailed it as the "fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law".
Is it about bringing back manufacturing to the US? Then why is China being hit with less trade tariffs than Canada (20% total vs 25%) when the US imports around the same amount from China as from Canada?
I mean, the whole issue would be avoided of America did not voted for sociopath president who was doing bad business whole his life. Trump was literally loosing money he inherited again and again and again whole his life.
And I mean, not because he would be following laws while criminals got ahead. No, he was a fraudster who still managed to loose money.
