While the promises made during the last election campaign by our present Prime Minister, Mark Carney, to deal with the Americans and their tariffs on everything seems but a distant and unfulfilled dream, we face some other serious international challenges.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, in an article in the Toronto Sun, makes the following statement about our Federal Government’s approach to dealing with the Chinese tariffs on canola and ours on their electric vehicles:
“It is, frankly, a case of policy misalignment: Protecting an industry that barely exists, while punishing one that feeds the world”.
Policy mismanagement, you say. Sounds familiar, punishing an industry without any thought on the fallout that may occur.
Policy mismanagement seems to be the name of the game with our Liberal government. Let’s see, there was the long gun registration from before the Harper Conservatives took power. How did that work out and at what cost?
Then came the Freedom Convoy, a simple protest perhaps, that was totally mismanaged by the Trudeau government and became the laughing stock of the world with its implementation of emergency legislation to save Canada. The court sentence for the organizers, the same as you or I would get for J-walking!
Things got so bad that our provincial premiers revolted and demanded action and don’t seem to be any better now with the fight between Alberta and its pipeline dreams and British Columbia and its anti-pipeline dreams. This after our federal government bought a pipeline!
Now we have Bill C-21 and the gun buy-back policy which seems to be generating a lot of push back from the firearms community. How many small businesses have been affected? How much revenue did they lose?
Speaking of protecting an industry that barely exists, let us look for a moment at the electric vehicle industry. With his insane policies, Carney has just about killed any hope the electric vehicle industry had in Canada. After his buddy Justin promised all that money to battery companies to come here, Carney killed the goose by making it mandatory to buy electric. What happened?
The sales of electric vehicles went straight into the toilet. Dealers are stuck with inventory they have purchased but can’t sell (sound familiar?). There is still insufficient infrastructure to support electric vehicles, they are vastly too expensive for the average Canadian and it is still cold in winter the last time I looked.
So to provide a ready and available supply of electric vehicles, what does our leader do? He puts a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, which are manufactured and sold at acceptable consumer costs, to suck up to the US. Naturally, the Chinese clap a huge tariff on our canola crop just as the harvest comes in. There it rots. Thank you Mark!
The Chinese, however, are now suggesting openly that if Canada drops the tariff on its vehicles it will reciprocate and drop the canola tariff and open the market again. Hmmm. How are you going to play those cards Mr. Prime Minister? Or, maybe you could just give Stellantis more money to take south with them.
So, punishing an industry with policy mismanagement, be it the vehicle industry (the battery people went home), the canola industry or the firearms industry, can and will have serious negative effect in the long run. By the way, how much is canola these days, Mark?