Host: Prime Minister Mark Carney and Chinese President XI Jinping recently announced they'd struck a deal after years of tension between their two countries. Tariffs on Chinese EVs will be lifted on up to 49,000 vehicles in exchange for China lowering its tariffs on canola. Premier Doug Ford wasn't initially happy about the deal. Not happy at all, but a meeting with the Prime minister seems to have brought the temperature down. The strategy a task force with Ontario to consult on strategy and job protection. So how big could the market here be for Chinese EVs? Will the drivers of this country embrace them? I sat down with Stephanie Woodcroft, former president of the Automotive Journalists Association of Canada, to talk about how cheaper EVs will roll out in Ontario and the rest of Canada, and how much this will shake up the market. Stephanie, great to have you on the show. How are you doing?

Stephanie Woodcroft: Doing great. Thanks. Very happy to be here.

Host: All right. We're going to talk about Doug Ford. First off a bit of a change of tune. He hasn't called for a boycott of Chinese EVs since he met with Prime Minister Mark Carney and Industry Minister Melanie Joly. What do you think? They might have told him about the plan? I know there's lots of details that we'd like to know about it as well, but what do you think has kind of settled him a little bit.

Stephanie Woodcroft: And I'm not any more privy to information than anybody else, but my guess is not whatever happened in that room where it happened. I think Doug Ford was shown some dollar signs. Okay. Yes. I have a feeling that there are aspects of this China-Canada arrangement that involve bringing some manufacturing of vehicles to Canada, vehicles, possibly also batteries. It makes a lot of sense.

Host: What he wants, right? Speaking back to the point that Prime Minister Carney made in Davos that Canada has what the world wants, when we're talking about what Canada has that the auto industry wants, that's critical minerals, right? So it makes fiscal sense or it seems to because we're now seeing other automakers jockeying for position on this as well. Volkswagen is building a battery plant outside of St. Thomas. We just earlier this week learned that South Korea and China and Canada signed a memorandum of understanding around possibly bringing some manufacturing battery and vehicle to Canada. And that's related to the submarine deal, which is a whole other topic, right. But bringing that back to China, that those dots all connect to making it seem as though it makes fiscal sense to build the batteries and build the cars where the minerals are coming from, rather than shipping them around the world. So I would imagine there's a portion of this deal that hasn't gone public yet that may involve scaling up the the quota that comes into Canada over time. And with that, also China making some manufacturing investment, which of course brings jobs and just bolsters the economy. It makes a lot of sense with the Ring of fire being developed in northern Ontario, that that would end up being in Ontario, where that manufacturing would take place. And that brings us back to Doug Ford being a happy man.

Host: All right. Well, let's get away from the headlines for a minute. I want to talk about some numbers from last year. Sales of electric vehicles in Canada plummeted in 2025. Not the story. When we look at Europe, across Africa, the Middle East, China, they rose. Why are EV sales in Canada so low?

Stephanie Woodcroft: A lot of that comes down to price, which is why we're talking about this entire subject, right to to recap, for anybody who's not familiar with the the Canada-China deal, it's 49,000 EVs that Canada has committed to bringing in from China at a lower tariff. There was a 100% tariff that was in place to match with the United States. This is 6.1% a significant drop, right? And to come back to your point, Europe and the Middle East and other markets are already getting those those cheap EVs. 50% of that allotment of the 49,000 is meant to be priced off the boat, at least under 35,000. Whether that's going to equate to that when it gets to dealership lots is a different story. But that does speak to the point that we don't have anything at that price point in our market right now. And this this creates the potential to to bolster that, especially in the wake of the federal government having cancelled the EV rebates, which were the only thing that were bringing some of those cars even close to that level. And that coincided exactly with that drop in sales that you were talking about.

Host: So fair to say the cars that would be imported from China here don't necessarily have competition. Right now in Canada, there is a glaring gap. Or give us an idea of sort of maybe what is the price of an EV right now? An average cost of an EV right now in Canada.

Stephanie Woodcroft: There is a glaring gap. Well, whether I'd call it glaring depends on a lot of context. Right now, we're looking at a 2027 Chevrolet Bolt, which interestingly, has already been discontinued. Okay, it's a different subject entirely, but that is priced at an MSRP manufacturer's suggested retail price of just under 40,000 before fees. That's not that far off, that 35,000 that we're talking about. And certain provinces and territories still do offer rebates. So there are places in the country where you can get that car for cheaper. So it's not that it doesn't exist, but it's more that it's not as widespread as it could be. The other aspect of that storyline is do we immediately see those cheap EVs coming from Chinese manufacturers? Right. This is something that I spoke to when the news first broke. 49,000 is not. It's a drop in the bucket relative to the Canadian auto industry in general. We sell about 1.9 million cars a year. So that and the EV portion of that is about 5%. So we're talking about roughly 2.5 2.6% of the full market is what we're bringing in from this deal from China. And that's not enough to make huge waves at any level at this early stage. But it does put pressure on other automakers to to start bringing those prices down, which is the rebates were always meant to just make up for the fact that EVs were more expensive initially and were meant to. The rebates were meant to be removed when those prices came down to be at par with internal combustion engine vehicles, they were never meant to be permanent, right? Right. So what this does is sort of bring those Chinese, those Chinese EVs in particular back. They make up that loss and bring cars back, those EVs back down to a level where they can compete directly on price with internal combustion engine vehicles. Will we see immediately those $35,000 BYDs or Xpeng, those Chinese brands? I don't know if that's going to be an immediate thing, because you're talking about an automaker having to come into the country, set up a head office, set up a dealership network. That takes time, right? And what some Canadians don't realise is there are already Chinese built EVs on Canadian roads. Right? We talk about Chinese EVs in terms of those brands I just brought up, but there are Chinese built EVs that have been on our roads for a while. Right? Tesla, Tesla built, imported 44,000 just Model Ys in 2023. So that's pretty darn close to that.

Host: 49,000 that we're talking about, right? One of the things that a few people have been concerned about, and I don't know if it's a genuine concern from from your expertise, but what worries does Canada have about Chinese access to Canadian EV user data that it doesn't have already with North American automakers? Because I think when we talk about EVs, we jump right to security concerns. But there are EVs here in North America. North American made that that potentially could have the same concerns. But we don't have those red flags.

Stephanie Woodcroft: I don't know that it's the fact that it's EVs specifically that are the discussion point there. I think it's more that the cars are coming from China, and they have an awful lot of software in them, a lot of technology in them. Interestingly, it's BlackBerry that actually supplies the software for BYD. So there's already a Canada-China connection there, and Canada is deeply involved in that. So is it tinfoil hat or not? It's hard to say, but there has been some discussion of, you know, really high level national security things like it's it sounds crazy, but China has been accused of putting shut down operations in, in Chinese built vehicles so that so that they would have a way to remotely just prevent them from.

Host: The vehicle from working.

Stephanie Woodcroft: Right now, in the announcement of the the auto working group, Minister Joly did address that and said that that national security concern is on their radar.

Host: All right. In the last 30 seconds that we have, Canada is is still aiming to hit 100% zero emission vehicle sales by 2035. Are we going to get there without made in China electric vehicles or is that have to be part of the equation?

Stephanie Woodcroft: I don't think we're going to get there at all at this point. We were supposed to be 20, 20, 20% by 2026 and that got pushed to 2027, even that, even with this deal. Again, we're only talking about 2.6% of the market here. That seems very, very unlikely to get to 100% by 2035. I mean, that's zero emission vehicles. So it can also include plug in hybrids, but it seems really, really far off. And I would be shocked if we don't see the Carney government pull back on that as part of this ongoing discussion situation as the industry evolves. But it doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile goal. It's whatever point in the future we can we can get there. There's a lot of work to be done. There's other aspects to this discussion, like charging infrastructure, convincing Canadians that they don't need to drive more than 400 kilometers on the average day, right? You're not going picking up and driving to the Rockies every week. Those kinds of mindset changes are still they still seem to be a little ways off for the average Canadian. So it's an ongoing discussion

Host: Ongoing discussion. And perhaps we'll have you back for another conversation on this as we get more information and time.

Stephanie Woodcroft: Anytime

Host: So thank you so much.

Stephanie Woodcroft: My pleasure.