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US automakers broke their deals on running factories here. We have no native auto brands (other than attempted startups) building factories.
No need to protect US brand pricing anymore, let’s make cars affordable to Canadians
And it’s only a limited quantity allowed in, like 10% of the market.
Can we also make housing affordable again?
… let’s make cars affordable to Canadians
this is the first time in life that i envied canadians. lol
God forbid regular people can afford to buy a daily driver EV
GET YOUR HAND OFF MY CAUCUS!
This actually made me laugh. Thank you, I needed it.
Copypasta:
We should be reducing our import of Chinese developed technology, “smart” devices, phones, and EVs in particular. Every Chinese business big enough to play at the global scale has the government in it’s power structure. They don’t necessarily dictate business decisions but every bit of data collected is by default accessible by the government.
Having a significant fraction of a country driving around in Chinese EVs gives an insane amount of information to the Chinese government for free. And it’s not just direct information either like the driver’s identity, with millions of cars on the road a lot can be inferred, like if the parking lots at military bases suddenly fill up on a Tuesday afternoon or traffic between a high value person’s home and an airport gets unusually slow.
Cars have cellular modems, they have wifi and bluetooth hardware, if a particular person’s device was identified, for example, at a political meeting then that person could be trivially tracked by the dozens of Chinese cars and “smart” devices that they pass in a day. The information could be smuggled home along with all the normal diagnostic, update and service info. It is not in our best interest to let the Chinese government track individuals, be it politicians, expats, or activists.
This could be done today by the our government, and it is to some extent, to identify, and locate, protesters and criminals by their mobile devices but it takes time and access to equipment and logs that the government does not always own. A competent adversary who owns millions of devices in your country can do in seconds what takes law enforcement weeks to accomplish via conventional means.
Remember that China was caught operating their own “police” force around the world not long ago, they will take advantage of any opportunity they are given to spy on other countries and gain political control.
China doesn’t plan for the next fiscal quarter they plan for the next quarter century, and Canada’s resources are in their sights.
Yes, this is incredibly non-controversial. Which cars do you replace them with? American ones?
Fuck man. This is such a shit situation.
We need new cars NOW. But what we ought to be doing is expanding rail infrastructure and public transit.
K, but transit takes 4-10 years to build and will still never be able to cover cases like transporting the truly frail and sickly, large amounts of stuff, or going to remote and sparse places, because the last mile edge of the network is still a last mile at minimum, especially in inclement weather.
Cars are still going to exist for the long term forseeable future, we can try and minimize their use by providing better alternatives but we still need to plan for a future where they exist.
Yeah, I mean it’s as Carney said in his speech:
We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be
The guy is in the big fucking chair. Right now he has the power to steer the future where we want it to be. But he ain’t going to do it because he can’t think outside the bank. We need someone with more vision and more guts.
Lmao your take is that the Prime Ministership of Canada, the free leader of all of 0.049% of the global population (almost a full half of 0.1 percent!), is the “big fucking chair” that can single handily steer global events in any way he chooses?
You’re also presuming that when he does steer them, that that steering will be out in the open and plainly obvious for everyone to see?
You misinterpreted my comment.
Of course he’s limited to Canada. He can change policies, decide to invest in greener alternatives, etc. But instead all he thinks about is counting some beans. So he’s investing in what brings profit at he detriment of everything else.
Material conditions intensify
Lemmy seems to instinctively respond with “more transit” even when it doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to go too far with that one, but we’ve managed.
We can have more transit!
Eventually yes, and we should. Does it have anything to do with trade policy with China in 2026? Not particularly; it’s sort of interconnected the way everything is, but that’s all. (Or was that the joke?)
Well you said Lemmy says more transit too much, so … I had to oblige. 😄
Europe, Japan, Korea. They have their own problems too but it’s the USA and China that are actively threatening Canada.
See when trump says paid actors are protesting him, i think he’s funding this kind of shit.
Okay, but are American cars better from a security standpoint? I guess European cars are a valid option.
From an economic and domestic politics standpoint more trade with China is good, and maintaining what we have (like in canola and seafood) is imperative.
I have a feeling we’ll have much easier time getting Chinese manufacturers to comply with disabling telemetry for our market without being hit with sanctions than US.
That’s true too. I actually use a Chinese brand of phone, because guess what, most of the Western brands are locked down.
Obviously there’s exceptions like FairPhone, and there’s rumors Chinese silicon gets messed with. We don’t need them to pinky swear to anything we can verify, though. We just need them to agree, and unlike somebody they’re pragmatic enough to do so.
That’s right.
I started using a Fairphone recently actually. It’s an EU brand, sure, but the device and software is designed and made by T2 Mobile of Shanghai. So it’s essentially the same deal - Fairphone says “we want no telemetry” and T2 Mobile says “okay” and disables it. Behind all the pretences most brands work like this. Whether it’s only hardware, or software and hardware, or some mix, it all ultimately hinges on the Chinese supplier being pragmatic and doing what they were asked to do.
From Fairphone themselves:
This is the source tree from our hardware and software supplier T2Mobile.
The US could conceivably do the same as I suspect China is doing, but the US government has to approach each manufacture and request or just take the data. Then they have to correlate it and so on. There was a recent writeup where someone found they could make themselves an admin (oops forgot to finish a sentence) on a US manufactures dealer network and use it to locate any vehicle sold since ~2015.
China has full access to any data collected by any business without red tape, and they are able to compel manufactures to include any feature they want.
Sure we can trade in raw materials and simple manufacturing but we need to stick to importing technology that was not designed by a country that has and will continue to be hostile to Canada.
(I think you started a thought and then forgot about it, there)
Yes, it’s definitely harder for the NSA to do NSA stuff than it would be for… eh, the CAC, apparently (maybe?), but obviously it hasn’t stopped the Americans. What we really should be doing is our own counterintelligence work, where we sweep imports for funny business. And importantly, impose the basic expectation that our hardware and software isn’t spying on us in the first place, although that would be a huge shift.
Honestly I’d be less worried about my car spying on me than my phone but we import those from China almost exclusively.
Yes, that goes for phones as well. The Americans have definitely been on the lookout for hardware trojans on computing devices. Probably us too in some capacity, being in the five eyes.
Did you never care until Trump that you were buying so many US cars? What threat is China to Canada?
Remember that whole thing where they interfered with elections and were policing expats from China? That never stopped.
Policing expats, sure. But what about this election interference?
Well, I hope next time they will make the “socialist” NDP win then.
Bicycle
I do around town but a 30km commute to a 12hr shift is not really viable.
Reminder that ~100% of Canadian territory is not urban.
Don’t like 70% of Canadians live in urban environments though? Meaning a lot of people could probably get by with a bicycle and public transit. Not everyone of course, but the “~100% of territory is not urban” line is kinda misleading when ~100% of territory is also devoid of human activity in the first place.
Sure. But 70% bikes is still 30% cars (or busses, or offroad whatever).
Farmland has to be at least 10%, and then outside the high arctic there’s trapping and native hunting, if only when someone passes through. There’s human activity. It’s not just crudely rendered videogame scenery as soon as you leave whatever city.
This just in, Toronto doesn’t exist
If you haven’t seen it before, that little squiggle means “approximately”.
Aint no way am I willing or even able to bike 50km to work each way in the winter.
Please just give:
Cars with buttons and dials. No touch screens other than maybe a GPS exclusive screen.
Cars that can be fixed relatively easily.
Safety(Cars aren’t really safe, but its what we have to deal with so…make them smaller with clear lines of sight, etc).
These are my dreams, I guess. I doubt you can honestly get anything close to that in 2026. Also as if I would be able to afford anything new when cost of living has skyrocketed lol.
