Industry and Technology Committee on Oct. 27th, 2025

[Brian Kingston]

Yes, it's surprising to me as well.

What has happened is the Americans have struck deals with countries like Korea and the EU to provide them with lower tariff rates and, at the same time, have put tariffs on the North American supply chain, and not just on autos, but on steel, aluminum and all of these other components. Then they have found ways to try to reduce that burden through very convoluted mechanisms. The reality is that it would be more cost-effective to build these vehicles in other markets, send them to the U.S., and just pay one tariff.

Frankly, that is the argument that manufacturers are making in the United States. If you want to have a strong auto manufacturing sector, you have to make it competitive to build cars in the U.S., and that includes Canada and Mexico in the supply chain. Right now, we are in a bit of a bizarre scenario where building outside of North America is advantageous.

[David Adams]

The other lens I would put on that is that one of my members, BMW, has the largest manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina. They are doing what North America wanted them to do: Come and produce where the vehicles are sold. But those vehicles that are built in the U.S. now, which contain Canadian steel and Canadian aluminum, because they're not CUSMA compliant are paying a 25% tariff coming into the country, with no remission offset.

The tariffs themselves are causing some real competitive disadvantages in the marketplace that every manufacturer is having to deal with.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

This way of doing things is an aberration. It's truly unacceptable.

Thank you very much.

I don't have enough time left to ask a final question, but I sincerely thank all four of you for being here. We've learned a lot.

We just have to hope to find a good agreement to maintain good jobs.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you.

Ms. Borrelli, you have five minutes.

Okay.

Madam Dancho, you have five minutes.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to dig into an issue that we haven't talked too much about yet. Just last week, the Liberal government announced that it was taking measures on Stellantis and GM as a result of the Brampton Jeep Compass production cancellation and the BrightDrop EV van shutdown in Ingersoll. On Stellantis, the quota cut...and again, this is the retaliatory tariffs. My understanding is that the ones that will be able to come into the country now...has been cut by 50% that won't be tariff-free; and for GM, it's a 24.2% quota cut.

Mr. Williams, for an individual consumer, what does this mean? These are pretty popular vehicles. Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Ram are from Stellantis, and of course GM has many models. Can you provide the committee with the impact on the individual consumer for that?

[Huw Williams]

Yes. Again, we've been consistent on both sides of the border that we shouldn't have auto tariffs on consumers on either side and we should get to a free trade agreement. I recognize that it's a complicated environment. When I was interviewed for the lead news story on CBC's The National on Thursday, I was quoted as saying that when your trading partner pulls out a gun and shoots you in your right foot, you don't pull out a gun and shoot yourself in your left foot. I think we have to be very, very careful on our automotive retaliation so that we don't make it worse for customers, dealers and the overall mix, while recognizing that we're not in an easy spot.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Ultimately, then, this change in quota will drive up the prices of some of these Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Ram and GM vehicles being sold to Canadian consumers. You mentioned that the average price is already $60,000 per vehicle. Is my assessment of what is about to happen to some of these car prices correct?

[Huw Williams]

That's correct. When tariffs are applied, car prices go up. There is no other way around it.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I appreciate that measures are trying to be taken to address what we see as an issue with Stellantis pulling out of Brampton, after receiving billions of dollars of commitments on deals from the Liberal government. I do appreciate what's happening, but what I really see is that we're driving up costs for consumers. These are very popular models, as you know, for consumers. When the Liberals signed the deals with Stellantis, there didn't seem to be a Canada-wide jobs guarantee, so production is moving and investment is moving. On the one hand, we had deals signed two or three years ago without an employment guarantee, from what it seems, and now, because of that, the consumer is getting hit with higher prices for the vehicles they buy, which are already some of the most expensive.

As kind of an assessment of where we are with this, which is a pretty big mess under the current leadership in Ottawa, consumers are being hit and auto workers are being laid off. Multi-billion dollar deals were signed with a number of the companies you represent, Mr. Kingston, and yet those companies are promising billions of dollars in investment in the U.S. and tens of thousands of good American jobs. Really, this isn't a great situation for the Canadian auto sector. We have no commitments from the Liberal government on when we're going to get a deal, which you've all said you need for certainty if you're going to keep the jobs that you currently have and ever hope to build new jobs. It's a pretty big mess under the current government, from our estimation.

Ms. Borrelli, do you have any questions or comments you want to end with? I think I have two minutes left.

Thank you, all of you, for all your comments today.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you.

With the current EV mandate, what type of infrastructure will be needed to ensure that the mandate is met in the right time frame? Do you believe this infrastructure is possible? Will the power grid be able to support this expansion?

[Brian Kingston]

It's my favourite question: No.

To give you a sense of where we are right now, we need 100,000 public EV chargers this year. This is according to NRCan. This is not our estimate. There are 36,000. This morning I decided to look at the rate of growth of the charging infrastructure. I was curious to know whether we'd made progress since last year. So far this year, 3,500 chargers have come online. Again, according to NRCan, we need 40,000 a year. At best we're seeing about 3,000 or 4,000. There is simply no way to have the infrastructure installed at the pace needed to support mandated targets.

Then, of course, the bigger challenge is that as you build out that infrastructure, you need to have transformer upgrades and line upgrades to accommodate the electricity. It can be done, but it has to be thoughtful. There has to be a plan to do that. It's also quite costly.

That's where we stand right now in infrastructure.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

How's the time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

You're at seven seconds.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Colleagues, that's going to bring us to the end of today's meeting.

We very much appreciate the witnesses making themselves available, particularly on short notice, in order to provide some guidance and insight for us. We very much appreciate that it's a difficult time with a lot of headwind. We are certainly watching keenly and hoping, for the sake of the country and for our future prosperity, that we can move towards a situation and circumstance that is an improvement over the one that we see today.

Colleagues, we'll be meeting again on this study on Wednesday.

The meeting is adjourned.