I don't think that China has an idea of state-to-state fair and reciprocal trade. One suspects that the massive Chinese state subsidies to the EV sector have a similar motivation to the massive subsidies to the Huawei company, which is that the investment pays back in the espionage and infrastructure information that would accrue.
In addition to the idea that they can listen to what you're saying in your car and that they can know a lot about the driver and so on, information is also provided about where the car goes. In the next conflict with China, that will be critically important in the sense that the next war we have with China will not be about Canada sending bombs to blow up buildings in faraway countries. The concerns that the CSE and other agencies have raised about China's products in Canada, including the TP-Link routers, will mean that they will impact us directly here. The bank machines won't work. There was a warning by an agency here about China's possible control of water filtration systems.
On the idea that Mr. Kovrig raised about the possibility of our being able to control the software on the EVs, I'm not sure how feasible that is in the sense that all of these things, as you know from your computers, are being updated continually by the manufacturer. We have the example of subway cars in Boston from a Chinese manufacturer a few years ago; it was found out that the doors could be controlled from Nanjing in China.
I don't think that China would agree to our having control over those EVs, because of what I said. They're subsidizing them heavily because they provide a benefit.
The other one that you talk about, the devastation of our own auto industry by these heavily subsidized things—and as Kovrig pointed out, the Chinese can afford to lose money for a long time—is another way for them to gain more economic leverage over us for their other purposes. In other words, we're not going to be expelling Chinese agents of espionage, tightening up on grey-area activities for the transfer of dual-use military technologies or exposing the Chinese proxies through an effective registry, if that would then lead to Chinese retaliation in trade aspects.