While Canada might have taken a step like this eventually, Trump being Trump made it far more likely due to his desire to alienate Canada.

Now it is likely that Chinese EVs will drive on US roads from Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto into the US and US citizens will see for themselves. I'm not a fan of cheap cheap labor in that it reflects poverty that shouldn't exist in the modern world, but the strategic insistence of Detroit to produce expensive, low-efficiency, low-capability SUVs will start to backfire.

People lament that the US has basically surrendered the future of car manufacturing, but I think it was a forgone conclusion for a long time before anyone realized.

While I'm a citizen of the US, and would like Chinese people to have more freedom of political representation, I am glad that the world will benefit from Chinese EV's.

The world shouldn't buy US cars and certainly shouldn't take any pointers on politics.

Protecting their internal market and nurturing their native industries is how Chinese [1] products, including EVs, got to this point. Seeing this, what will Western countries do? Having forgotten how they attained their prosperity, will they open their markets and let competition decide the winner? A competition where one side's government will not allow their corporations to fail, so the 'competition' will be repeated until the correct outcome is attained.

[1] I don't mean to single out China, as no advanced economy reached its position via unrestricted free trade: James K. Galbraith has stated that "free trade has attained the status of a god" and that " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...

This is for about 50k cars a year that are priced about 35k CAD or less. It's a small amount compared to Canada's 2mil car sales a year, but it is quite significant in the message it is delivering to the world about Canada being willing to diversify their economy in the wake of hostility from conventional partners. It'll be quite interesting how normal partners react.