Premier Doug Ford says Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal with China on electric vehicles has hurt Ontarians and the two have not spoken since.
Ford says he was disappointed Carney did not give him a heads-up about a potential deal before the prime minister’s trip to China last week.
Carney struck a deal with China last week to allow up to 49,000 electric vehicles to receive a vastly reduced tariff rate of 6.1 per cent as they come into Canada in exchange for dropping tariffs on Canadian canola and some seafood.
Ford and Carney became fast friends after the latter’s win to become prime minister in the spring.
That may have been the way it initially looked, but after Edison’s founders had meetings with politicians and department heads, they have got some of those roadblocks removed and are well on their way to dealing with the rest.
Most of those regulations weren’t intentionally preventing what Edison is doing, but rather had been created without predicting and accommodating the type of hybrid EV that Edison is making.
It was more a “fell through the cracks” issue and not the government actively standing in their way.
The speed that the regulatory changes have happened is surprisingly fast compared to how government usually moves.