the government is responding by planning to ship oil from alberta to quebec (the national energy program) and generate an industrial policy around made-in-canada cars. but, this is dumb. it's backwards - it's bringing back the 50s. it's responding to trump with trump.
if we're going to build our own cars just for us and are no longer going to be able to export, the most obvious thing to do is to completely phase out fossil fuels entirely, which makes the nep strictly obsolete thinking. if all new cars are to be electric, and only electric vehicles are allowed by some upcoming date like 2035, canadians will need to buy electric vehicles to replace their old economy ones. this will drive the sector for a while.
we may need to nationalize some of the plants.
then, you reroute the electricity we're exporting back to canada to get the grid up by hiking up export taxes, which drives up the cost of manufacturing in the us rust belt at our benefit.
in all of this is an opportunity to retrain workers to build more houses in a massive make work plan, which we clearly need.
the canadian political spectrum is once again asleep at the wheel. this could be an opportunity to transition off carbon, at least in our populated great lakes and st lawrence region. let alberta export it to texas all it wants, until it starts to see the value of export taxes, itself.