{"id":5236,"date":"2026-06-28T03:47:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T03:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=5236"},"modified":"2026-06-28T03:48:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T03:48:57","slug":"5236","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadafirst.nfshost.com\/?p=5236","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Beijing’s Trojan Horse Rolls Into Canada: A National-Security Scholar Warns Carney’s Chinese EV Deal Embeds Sabotage Risk in the Country’s Roads, Ports and Grids<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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<\/td>\"\"<\/a><\/td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/tr><\/figure>OTTAWA<\/strong> \u2014 China keeps finding inventive ways to burrow into the West, and Canada\u2019s new appetite for Chinese electric vehicles may be the most consequential opening yet.<\/span>That is the warning at the center of a report published this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and written by Brenda Shaffer, an energy and national-security specialist who teaches at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. China, she writes, \u201ccontinues to find creative ways to infiltrate and influence the West,\u201d embedding in its exports the capacity to surveil citizens, disrupt transportation and ports, and trigger blackouts and grid damage.Shaffer situates the electric-vehicle question inside a wider argument about hybrid warfare. China, Russia and Iran, she notes, have each written attacks on Western domestic energy infrastructure into their war doctrines, erasing the old line between the home front and the battlefield. Even brief disruptions to electricity or transit, she argues, could spread public panic and erode support for a distant conflict \u2014 the defense of Taiwan being the obvious test.The cars began arriving in June, the product of a strategic partnership Prime Minister Mark Carney signed in Beijing in January. Ottawa cut its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles from 100 percent to 6.1 percent, opening an initial quota of roughly 49,000 vehicles in the first year. Carney has cast the imports as a low-cost route for Canadians switching to electric, and analysts cited by Shaffer expect Chinese brands to capture a fifth of the Canadian market.Shaffer leans on an internal Public Safety Canada memo, obtained under access-to-information law, warning that opening the market to \u201chigh-risk vendors\u201d invites connected cars that \u201ccollect significant amounts of data on Canadians, which can have intelligence value.\u201d Her account of the official response is withering. Asked how Canada would protect drivers, the chief of the defense staff, General Jennie Carignan, told reporters only that \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of Chinese vehicles so far,\u201d and Defense Minister David McGuinty said he would raise the question with base commanders.The danger, in her telling, runs well past cars. A congressional probe found hidden communications equipment inside Chinese-made cranes at major American ports; the same cranes are common in Canadian harbors, where Transport Canada began assessing the risk in 2023. More worrying still are solar power inverters \u2014 the devices that feed renewable energy into the grid \u2014 of which China supplies about 70 percent worldwide. American investigators have identified undeclared communication components inside some Chinese inverters that experts warn could be used to switch them off remotely and destabilize power grids. Lithuania has banned Chinese inverters outright and the European Union has moved to bar them from public funding, while Canada, Shaffer writes, has imposed no comparable limits \u2014 even as the January partnership commits Ottawa and Beijing to deepen cooperation on solar, wind and battery storage.Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre\u2019s auto policy would prohibit Chinese-made vehicles from proximity to Canadian Forces bases and other sensitive or strategic infrastructure. In Washington, where opposition to Chinese electric vehicles is one of the few genuinely bipartisan positions, President Donald Trump has called the deal a disaster for Canada, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Canada would live to regret it, and the U.S. ambassador, Peter Hoekstra, vowed the cars would never reach American roads: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to open the floodgates to have Chinese cars coming into the US from Canada.\u201dShaffer\u2019s alarm is echoed, from a different vantage, by Michael Kovrig, the former Canadian diplomat held in China for more than 1,000 days. In testimony to Parliament this spring, Kovrig described the deal as a \u201ctrifecta of risks\u201d \u2014 structural dependence, unfair competition that erodes industrial capacity, and systemic pressure on government policy \u2014 and warned that the People\u2019s Republic \u201cweaponizes technology, supply chains and market access\u201d to force acquiescence to its agenda.Commenting this week on his own testimony, Kovrig wrote on social media that opening Canada\u2019s market to Chinese electric vehicles \u201cshould be assessed not as a normal trade agreement, but as a tactical gamble that risks deep entanglement.\u201d The Chinese Communist Party, he wrote, \u201cpours enormous resources into the sector to build scale and sustain overcapacity.\u201d He went on: \u201cThe pattern is to flood, consolidate and weaponize. We\u2019ve seen China do this before with solar panels, steel, ships and drones, and EVs are now moving through the same stages in global markets.\u201dThe warnings have not slowed Carney\u2019s government, which is pressing ahead at full speed. Industry Minister M\u00e9lanie Joly spent much of last week in China, courting BYD, Chery, Geely and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology to build electric vehicles on Canadian soil, and confirmed that the import quota will keep climbing \u2014 rising by 6.5 percent a year from 49,000 vehicles in 2026 to roughly 67,000 annually by 2031. Carney, caught on a hot microphone with Trump at the Group of Seven summit in France, defended the arrangement as \u201cless than 3 per cent of our market, 49,000 cars,\u201d telling the president, \u201cIt\u2019s a cap, we capped, a hard line.\u201dBeijing is pleased.Geely Holding Group\u2019s Lotus-brand electric vehicles will reach Canada next month \u2014 the first such models sold under the 49,000-vehicle quota \u2014 China\u2019s ambassador to Canada, Wang Di, told Reuters on Friday. The cars would arrive, he said, \u201cand they will be holding a ceremony when the cars are delivered in Montreal,\u201d a milestone in the trade pivot Carney has pursued to move Canada away from dependence on the United States.On June 26, the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s state-run China Daily approvingly reported Canada\u2019s pledge to lift its exports to China by 50 percent by 2030. At a Canada Day reception at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, the mission\u2019s charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires, Mark Richardson, called Canada \u201ca stable, reliable partner \u2014 a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term,\u201d adding, \u201cThat includes with China.\u201d Of Carney\u2019s January visit, he said: \u201cTo say this has been a significant year for Canada\u2013China relations would be an understatement. In many ways, it has been a turning point.\u201d He noted that Canada had become a major energy exporter to China and observed that \u201cthe first shipment of Chinese-made electric vehicles has arrived in Canada under a new quota that was agreed in January.\u201d Disclosure: The author appeared on a panel at the Hudson Institute in May, convened by senior fellow Michael Doran, alongside research fellow Zineb Riboua and Professor Brenda Shaffer, whose Macdonald-Laurier Institute commentary is discussed in this report.<\/em><\/h1><\/div><\/table><\/div><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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