Why Chinese EVs keep haunting Liberal prime ministers

OTTAWA — Mark Carney has inherited Justin Trudeau’s nightmare.

In his decade as prime minister, one of the policy decisions that haunted Trudeau was the unavoidable question about whether to allow Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) into the Canadian market.

It was Trudeau’s nightmare, bequeathed to Carney pretty much in tact, because it forced him to choose between two clusters of powerful, competing political forces, both of which he was accustomed to going to bat for.

On one side of the ledger were the formidable forces in favour of allowing the increasingly well-regarded Chinese vehicles allowed into the Canadian market: consumers, the environment, farmers, fishermen and anybody else who exports to China, voters on the West and East Coasts and in farming regions and Canada’s relationshi