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Building the Canadian Car – Part 2

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Economics

Project Arrow – the timing is NOW

Doug Anderson

Aug 22, 2026

I wrote Part 1 of this almost exactly a year ago (Aug 30, 2025) when the initial 25% American tariffs (April 3, 2025) had been in place for a few months and initial efforts to have them lifted had failed.

The premise of that article was: “So with all the expertise we’ve acquired and all the parts plants we have, it makes sense that our response to Trump’s tariffs should be to start building a Canadian car.”

Well those tariffs just went up dramatically.

The Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturers’ Association has been a leader in automotive technology, and some years ago they “launched the first, original, full-build, zero-emission concept vehicle named Project Arrow in 2023. An all-Canadian effort, it was designed, engineered and built through the joint efforts of our world-class automotive supply sector and post-secondary institutions.”

In … More

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Building the Canadian Car

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Economics

We were making them up to 1965 – 60 years ago

Aug 30, 2025

Most of the people reading this weren’t even born when Canadian auto workers were producing from scratch tens of thousands of cars in Canadian assembly plants with Canadian-made parts. Even fewer will remember when their parents, or perhaps their grandparents, actually owned one.

If you came of age after the Auto Pact was signed in 1965, this is ancient history. 1965 was when our auto sector began to integrate with the American industry. Before that Canada produced thousands of cars (and trucks) – albeit in branch plants of the American big 3 – GM, Ford and Chrysler. Most the the production was identical to the American models (some of the names were changed, such as the Ford Frontenac and the Pontiac Acadian and they might have had different grilles) but the designs were were the same … More