Following the US lead, Canada has slapped a 100 per cent tariff on electric vehicles imported from China. So much for fighting climate change.

The decision highlights the challenges to being in government. Canada’s Liberals paint themselves as climate warriors, indeed as climate saviors, fighting for the environment. They want us all to drive electric vehicles, even if there is no infrastructure to support them. They have poured billions of dollars into subsidies for battery manufacturing plants, as well as subsiding every electric vehicle sold here.

The signature Liberal policy is a carbon tax that has raised the price of everything. (With, I might add, no proven environmental benefit. People aren’t consuming less, they are just paying more.) Electric vehicles are , they say, not just the way of the future but what we need to be driving now.

Which makes the tariff difficult to justify. The average price of a new electric vehicle in Canada is almost $75,000. The Chinese were offering a vehicle for $17,000. That would certainly catch my attention, if it was a quality vehicle. Even with the infrastructure issue, I might consider going electric at that price. .

Does it make climate sense to restrict the sales of vehicles that are one fifth of the cost of a new Tesla? Of course not.

The suspicion though is that the Chinese vehicles are themselves subsidized, part of a Communist plot to take away Canadian jobs. Certainly it is true that with lower wages they can make vehicles cheaper than we can. The question is one of whether we want to maintain local production of anything, or just outsource our economy to China.

The government has decided, in this case anyway, to opt to protect Canadian industry. I might have done the same thing if the decision was mine to make. But it pretty much guarantees my next vehicle purchase won’t be electric. I’m not paying luxury prices for something that is going to complicate my driving. And from what I have seen, finding a charging station in working order can be complicated.

It didn’t have to be this way. In theory anyway.

This summer I read a biography of Elon Musk, the driving force behind Tesla (and other companies). It was mentioned that in his youth he was a big fan of science fiction author Robert Heinlein. I was too – still am in fact, or at least of his writing.

Musk would surely be well acquainted with Heinlein’s vision for non-combustion engine vehicles. In Heinlein’s universe they were powered by a type of battery called a Shipstone. When your charge ran low, you pulled up to a service station, swapped a new Shipstone for your depleted one and you were on your way. No waiting around half an hour to charge a battery, and faster than filling up a tank of gas.

Why didn’t Musk insist on his engineers coming up with something like that for Tesla? I’d buy one. Maybe he tried and failed.

I’m not sure cheap Chinese electric vehicles will save the planet. Or electric vehicles from anywhere else. The electricity has to come from somewhere, and how it is generated will determine the environmental impact. Some countries, including China, are still burning coal, which probably offsets any environmental benefit from using an electric vehicle.

Still, when you call it a climate crisis or a climate emergency and make politically motivated choices that favor other things beside the environmental benefits, it weakens your argument somewhat. In slapping 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, both Canada’s and America’s leaders have weakened their arguments on the need for drastic action.

I guess they’ll have to live with their decisions and accept it when the suggestion is made that their actions are somewhat hypocritical.