If you take Carney’s Davos framing seriously, you have to stop reading trade deals as “extra access” for legacy automakers and start reading them as normalization events for Chinese EVs.

For a decade, legacy carmakers have treated Chinese EVs as a political problem: something to be contained with tariffs, safety rules, industrial policy and vague talk of “strategic autonomy.” That bought time and created the illusion that, if things got uncomfortable, you could always lean on politics to slow entry.

That stance was never tenable, today’s geopolitical situation only accelerates what was inevitable; that reality is here in the form of the first of what should be numerous other trade deals between countries and country-blocs.

Canada’s agreement with China and the EU’s agreement with Mercosur are the first manifestation of this accelerated timeline for legacy automakers.

What was already looking to be an expensive, even existential, competition sometime in the future is looking to be exactly that, but it’s already here.