Canada’s Carney balances China food exports, EV imports and Trump

Canada and China recently reached a trade agreement that will see Beijing substantially reduce tariffs on Canadian canola and Ottawa allow greater market access to Chinese electric vehicles.

The context for this deal: Donald Trump's disruption of Canada's relationship with the US, by far the country's biggest trading partner. Prime Minister Mark Carney must renegotiate the USMCA trade deal with Trump this year while diversifying to non-US markets and managing domestic pressures, including export industries distributed between different provinces in Canada's sometimes fractious federation.

These charts explore the Canada-China relationship, tapping our deep, granular datasets on trade and agriculture.

Our first visualization highlights the importance of canola -- rapeseed that has been bred to produce oil for human consumption. Canada is the world's biggest producer of this oilseed, and China is one of its biggest customers. Canola products have often accounted for more than half of all Canadian agri-food exports to China, surpassing western Canada's traditional farm export -- wheat (included in the cereals category, shown in yellow on our chart).

We've also highlighted shellfish (an important industry in Canada's Atlantic provinces) which was also addressed in January's trade deal. Peas and pork also stand out as notable Canadian farm exports to China (especially in 2020-21).

Our second chart compares Canada's global agricultural exports -- which have been on a long-term upward trend -- to the monthly share of food exports headed to China. This metric has been quite volatile, plunging to 3% near the end of 2025 after peaking above 22% just seven years earlier.

Our third chart turns to the Chinese side of the canola trade. Russia and Australia have sometimes been notable foreign suppliers of canola -- especially in 2019-21 -- but Canadian imports are dominant.

Next, we consider electric vehicles. Canada will allow the import of up to 49,000 Chinese-made EVs (3% of the Canadian market). Carney's office said the deal will "drive considerable new Chinese joint-venture investment in Canada with trusted partners" and "ensure a robust build-out of Canada's EV supply chain." This was criticized by US officials and the province of Ontario, home to US- and Japanese-owned auto plants that will face increased competition.

The integrated North American automotive supply chain under USMCA (and NAFTA, its predecessor) can see components cross the US, Canadian and Mexican borders 7 or 8 times before a vehicle is finally assembled and sold. It's notable that Mexico increased its share of the Canadian market between 2023 and 2025, a phenomenon that may have a read-through for US trends. (Trump had criticized Mexican auto plants' use of Chinese parts; at the end of 2025, Mexico added tariffs on imports from Asian nations including China.)

Canada had moved to limit Chinese EV imports when it aligned with Biden Administration tariffs in 2024. We can see the result in our pie charts, comparing the sources of Canadian auto imports in 2023 and 2025. From more than 5% (mostly Chinese-made Teslas), the share slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the share of Korean, German and Japanese imports remained roughly steady.

Our last chart measures the relative importance of Canadian export sectors to give a sense of Carney's domestic balancing act. In absolute terms, the auto sector's exports to the US far exceed Canadian farmers' shipments to China. But those auto exports have been in long-term stagnation since the early 2010s. Agri-food shipments to China had sometimes been on a more positive trend until recently, setting peaks in 2018 and 2022.

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