Ontario’s auto sector feels betrayed. Michigan isn’t thrilled about that. 

The state—the engine of North America’s auto industry—has landed in the middle of a geopolitical standoff as leaders in Canada and the U.S. drift ever closer to an all-out trade war. 

In one of its ears, auto industry lobby groups whisper that U.S. President Donald Trump has an aggressive vision to repatriate auto manufacturing to the U.S. from Canada. In the other, Canadians warn they must turn their backs on the state if trading means cowing to economic demands they see as unreasonable. 

From the Detroit Regional Chamber’s tower, business leaders like Glenn Stevens Jr. can see the border the verbal barbs are flying across. And he is preoccupied with the prospect of 25 per cent tariffs taking effect in four weeks if the two sides can’t find their way to a deal.

“We view our neighbours as neighbours, friends, allies,” said Stevens, executive director of the chamber’s auto-sector group MichAuto, gesturing across the Detroit River toward Windsor, Ont. “It’s personal to us when one of us feels attacked or feels threatened.”

The auto sector faces major competition from China, which has rapidly built a goliath EV supply chain to make affordable cars as efficiently as possible. China invested heavily in a nationalistic push toward energy independence while continuing to extend its reach abroad. Its EV industry, for one, is staking claims in supply chains in Southeast Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa—and pressing toward markets like Australia and Hungary that have resisted its overtures. 

Detroit wants to stay competitive. Like China, it has tapped trade partners in the past to do so. Stevens said that Ontario’s push to build its auto sector over the past few years helped the Great Lakes region fight for manufacturing investments that might otherwise go to the southern U.S., Mexico or China. 

Tariffs threaten that plan, according to Stevens and many other auto-sector leaders that see the trade barriers as margin killers. 

Which is not to say the U.S. auto sector is speaking with one voice. The United Auto Workers have condemned Trump’s policies on labour, but said they were “willing to support the Trump administration’s use of tariffs to stop plant closures and curb the power of corporations that pit U.S. workers against workers in other countries.” 

Still, groups on both sides of the border, including the UAW, MichAuto and some Canadian auto leaders, are starting to coalesce around an idea that could address some of Trump’s trade concerns without tariffs: re-opening negotiations on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) before its scheduled 2026 renewal.

While the last negotiations were hard-fought, Stevens said many people walked away happy with the current deal and may be able to find common ground again. Until recently, advancing the North American auto sector had bipartisan support both in Ontario, where the federal Liberals and provincial Progressive Conservatives both backed it; and in Michigan, which has a Democrat governor but swung to Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Stevens hopes there’s a path back to that place—and a quick one—as competition looms from fast-growing Chinese automakers like BYD.

“Together we lead, or we lag,” he said. “And lagging is not an option, particularly when you have some of these global powers like China.”

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