EV sales are booming globally — but growth in North America lags the rest of the world.
Global EV sales jumped 29% to 5.6 million in the first four months of the year compared with the same period in 2024, according to data released Wednesday by EV research firm Rho Motion.
In April alone, 1.5 million EVs were sold worldwide.
However, EV sales in North America — the US, China, and Mexico — rose by just 5%, or 600,000 vehicles. Battery electric vehicle sales in the region rose 7%, while plug-in hybrid sales increased only 1%.
Trump’s Worldwide Trade and Tariff War
Forget the trade talks
Quartz » Trump said his administration doesn’t have time to negotiate individual trade deals with scores of countries, so the administration will decide what the tariff rates will be “over the next two to three weeks.”
The president of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), Martin Schlegel, has warned of the huge financial uncertainties caused by recent US tariffs (SwissInfo)
US consumer sentiment slides to lowest in 3 years as trade war raises anxiety about inflation (AP)
The Ugly
“The highest attrition rates within the [Canadian Armed Forces] CAF are observed among its lowest ranks and newest members,” said the report, which pointed to the 2023-24 fiscal year where 9.4% of newly enrolled members quit, as opposed to 4.3% average across all of the Forces.
The reason new members are quitting: Training delays and difficulty adjusting to military life.
Nick Murray, The Canadian Press »
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said Thursday the party plans to launch a legal challenge after losing the federal riding of Terrebonne by a single vote.
Blanchet said the party wants a court order to run the vote again because a mail-in vote from a Bloc supporter was returned to sender, which would have brought his party into a tie with the Liberals.
For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Sunday Mass is a weekly ritual. But this weekend in Rome, it will be anything but routine.
Carney will join world leaders in St. Peter’s Square for the inaugural Sunday service of Pope Leo XIV — a moment his office is calling “defining” for the pontiff and a rare public intersection of the prime minister’s faith and political leadership.
For Carney, a practicing Catholic and former central banker, the trip is both spiritual and strategic. Carney’s office said that while he’s in Rome he “will also meet with other international leaders to discuss deepening trade, commerce and cultural ties” ahead of next month’s G7 leaders’ summit in Alberta.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke with the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum.
President Sheinbaum congratulated Prime Minister Carney on his election.
The leaders discussed building on the strong trade relationship between the two countries, grounded in the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and the imperative to strengthen their respective economies against future shocks.
The leaders tasked their senior officials to immediately work to find opportunities to deepen bilateral relations and agreed to remain in close contact.
Companies like Loblaw and Walmart are reporting that they will need to increase prices for consumers, with the former noting that their pre-tariff inventory is set to run out, meaning those items will start seeing an increase.
A spokesperson for Loblaw told Global News that the increase could be up to 25%, depending on the product and tariff amount, and applies “entirely to products coming from the U.S.”
More » The Canadian Press // Video » CBC / Bloomberg
Célia Belin, European Council on Foreign Relations »
Trump is eliminating the ties that bind the US to Europe, trying to transform Europe in his image and attempting to intimidate any transatlantic resistance into submission.
Europeans need to respond in kind. They should reshape the rules-based order to salvage what they can, fight back against the assault on their democratic model, resist coercion and diversify away from the US.
Darius Snieckus, National Observer »
PowerCo which has a $7 billion battery plant under construction in St, Thomas, Ontario credited a flexible technology manufacturing strategy with helping it weather regional sector uncertainties in Canada created by the combination of a slow-down in EV demand and the impact of US auto sector tariffs.
“Different companies will have different strategies for the markets and plants they serve. For PowerCo, Gigafactory St. Thomas is a strategic, long-term investment with strong fundamentals,” Tegan Versolatto, PowerCo’s Canada spokesperson, told Canada’s National Observer.
Rachel Doran, National Observer »
Canada woke up the day after Trump’s inauguration in unfamiliar territory. Our closest neighbour and biggest trade partner for the past century suddenly decided Canada was not, in fact, a friend — and furthermore, our trade agreements were not really binding. Whether and which tariffs come or go is impossible to predict at this point, but one thing has become clear: trust, that other important T word, has been shattered irreparably.
Fortunately, Canada has trade agreements with 60 per cent of the global economy, making us well-positioned to lessen our reliance on US markets. And, as a new Clean Energy Canada analysis finds, among our 10 largest non-US trade partners, all of them have net-zero commitments and carbon pricing systems, and roughly half apply carbon border adjustments on imports and have domestic EV requirements reshaping their car markets.
