Article content continued

“Part of what you’d want to retain in the current trade relationship is harmonization in regulation, because to disassociate one from the other, I mean, it’s — wow,” Carlisle said in an interview on the sidelines of the Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto. “We as an industry would advocate very strongly to stay harmonized.”

The more regulations an automaker has to comply with, the higher its costs will be, said Mark Buzzell, chief executive of Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd. Buzzell was general manager for the western market area in the United States before taking the Canadian role on Jan. 1.

“I worked in California where there were (electric vehicle) mandates which were different from the rest of the U.S.,” he said. “Our position is that we would like to see harmonization within the U.S. and we would like to see harmonization within Canada, and there are benefits for the U.S. and Canada, since the markets are so similar, to have harmonization too.”

If the U.S. lowers its fuel-economy standards and other jurisdictions don’t follow suit, the industry will be forced to design its products for the “highest common denominator,” said Michael Robinet, managing director of automotive advisory services at IHS Markit.

“This idea that the regulations are going to be flattened is really Pollyanna-ish,” Robinet told the Automotive News Canada Congress at the auto show Friday. “There’s no such thing as a Canadian automotive industry, there’s no such thing as a U.S. automotive industry, there really is and still is a North American rationalized automotive industry and we’re hopeful that the right people are going to figure that out in Washington and other places of power.”