The Canadian automotive industry desperately needs more semiconductors from Taiwan.
Local producers have been battling with the semiconductor shortage for the better part of two years. A member of parliament from Ontario, Chris Lewis, said that local car factories including those owned by Ford, GM, Stellantis, Toyota, and Honda continue to battle with the shortage, prompting him to visit Taiwan.
“We’ve got parking lots full of cars, finished product cars, that sit in the parking lot, can’t be sold, because we don’t have semiconductors,” he recently told reporters.
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Lewis met with senior executives at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) during his trip to the country, asking them to “put Canada at the top of the list.”
“I think every single meeting, including the upper levels of government, I brought up there are very major shortages of chips. It was a very broad conversation and every time we said ‘please send us more chips’,” Lewis added.
While Lewis got reassurances that Taiwan is working to build more chips, he said it remains important for North America to produce its own semiconductors, reducing its reliance on other countries.
“The conversation needs to be larger than that,” he told Auto News. “It needs to be so how do we use their technology, use their expertise, get them over, train them and start building them in North America, build them in Canada, build them in the United States.”
Earlier this year, TSMC revealed that it will invest $12 billion in Arizona to establish local production of chips.
“In the face of authoritarian expansionism and the economic challenges of the post-pandemic era, Taiwan seeks to bolster cooperation with the United States in the semiconductor and other high-tech industries,” Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen said after the deal was announced. “This would help build more secure and more resilient supply chains. We look forward to jointly producing democracy chips to safeguard the interests of our democratic partners and create greater prosperity.”
