On the Canadian Ambassadors Car

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The Canadian Ambassador to China does not get nearly enough press time as his American counterpart, Gary Locke, but it seems this week David Mulroney is a media star. Ambassador Mulroney did not expect to be a star, pictures of his new Toyota Camry Hybrid were posted to the official Weibo (think Chinese Twitter) of the Canadian embassy, which left Chinese netizens scratching their heads. Netizens were busy asking each other how a man of Mulroney’s position be driving a mere Camry? Low level Chinese officials at least get to role around town in an Audi A4L or a Buick at worse, but for an ambassador to be driving a Camry seems to be unthinkable for Chinese. A Chinese vice minister at ministerial level in Beijing will often get an Audi A6L as his personal car, the A6L retails anywhere from 350,000rmb to 690,000rmb ($55,000USD to 109,000USD) depending on specification, throw in tax on top and you’re looking at  car that costs 20% more, let’s not forget that he will have a driver (or two) which will be an extra 36,000rmb per year on top in salary expenses presuming a driver makes 3k RMB per month in Beijing.

Mulroney came out to explain that Canadian ministers are limited to just $32,400 for their car, presuming this is Canadian dollars this roughly translates into just over 200,000RMB via Google. So how much does a Camry Hybrid cost in China? Prices of the last generation model were over 300,000RMB which is clearly well over the 200k limit imposed by the Canadian government, so perhaps the Camry in question was brought over from Canada. Either way, Ambassador Mulroney should be a template from which Chinese government officials can learn from. As mentioned earlier, Chinese netizens were in shock to learn that an Ambassador would drive a mere Camry, one netizen commented: “Shit, even in my village the leaders have VW Passat’s“