Why is Canada giving two automakers $30B in subsidies for EV battery production?

> The political staffer took the instructions from two developers in envelopes handed to him at a September, 2022 dinner hosted by BILD, the principal lobby group for the residential building industry.

This is not conjecture, but rather the determination of a newly released report from the province’s auditor general.[1]

This is also the same province that leased a major highway, the 150km-long 407, to a private corporation for 99 years for just $3b in 1999 (in a deal facilitated again by the Progressive Conservatives). It is estimated this highway is worth over $30 billion dollars today.[2]

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Now, the Stellaris and Volkswagen deals are a federal/provincial partnership, but my goal here was to highlight that Ontario has a history of self-owns.

[1] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ontario-auditor-general-unwraps-do...

[2] https://www.thespec.com/news/canada/birth-of-a-fiasco-how-th...

You can't pay workers for 10 years with a tax exemption alone. You still have to make money selling product.

Similarly, those workers won't have income tax exemptions

It goes back to 2003, the ontario liberals got into power and implemented manufacturing taxes against the autoplants. Ontario shed about 800,000 manufacturing jobs over this idiotic move.

But what ended up happening is 2 fold, they outsourced their assembly to live external plants. Avoiding these new taxes but also greatly reducing the number of employees needed for the main plant itself. So you are hiding the thousands of other workers.

The final major change is that the ontario government eventually had to come in and effectively give them all those taxes right back in subsidies. Why stay?

This is also why the Ontario Liberals basically dont exist anymore. They crushed Ontario pretty badly.

What do you mean by “pretend economy”? When I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada and consider Canada’s ranking across a broad range of metrics, it looks pretty real to me.

> It's just government money sloshing around, giving us the appearance of participating in various industries

Whence does this money hail?

(1) China is going to do it, so the United States is going to do it, so the EU is going to do it, ...

(2) Really the world should just enforce a carbon tax of $50-100 a ton and rebate it to make it revenue neutral. In that case market mechanisms would be harnessed to develop a post-fossil fuel economy. It's conceivable such a mechanism would be perceived as "fair" in one country but it would be so fraught when the global north and south would be involved. The global south would want to be paid reparations for colonization, whereas the north would see the money being stolen and pissed away by governments and well-positioned individuals in the south: the south doesn't have the institutions to be able to received such a windfall. It wouldn't get so far, however, with voters in the south, who would be opposed to such a thing on the basis of simple racism.

It is much more palatable therefore to promote decarbonization through random subsidization projects like the above despite all the problems they entail.

I've heard Canada described as three mining companies standing on each other wearing an overcoat.

> If Stellantis is able to net the full C$15 billion from the federal and provincial governments over the next 10 to 15 years, which is based on meeting production targets, this would amount to C$6 million per worker, given that the Windsor plant is projected to employ 2,500 workers. Such a sum would more than cover its entire labor cost at the facility for three decades, meaning that the governments of Canada and Ontario are providing Stellantis with a free workforce into the second half of this century.

I don't think you can equate depreciating equipment against income on your tax return (which is considered to be an "oil company subsidy" by many) with straight up free money from taxpayers like this.

Canada doesn't have domestic equivalents...