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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

"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."

Make it make sense!

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This this analysis conflates tax exemptions with subsidies and cash payments.

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

One way or another the company's obligations are down. Company revenue is ~$200B/yr so they will easily take advantage of the full tax exemption, which you could then think of as paying workers or any other business expense (pessimist note: I strongly suspect it will not go towards higher wages or better working conditions).

Volkswagen and Stellantis have 200B Canadian revenue? Where are you getting your numbers from?

That's 10% of Canada's entire GDP

The profits might not go to the workers, but whatever they will be getting paid to work at a battery Factory is more than zero for not working. If a battery Factory doesn't pay more than the next best job, they won't have any employees

> Similarly, those workers won't have income tax exemptions

Seems unfair - why not give workers tax exemption instead, let the companies pay there way. You will attact the best talent, or so the theory goes!

In concept, that could work. People would be willing to take lower paid jobs if they were tax-free and therefore the cost of Labor at the battery Factory would be less.

However, the general Canadian public would flip their s** some people were given income tax deductions based on their job while they weren't.

As a Canadian founder, it makes no sense at all. Corporate welfare should not exist, sink or swim.

EV Battery Production has become a critical National Security issue for most countries.

We don't need yet another B2B SaaS that won't generate more than a couple hundred jobs in its lifetime, but we need EV battery manufacturers to continue to allow the Canadian automotive manufacturing hub in Southern Ontario to exist otherwise Thousands of jobs are lost as well as to allow for backup energy storage facilities to be built as nations begin migrating to renewable energy, which has production peaks

Ontario automotive manufacturing only exists because of corporate welfare, so in that sense I think draining our resources is not the path to being sovereign.

I didn't say fund B2B SaaS instead, I said just don't do corporate welfare. B2B SaaS gets R&D credits here which doesn't make sense either.

> Ontario automotive manufacturing only exists because of corporate welfare, so in that sense I think draining our resources is not the path to being sovereign.

That "corporate welfare" helps employ 136,000 Ontarians as well as maintaining an robust industrial base that can expand into newer critical technologies such as Battery Tech (as is clearly seen in the article above).

"Corporate welfare" is nonsense. As opposed to what? A theoretical total free market? Western governments have tried that for the past few decades, and that's done nothing but hollow out blue collar jobs and produce instability along with deaths of despair and wealth inequality.

The libertarian "free market" myth is effectively dead -- welcome to the age of industrial policy.

It's actually the opposite. In many cases corporate welfare is simply relaxing government taxes.

Governments understand that their taxes are barriers to the jobs and goods they want so they are willing to selectively get out of the way.

It's not a free market, but libertarian treatment for specific companies that they want to succeed.

In this case, nobody wants to build batteries in Canada if the government takes 25% of any profits, so the government has to reduce their take if they want battery factories

The auto plants in ontario havent paid their employees in decades. This isn't new.

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.

its almost as if true motives does not have to be equal to claimed motives. With some slightly different lenses on here, it makes sense.

Well, for starters Ontario’s provincial government (the Progressive Conservatives led by Doug Ford) just handed an estimated $8b in “free” value to developers that owned previously-non-developable protected land on Ontario’s Greenbelt. Conveniently, those developers themselves had direct influence over which parcels would be unlocked. Additionally, some of those same developers made personal appearances at a cash fundraising event for the Premier’s daughter’s wedding.

> 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...

Doug Ford haters popping up in random places...

I'm sorry, this obvious corruption as outlined in the auditor general's report is acceptable to you?

Well for one thing, maybe if this international green tech "race to the bottom" goes fast enough, Canada's forests won't completely burn to the ground.

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