The Trudeau government’s EV strategy expressed a legitimate ambition, but it does not appear to have weighed seriously the prospect that EV demand was not inevitably going to be governed by hockey stick economics — that is, slow growth followed by a sudden, sharp and sustained increase. Trudeau’s imprudence was apparent in the whopping nature of the subsidies.
Wednesday’s report from the financial news site Nikkei Asia that Honda has suspended its plan to build a $15-billion electric vehicle plant in Ontario indefinitely comes as no surprise — particularly not to the federal government, which was told in January, sources say.
The plant in Alliston, Ont., was supposed to become operational in 2028 and would have produced up to 240,000 EVs annually
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Adam Chambers, the Conservative international trade critic, told reporters on Wednesday that
the subsidies on offer by Ottawa induced some manufacturers to move traditional vehicle production outside of Canada to make room for subsidized electric vehicles
, and now the market isn’t there for them. “Instead of rethinking their entire policy, they (Liberals) are doubling down,” he said. “You saw last night, the Japanese ambassador suggesting that access to the U.S. market for automakers is integral to having production here. If we don’t have access to the U.S. market, we do not have an industry.”
Without Biden, the Canadian EV policy made little sense. It makes even less sense when Canadian exports to the U.S. are hit by tariffs
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