Trudeau, Ford hail 'game-changing' $15B Honda EV deal for Ontario

It’s being touted as the largest auto investment in Canada’s history. This is absolutely historic. Japanese automaker Honda is committing $15 billion to build 4 new electric vehicle manufacturing plants in Ontario. The deal includes establishing Honda’s first electric vehicle assembly plant as well as a new stand alone EV battery plant at Honda’s facility in Alliston ON. That’s good news for everybody. You know, lots of work could be available. Bravo. We’re doing something to save the planet. It’ll it’ll be good. And there’s of course, taxes will come from the plant to help the town. The federal government and province are each contributing about $2.5 billion in investment tax credits and through various direct and indirect incentives, Canada is planning for 0 emissions by 2035. SA lot of these movements need to be done. The demand will catch up eventually, but in the meantime you have to make the investment. Already there are promises that cash will yield results. These investments will create well over 1000 well paying manufacturing jobs. That growth also expected to have a positive impact across the wider community. It’s the spin off jobs, but it’s the small little mom and pop shops around those facilities too that benefit from more customers. But some here want confirmation. Locals will be the ones benefiting. I know people that work there, but I found a lot of them are on part time contracts, right? There’s no full time commitment. Our objective is to optimize Canadian jobs. The federal government and automakers say once the assembly plant is fully operational in 2028, it will produce up to 240,000 vehicles per year. ITIL Moussa, CBC News, Alliston ON. Now let’s bring in senior business reporter Peter Armstrong. Peter, this comes at a time when we’re hearing about struggles in the EV industry, and those struggles are real. The market is cooling, but it isn’t outright declining. And as pedantic, I know, but it’s a crucial distinction that sales have slowed way down from where they were this time last year and that’s showing up in the corporate earnings. Tesla’s numbers were out this week for their EV unit lost $1.3 billion in the first three months of this year alone. GM is scaling back production and it’s all kind of based on the same notion, right, that there are way more models available and the growth of new customers has slowed. So all of these people have more places to spread their money around and that’s eating into profitability. So when we look at huge investments like this Honda announcement, you’ve got companies but governments as well, betting that the demand is going to catch up to the forecast in spite of all the ugly data we’ve seen on a week like this. Let’s zoom out here. How does this deal fit into the bigger picture? That’s important, right? Because the feds have set a goal that every new car in Canada sold by 2035 has to be 0 emission, and that may well be an ambitious target. But I think it would be a mistake to only think of this as a Canadian project. Like 88% of Canadian auto manufacturing is exported to the United States. So the viability of a project like this doesn’t necessarily need that 100% adoption. And remember, in spite of all that slowing demand I was talking about, all of those automakers still believe they’re going to get there. It’s just a question of how steep the adoption curve is going to be. And every expert I spoke to, Ian, believes it may take time, but that the industry is going to get there. Senior business reporter Peter Armstrong.