(Ingersoll) As Canada’s first large-scale electric vehicle manufacturing plant officially opened Monday in southern Ontario, Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford spoke of a historic milestone in Canada.
Prime Minister Trudeau said the all-electric delivery vans began rolling out of the General Motors assembly plant in Ingersoll earlier Monday. This CAMI plant has been refurbished and retooled to build the new BrightDrop all-electric vehicles.
The transformation of the plant was done in “record time” after GM announced its plan in April, Trudeau said. “All governments in the world would love to invest millions of dollars in places like this,” he told a news conference at the southwestern Ontario plant.
The provincial and federal governments have invested $259 million each in GM’s $2 billion project to redevelop the Ingersoll plant and prepare its plant in Oshawa, Ontario, so it can produce electric vehicles.
The federal government says the Ingersoll plant should build 50,000 electric vehicles by 2025.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford called GM’s commitment to the plant a “massive vote of confidence” for his province, but said there was still work to be done, given economic uncertainty.
“We brought back the automotive sector,” he said. These vehicles will be produced with clean steel, clean energy and great people. »
Shortly after his first election in 2018, the Progressive Conservative Prime Minister scrapped Liberal rebates on the purchase of electric vehicles. Later that year, his government also “excluded” the province from the “carbon market”, a system which precisely financed rebates to buyers of electric vehicles.
Ford said Monday that through the rebate program, Ontario taxpayers are “subsidizing the purchase of vehicles [électriques] from anywhere but Ontario,” and instead chose to focus on long-term production investments.
“The market dictates the law, and the market will be ‘electric vehicles,'” he said Monday.
MP Brian Masse, New Democrat auto strategy critic, said Monday the announcement was “a step in the right direction,” but he called on the government to improve incentives for vehicle purchases. electricity in Canada.
The federal government is offering up to $5,000 off the cost of new electric cars that have a base price of less than $55,000, or pickups, SUVs and vans under $60,000.
Recent data suggests that Canada and Ontario are lagging behind global electric vehicle sales, and some manufacturer associations attribute the lags to insufficient rebates.
A report by research firm BloombergNEF last month showed that about one in eight vehicles sold globally between January and June were battery-electric and plug-in hybrid passenger vehicles. According to this report, Canada was among the countries that are “catching up” in this regard.
Statistics Canada data indicates that about one in 14 new vehicles registered in Canada in the first half of the year was electric.
In British Columbia and Quebec, where provincial rebates supplement federal subsidies, electric vehicles accounted for about one in six and one in ten new registrations, respectively, during the same period. Meanwhile, in Ontario, electric vehicles accounted for one in 20 new registrations.
Canada intends to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine passenger vehicles by 2035.