Quebec and Ottawa extend, to begin with, 300 million dollars at the feet of General Motors. An offering for the American multinational to rise up and bring out of the ground, here, a battery factory for its electric vehicles. With this in mind, the Bécancour region has been renamed “Energy Transition Valley”. It is quite possible that we quickly end up talking about a vale of tears.
“We are building a new industry with thousands of paying jobs,” said François Legault. The Prime Minister welcomed it, planted next to a gigantic electrified Hummer. The pretense industry knows how to keep such liners afloat by painting them green.
Another General Motors plant had opened in Quebec. It was in 1965, in Boisbriand. Employees were initially paid 25% less than in Ontario. It was a “new step” for “Quebec’s economic development”, welcomed Jean Lesage, the Prime Minister at the time. A “leap forward”, added this Grand Helmsman.
My father drove a Chevrolet Impala made in Boisbriand. His Milk Goat, as Sol said, was green. When the factory closed in 2002, everything had gone red. GM only made the Camaro there now, with an engine capable of driving you to the grave screaming scissors. I have known several devotees of this car. They gladly explained to you that you were doing an act of patriotism by driving a Camaro. Weren’t they rather, in an economic order where they were only pawns, destined to fatten the American eagle while being blackmailed by their own money? The Boisbriand plant was fueled by loans, grants and tax breaks granted to GM. After the plant closed, it even took another fifteen years for the Quebec government to be repaid an interest-free loan of $110 million. Under the same conditions, Ottawa had sold off 220 million in public funds in favor of GM.
“In my Camaro, I’ll take you on all the summer roads,” yelled Steve Fiset on the radio, when he shared an apartment with Pierre Bourgault, the independence tribune who died twenty years ago this year. Did the Camaro have enough to take us to the sweetness of a better country?
Over time, there were rare automobiles made in Quebec. The Champlain, I believe, was built in a few copies in the interwar period. The little Hyundai Pony, assembled in Bromont, became at best, under the pen of the writer François Barcelo, a character of Corpses, to date the only Quebec thriller published in the famous “Série Noire”. Near Montreal, Peugeots and Renaults were unsuccessfully assembled. There was also the Manic. Deputy Gérard Deltell, the shadow of the hand of the ultra-conservative Pierre Poilievre, is a great collector of these cars cobbled together in Granby from French parts.
In short, we do not manufacture cars in Quebec. On the other hand, we know how to make trains, metros, trams. However, these are automobiles that we buy and finance in droves. So much and too much. So much so that the fleet of these vehicles is now growing faster than the adult population!
Every year, explains Catherine Morency, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Mobility at Polytechnique Montréal, Quebecers spend 33 billion dollars on their cars. And this money goes abroad. As if that were not enough, we are now financing, through the State, the purchase of hyperexpensive private vehicles under the pretext that they are electrified, without ultimately changing anything in this deficit equation. Is it really reasonable to conceive that we pay subsidies for the private purchase of gleaming Audis, Volvos, Teslas and “Béhème Doublevé”? Should ordinary people be told to lower the heating in their apartments and ensure their energy sobriety in order to allow prosperous people to get around better in electrified Hummers and Porsche Cayennes? “I think our children will hate us,” Catherine Morency replies with a sigh.
Thinking in terms of national and general interest would mean investing as a priority in transport that we control and produce: public transport. This would mean setting up, as quickly as possible, infrastructure to ease everyone’s travel. Here, Paris announces that it is preparing its eighteenth metro line. All things considered, Montreal has 4.5 times less. The yellow line, inaugurated in 1967, continues to have only 3 stations…
The big boss of GM had one day summarized what the logic of such a company tended towards. “What’s good for General Motors,” he boasted, “is good for the United States, and vice versa. “No need, in other words, to ask yourself too many questions, since you are told that it is good… By next year, note therefore that it will be possible to buy a big Camaro, a clone of the one produced formerly in Boisbriand, but in an electric version. It must be good, right?
In the meantime, there is not even a plan to reduce the overall number of automobiles in Quebec. Larger and larger vehicles require even more public space than in the past, in addition to costly individual facilities for recharging. Is it really the production of nearby batteries that will change this increasingly disastrous landscape? The battery sector is at most a headlong rush, in the name of absurd technological red herrings on practically all levels, summarizes Catherine Morency.
That said, I would like to point out that I am taking a break for the next few days, far from this Canadian trance for electric cars. Consider that I am simply stopped to recharge my batteries.