Table set for Honda's massive bet on Canada's electric vehicle sector
CBC
When word of Honda's soon-to-be-announced electric vehicle investment leaked to Bloomberg News on Sunday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford saw an opening to boast about his government's success in getting into the automotive battery business.
"We've overtaken China and knocked them off the pedestal for the first time ever," he told the First Nations Major Project Coalition conference on Monday morning, referring to Canada's top spot in a recent global supply chain ranking. "That's absolutely huge."
Expect more superlatives when Honda Canada makes its official announcement in Alliston, Ont., on Thursday, as government and industry leaders celebrate the fact that the company behind some of Canada's most popular models is settling in for the long haul in Canada's EV sector.
"This may be Honda's biggest bet anywhere on the planet," Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Manufacturers Association of Canada, told CBC News. He called it a "double down" on Canada and "an announcement that I think will be heard around the world."
Honda doesn't make speculative bets, he said. "They've been in Canada for almost 40 years. They've never retreated, they've never gone back. This is, for Canadian suppliers, an extremely bankable customer to get."
Enjoying the hype this announcement is generating means ignoring, for the time being, the fact that most of Northern Ontario's critical minerals are years (if not decades) away from powering all the new EVs Canadians will be federally mandated to purchase after 2035 to meet federal carbon emissions targets.
It means overlooking the fact that Ford's government remains well short of the Indigenous partnerships and permissions it will need to fulfil its Ring of Fire mining aspirations. It means dismissing the failure to date of early consumer incentives and spiking spring gas prices to set off a rush of EV sales, and the fact that many of the new EVs on Ontario's roads were imported from a Tesla gigafactory in Shanghai.
"Here in Ontario, we've become a world leader in the electric vehicle revolution," Ford bragged.
Ford said the deal coming this week will be "double the size of Volkswagen."
The $7 billion VW battery plant now under construction in St. Thomas, Ont., covers roughly 150 hectares — over 200 football fields. It's "like a city in itself," Ford said.
It was not clear from Ford's comments if he meant Honda's new operation will cover twice the acreage of the Volkswagen plant, or if its investment is double the size of the Volkswagen deal. Either way, it's historic.
In January, the Japanese news outlet Nikkei was the first to report Honda was considering an investment of 2 trillion yen (about $18 billion Cdn) to start up an EV supply chain in Canada.
Ford's economic development minister, Vic Fedeli, appeared to confirm Thursday's figures could be on that scale when speaking to reporters at Queen's Park on Monday.
Ontario's EV investments "went from zero to $28 billion in three years," he said, before hedging slightly.
