00:02:20.280There used to be in Talbotville, which is just outside of St. Thomas, you're getting all of the southwestern Ontario geography today, a giant Ford plant.
00:02:29.220They made the Crown Vicks there, and at a certain point, they shut down that plant and left a lot of people who had skills in the automotive industry out of work.
00:02:37.960So from a St. Thomas perspective, from a southern Ontario perspective, this is great news.
00:02:43.340Investment, development, it's a new plant, it's electric vehicles of the future.
00:02:47.440but you look a little bit further through it and you kind of wonder
00:02:50.840all right how is this coming to fruition is this Volkswagen looking around and saying you know we
00:02:57.360really think this is the place that makes the most business sense because it's affordable land
00:03:03.380there's a labor pool or is it that they were paid to come here now this is where we get into the
00:03:09.780nitty-gritty of this and I want to let Francois Philippe Champagne the industry minister have the
00:03:15.260first word on this because he won't actually say how much the federal government spent to bring
00:03:21.360Volkswagen to St. Thomas, Ontario. In addition to what you laid out, I'm going to ask you very
00:03:28.660bluntly, Minister. Did you have to cut them a check and how big of one? Well, listen, you always
00:03:34.580have to be part of the, I always say government have to be part of the equation when you come to
00:03:38.220these large investments. You mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States.
00:03:42.840you will recall that in the thought economic statement we said that uh we intend to to level
00:03:47.880the playing field that we would be selective um so obviously government have to be a part of the
00:03:53.160equation and i appreciate all those points and i'm certainly not trying to take away from them
00:03:57.560but it's a really long-winded way of not not answering minister that the original question
00:04:01.480i posed am i to interpret from your answer that the federal government did invest did cut the
00:04:07.080company a check and again i'm going to ask on behalf of canadians i'm not saying the investment
00:04:11.480isn't a worthwhile one but how significant is it how big is the size of the check you had to cut
00:04:15.800so i'll answer very clearly your question canada uh had to be part of the equation and i'm not
00:04:21.720going to go into the details because we have discussions with many others so discussions
00:04:25.640are commercially sensitive but as always vashi will recall we always we always make that
00:04:31.560information public in due course i i like how he prefaces i'm prefaces that with i'm going to be as
00:04:41.240clear as I can before saying nothing at all except for we had to be quote part of the equation. So
00:04:48.080we know that this is a big deal here, billions of dollars. This is the first North American
00:04:54.040electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant Volkswagen has. We look into some reporting
00:04:59.740that's been done outside of Canada, specifically in the Financial Times. There was a report in
00:05:05.000the Financial Times that said Volkswagen was putting plans for a European battery plant on
00:05:10.460hold because it could get nearly 15 billion dollars in subsidies for a north american plant
00:05:17.340now it sounds like they might have been talking about this one given that it is the first and so
00:05:22.580far only north american plant and it's meant to serve an international market here so we're talking
00:05:28.280about billions billions with a b that is being given probably by the provincial government as
00:05:35.160well this is not just a federal government issue to build this plant banking on electric vehicles
00:05:40.700being the future and as Vashi says maybe it is a good investment maybe there's going to be an ROI
00:05:46.040maybe it will generate all that and more but this to my view looks like smells like sounds like
00:05:53.120corporate welfare and if the business case were there why does government need to in
00:05:57.640Minister Champagne's words be a part of the equation joining me on the line now is
00:06:02.480at Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, Philip Cross, formerly with Statistics Canada,
00:06:07.300now in the evil, scary private sector. I appreciate you joining me, Philip. Good to
00:06:12.120talk to you again. Thanks for having me back, Andrew.
00:06:14.860So let's talk first off about, I think, the landscape here. We know that manufacturing
00:06:19.420has been in decline. The automotive sector has been just pummeled in recent years. There are
00:06:25.080a number of reasons for that, economic, trade-related, and so on. I mean, in southwestern
00:06:29.840Ontario, it's particularly acute. And I never like to poo-poo something that will employ my
00:06:34.880neighbours, my friends, people, and my family. But you have to look at the bigger picture here.
00:06:39.440And this is, I mean, corporate welfare. There's no other way to put it, right?
00:06:43.820No, and particularly when you're talking about $15 billion, we've moved to a whole different
00:06:47.520level. I mean, we've seen this is an industry that is chronically dependent on government-first
00:06:52.820subsidies. But typically, you know, when it's GM and Toyota and Ford and so on, it's a billion
00:06:58.940hear a billion there um but you know 15 billion is just off the scale uh it makes you wonder if
00:07:06.380there if there is a sound business case for this and the the addiction of this industry to subsidies
00:07:12.620contrasts with other industries you can look at high tech and you know they're based in california
00:07:18.460you know that's where apple and google and uh everybody is and then up to up the road you have
00:07:24.540Microsoft in Seattle. They moved there because they want to be as far away from Washington as
00:07:29.420possible. Bill Gates said he deliberately put Microsoft in Seattle because he didn't want
00:07:35.340anything to do with with Washington politics. He wanted to be away from all that. That to me is
00:07:42.700that's the kind of industry you want here. You don't want an industry here where they're only
00:07:47.260here because you bribed them. But it's a sad comment in Canadian business environment that
00:07:53.420that the only way we can get investment in this country is to bribe people to come here.
00:07:57.580I mean, it's staggering that investment has fallen 17% since 2014 in this country.
00:08:03.620We have a real problem attracting business here,
00:08:06.960and it appears the only way we can get businesses here is if we give them ever larger amounts of money.
00:08:13.220Yeah, I read one article that was talking about a plant that's being built in Windsor by Stellantis,
00:08:20.740which is double the size of this one that's being talked about in st thomas and it's valued at five
00:08:26.960billion dollars now i mean obviously different costs come from different places but but if you
00:08:31.160can build something for twice the size at five billion dollars and we're talking about potentially
00:08:35.36015 billion dollars in subsidies we're not just talking about bankrolling the entire construction
00:08:40.380of this plant but also its operations for i don't know how many years and at this point i don't even
00:08:45.520think you can say volkswagen is doing it this is just a canadian government factory with a
00:08:50.040Volkswagen logo on it? Yeah. Well, it's a little worrisome, too, that Volkswagen doesn't have any
00:08:54.800history in this country. It's not like Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford that have deep roots here,
00:09:00.940that obviously came here. They have workers that have been here and trained for a long period of
00:09:05.580time. So it makes you think at the first downturn in the auto industry, and the auto industry
00:09:09.560always has downturns, the first plant Volkswagen is going to close is going to be this one,
00:09:14.880since they don't have any real business case reasons to be here in the first place.
00:09:21.440So the other problem is, and I've seen the academics at the University of Windsor point out
00:09:28.340that it's very likely that a lot of these auto investments would have been made anyways.
00:09:32.640That firms decide ahead of time, okay, we're going to put a plant here.
00:09:36.340Let's see how much money we can extract from government.
00:09:39.320And that's just become part of the game.
00:09:42.200Although as a new arrival, I must say, Volkswagen, as I say, has mastered this game in a way that nobody else has.
00:09:48.400Yeah, they've learned the game very well.
00:09:50.060But let me actually push back on that point a little bit, Philip, because I wonder if one of the problems here is that because this is the rules of the game now,
00:09:57.640and this is basically how things work, if the only way to get investment from one of these companies is to just throw money at them.
00:10:05.660Like I remember a few years ago when Amazon was doing this Amazon 2.0 and building the second headquarters, they turned it into a contest almost.
00:10:14.480They basically opened it up to a public bidding thing and said, you know, governments just come and tell us what you're going to give us to set up shop there.
00:10:21.080Right. And it's very funny you should mention that because just in the last week, Amazon announced the suspension of work on this new headquarters that we were all dying to get.
00:10:32.100Including Ontario. Ontario was putting together a multi-billion dollar bid.
00:10:36.040No, and Toronto was one of the supposed 20 finalists, although you knew that Amazon was never going to leave the U.S.
00:10:42.740But, you know, and that's what makes you worried that, you know, corporations can take all these subsidies and there's no guarantees that the plants will stay open, how long they'll be open.
00:10:54.040As I say, I think it's a little worrisome that Volkswagen in particular doesn't have any traditional roots here in the Ontario economy.
00:11:01.740And it makes you wonder how deep their commitment is here in the first place.
00:11:10.040And again, obviously, we don't have the specifics, which I think is in and of itself noteworthy.
00:11:14.440Because oftentimes when governments are handing out big giant checks, they want to be telling everyone and bragging and shouting from the rooftops about we're investing this much.
00:11:22.340So the fact that they're not doing that suggests that even there might be a bit of embarrassment about it.
00:11:26.780Yeah. And remember, too, this long-term strategy of the Ontario and the federal governments of subsidizing auto plants. In the long term, it hasn't stopped a long-term shift in this industry, which is increasingly to Mexico, a certain amount staying in the U.S. and a declining proportion in Canada.
00:11:47.840The Canadian auto industry's share of North American production is in long-term decline.
00:11:52.580So, you know, we shouldn't trumpet this as a winning strategy.
00:11:56.100If anything, we're just, you know, slowing or minimizing the losses here.
00:12:01.060Instead, a better strategy would be to focus on making our economy and our industry so competitive that firms will want to be here.
00:12:09.920Because of the hospitable business environment.
00:12:42.720It's an electric vehicle battery factory.
00:12:44.700And we know that government, this particular government has been very, very much focused on climate initiatives, on green tech and all of that. And I think that when you start letting these things cloud your economic judgment, you're not making economically sound decisions.
00:12:59.700uh very much so i couldn't agree more i'm glad you brought that up it was a point i wanted to
00:13:04.820make that this really does seem to fit the um uh um the ideology of this government but as usual
00:13:13.540with this government too you know the facts in the ground don't really support it i think most
00:13:17.780people would would agree that electric vehicles aren't that much better for the environment than
00:13:23.300than internal combustion engine vehicles uh that this is really a lot of greenwashing i mean the
00:13:29.300life cycle of manufacturing a battery is is insane for uh for emissions for environmental harm all
00:13:34.980of that yeah yeah so i mean if you were really committed to reducing emissions you would want
00:13:41.060people to just drive in less to change their lifestyle but of course you know no government
00:13:47.060will mention that because the mention the minute you start telling people you're going to have to
00:13:51.380live in downtown in small homes you're not going to be able to travel much you can forget about
00:13:55.940flying around the world, immediately you're going to lose the next election and you're going to lose
00:14:00.200badly. So instead, what we do is, yeah, we subsidize firms, we tell them to build electric
00:14:07.680battery vehicles, and, you know, we pretend the problem's solved.
00:14:15.780To make a business case for this amount of money, I mean, if you could, and I'm kind of of the mind
00:14:21.480that I don't think it can be made, but if you were the government that has to come out and sell this
00:14:25.660when that dollar figure eventually comes out, how do you at all demonstrate that ROI?
00:14:30.080I mean, I'm looking here, $15 billion divided by $50,000, a reasonable annual salary amounts
00:25:13.480If you look at, I probably should have pulled it up on the screen here,
00:25:16.860but on his website, he talks about faith, he talks about family, he talks about freedom.
00:25:21.200Those things are not really compatible with the government of Canada today, but they are certainly compatible or are supposed to be with the conservative movement in this country.
00:25:31.560But last night, Gerrit Van Dorland was disqualified by the Conservative Party of Canada's National Candidate Selection Committee.
00:25:40.140And I'm going to give you what the party says is the reason for the disqualification.
00:25:46.040And you can read the full story on this over at tnc.news.
00:25:49.040But what the Conservative Party said, and I'm quoting directly from a statement I got from their spokesperson,
00:25:56.900is that Garrett Van Dorland, a nomination applicant in Oxford, was disqualified from standing in a nomination race
00:26:03.240by the party's National Candidate Selection Committee due to a failure to comply with the obligation to disclose
00:26:09.820required information during the candidate application process.
00:26:14.200The recommendation to disqualify this individual was first made by the local candidate nomination committee.
00:26:20.720And just by way of reference, candidate nominees have to provide to the party a list of all current and former social media accounts and websites,
00:26:29.180a copy of any deleted or publicly inaccessible social media or other online content,
00:26:35.620and a copy of all articles, media coverage, quotes, interviews that relate to the candidate.
00:26:40.500And I just want to give you some perspective here, because I've been a candidate.
00:26:44.660I ran in 2018 unsuccessfully for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
00:26:50.580And in doing so, I had to go through this application process, and it was insane what
00:33:10.040So I've spoken of members of the National Council who I've been in touch with about this issue for about a week now when it came to our attention.
00:33:18.440And it seems like that the party has not shared with members of the National Council, at least as since we're recording this, the details of what that nondisclosure was.
00:33:30.320Are we talking the fact that Garrett had an entire social media account that he deleted or a website that he deleted that he hasn't disclosed?
00:33:38.860given that that's a question in the 50 plus page candidate application uh for the conservative
00:33:44.160party of candidate which frankly is not a bad question to ask but i don't how are you supposed
00:33:49.260to give copies of stuff you've deleted i mean i deleted it for a reason i didn't keep the copy i
00:33:53.420mean that so that that in and of itself is i think a bit of a flaw in it but fair enough to
00:33:57.700acknowledge the existence of this but we're talking like an entire website you've deleted
00:34:02.020or whatever i think that's an issue or are we talking about you know a facebook or a comment
00:34:07.040that garrett made on a post you know back in 2010 and three weeks later he thought well you know
00:34:12.000that's kind of a not very terrible post i'm gonna or comments i'm gonna delete that comment are we
00:34:16.560talking about something like that no one knows right what one one is reasonable right to not
00:34:22.080one is reasonable for a candidate to be disqualified if they don't disclose something
00:34:25.520as big as i had this entire website and i deleted it and i didn't tell you about it versus you know
00:34:30.320there was this comment i had up for three weeks on a facebook post you know 15 years ago and i
00:34:35.360I can't remember because it's 15 years ago and I deleted it.
00:35:16.380So the National Council kind of told me, well, if the content doesn't matter, then why do we care?
00:35:23.180And if it's not that big of a deal, is it reasonable that he forgot this, or is it unreasonable?
00:35:28.980And those are the questions that are left unanswered, even by two national councillors, again, which strongly suggests to me that there's nothing there.
00:35:36.060Now, it's interesting that you mentioned, Andrew, when you were running for your provincial nomination in London West of, I believe, for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
00:35:43.920And I think and I agree with you that you were well on your way to win that nomination.
00:35:49.060And then all of a sudden you were appointed by the now premier, Doug Ford.
00:35:52.760You know, I think that does a lot of candidates, even yourself, a disservice because it runs a lot of people the wrong way.
00:35:58.320And it's interesting because I don't know if you've talked about this on your show yet or not, but Arpan himself has come out and said, well, Garrett should be reinstated.
00:36:07.380And he sent a public letter to the National Council because the appeals could be heard over the weekend that Garrett should be reinstated.
00:36:13.680And Rick Roth, who is another candidate running in the nomination, has said the same thing as well.
00:36:18.160So, you know, if you are a candidate that is, you know, in a position to win with Garrett gone, you're probably not going to say anything, right? Because you're going to win the nomination with him gone. But like I said, I think Arpan is a good candidate, is a good person. And so I'm glad that he stated that.
00:36:41.160And, you know, if Garrett thinks that he should run and RPAN thinks he should run and Rick Roth thinks he should run and members of the party think he should run and members of caucus think he should run, then I would certainly hope that members of National Council and the leader and those around the leader would also share that view.
00:36:57.100You know, and just going back to the fundamental principles here, and I know people's eyes make glaze over when you start talking about, you know, what's in the party constitution.
00:37:04.060But like, in all honesty, you get the outcome you want or you get the process you want.
00:37:08.260If you want open and fair and transparent nominations, then have them.
00:37:11.540If you want preferred candidates, which is an entirely legitimate approach to building a party.
00:37:16.380I think it's entirely legitimate if the leader says, no, no, no, we need to put a certain type of candidate forward in each riding, then be transparent about that and don't go through the whole charade.
00:37:27.860And this was like Patrick Brown 101, where you say we're going to be the party of grassroots, the party of democracy.
00:37:32.680But then every nomination is somehow manipulated to have the outcome that Patrick Brown wants.
00:37:38.260Yeah, I would agree with you on that, to a certain extent. I think if there's an attempt to amend the Constitution of the Conservative Party of Canada to state that X number of ridings or in a by-election and outside of general, we're going to be appointing candidates as opposed to allowing the nomination process to go forward, I don't think that'll be very popular with a lot of supporters of the party.
00:38:01.700But that proves the point, though, because the party has decided that open nominations are important.
00:38:07.160in theory in practice something else completely and again i i go back like you know we're early
00:38:14.620days into pierre polyos leadership and i think that there's um a lot of positive changes that
00:38:19.820have been made in in relation to the previous leader and i think a lot of people would agree
00:38:23.860with that uh but this is the type of stuff that led to the end of the leadership of baron o'toole
00:38:29.180and i think a lot of people don't really want to see that happen with pierre i mean even if he
00:38:34.000didn't vote for Pierre as number one. I didn't. I voted him number two. Lesnar was number one for
00:38:38.160me. You know, we in the Conservative Party of Canada, they have gone through what, three
00:38:43.220leadership races in five years or something like that. I don't think people are really interested
00:38:46.840in doing that again. But it's stuff like this that inevitably kind of leads it down that road.
00:38:52.340And so I hope those kind of close to him are learning this lesson today and throughout the
00:38:56.560rest of the week. And I hope National Council does accept the appeal of Garrett and reverse
00:39:01.860the decision that let's not go down this road anymore, because it isn't in the nature of the
00:39:06.720party, like you were saying, if there was a move to amend the Constitution of the party to allow
00:39:11.200for appointments, I think there would be a big uproar, whether those people are pro-life or
00:39:15.520pro-abortion, or whether they are libertarians, or, you know, fiscal hawks, or foreign policy
00:39:23.320hawks, or whatever the case might be, whatever type of conservative they are, I think we can
00:39:27.020all probably agree, even red Tories, I would say, I think we can all probably agree, like,
00:39:31.080all the way around, people just want to have an open, fair nomination process. Now, that being
00:39:35.500said, I think a lot of people would also agree that there should be some sort of mechanism in
00:39:40.280place to have disqualifications when necessary. Sometimes there are people who want to run for
00:39:46.420public office who have done things in the past that are just extraordinarily problematic.
00:39:51.920And that, you know, political parties are, at the end of the day, private clubs,
00:39:56.320but at the same time they establish rules of the need to to apply even handedly so yeah a party
00:40:03.080should have the right to disqualify you know a lifelong liberal who just sees an opportunity to
00:40:07.620co-opt a nomination for sure but but but these things should be done in the most i'd say narrow
00:40:12.680way possible while keeping with what the grassroots want and i mean in some ways i might even say let
00:40:18.600the liberal run because the members would reject them exactly that's a whole can of worms yeah
00:40:22.600Exactly, right? Like, I think there's a lot of reasonable people within the Conservative Party of Canada that makes up its ranks and files in the members, right? And I think we've seen the reasonableness of party members, you know, in the last three leadership races, I would argue, right?
00:40:38.460Right. And I think that there is a self-regulation mechanism there to to be had.
00:40:44.780Right. And I think that the process of disqualification is something in an extreme.
00:40:49.080You know, a problematic past might be someone who has a heinous sexual crime that they've committed in the past or something like that.
00:40:56.260Where it's just it's just, you know, very, very inappropriate to to have a candidate like that.
00:41:01.060But that's not what we're talking about here. Right.
00:41:03.100We don't even know what we're talking about here because they won't tell us.
00:41:06.400And in fact, Andrew, you have more information than the candidate himself.
00:41:10.220The party gave you more information about the reason why he was disqualified, as little
00:41:13.840information as was provided to you, than Garrett himself from when I spoke to him earlier
00:42:01.120Thank you. Just on that last point, I should say, I got into this weird, I don't know if it's a Twitter fight, because I was sort of just doing it haphazardly while I was doing other things. But a Twitter exchange, I broke my rule and I engaged with an anonymous Twitter account. So I beg forgiveness of the standards I've set for myself.
00:42:18.240But someone who was taking aim at the fact that I, in the headline of the article I wrote about this for True North, said that a pro-life candidate was disqualified.
00:42:26.820And I quoted Scott Hayward, a comment that he made earlier today, saying that he thinks he was targeted because of his pro-life beliefs.
00:42:33.200And I included at the time that the party had not given any reason, which they hadn't.
00:43:45.520But nevertheless, there is always going to be more to nomination battles.
00:43:50.360We'll cover that as the show progresses in the week ahead.
00:43:54.120Just on our closing note here, I have to end with an update to the great quest for a special rapporteur on China's interference in Canadian elections.
00:44:04.520I would like it noted that I lost because I predicted it was going to be Beijing Bev herself, Beverly McLaughlin.
00:44:11.000It is not Beijing Bev. It is David Johnston. So David Johnston, the former governor general, who was also the, by the way, the commissioner of the, what was it called? The, I forget the name of it. The Leadership Debates, was it the Leadership Debates Commission? Yeah.
00:44:27.580He was the leadership debates commissioner who made the decision to ban True North and Rebel from covering the debate.
00:44:34.600So that is the eminent Canadian who's now the special rapporteur on interference in Canadian elections by China.
00:44:41.760David Johnston did decide to accredit Xinhua, which is the Chinese state media agency, to the debate.
00:44:48.240I'm not saying that's connected to this.
00:44:49.960I just have a little bit of a bone to pick with David Johnston.
00:44:53.020But for all of you who had David Johnston in the pool, you win the fully loaded electric Volkswagen that will be rolling off the line near St. Thomas in just a couple of years time.
00:45:03.560So congratulations. You can pick it up at reception.