Business
5 year payback estimate for EV battery-maker subsidies off by 15 years! – PBO
From the Fraser Institute
Ottawa’s super-charged EV obsession reaches new heights
Every week, it seems, we get another report revealing the deep thoughtlessness and fiscal recklessness of Ottawa’s electric car and electric-car battery fixation. For example, the Parliamentary Budget Officer recently asked how long it will take for the federal government to see a return on the $28.2 billion of production subsidies to EV battery-makers Stellantis and Volkswagen. The answer—about four times longer than government originally claimed.
Remember, Prime Minister Trudeau said the “full economic impact of the project will be equal to the value of government investment in less than five years.” But according to the PBO, it will take 20 years, not five years, to merely recover the money the government “invested” on behalf of Canadians. There’s no actual profit to be had at that point.
Why the discrepancy?
To figure that out, the PBO looked into the government’s modelling used to generate its “five-year” payback scenario and found that the government’s estimate included numerous assumptions about other investments (and assumed production increases) outside the direct battery-making process including assumed capability in battery-material production, which is shorthand for mining and refining of critical metals and minerals needed to make EV batteries. Of course, this is a notoriously uncertain proposition given Canada’s dismal performance in bringing new mining-related infrastructure projects with EV-battery potential to fruition.
In fact, as the PBO notes, of the total “investment package” government modelled in calculating its “payback” date, only 8.6 per cent was directly related to battery production at the Volkswagen plant. More than 90 per cent was based on assumptions about developments outside of the subsidized battery-makers purview or control.
By contract, the PBO’s modelling of the investment cost-recovery focused only on “government revenues generated by cell and module manufacturing, upon which the production subsidies are based.” And unlike the government’s analysis, the PBO analysis starts when production is actually expected to begin at the new battery plants, which is not until sometime next year.
And yet, the PBO analysis remains quite generous as it excluded “public debt charges that would be incurred to finance the production subsidies” and simply accepted estimates of production capability by Stellantis and Volkswagen.
Clearly, the Trudeau government’s EV crusade is textbook bad public policy where the government attempts to pick winners and losers in the economy, in this case dependent on fanciful scenarios of future developments in global markets far outside Canada’s control. The crusade is also out of step with developments in the largest likely market for Canadian EVs and EV products—the United States, where car buyers are increasingly rejecting EVs despite heavy subsidies and massive government spending initiatives to promote EV manufacturing.
Governments in North America have been trying to push EVs over internal combustion vehicles for 30 years now, and it has not worked. EVs have consistently failed to compete with combustion vehicles on performance and cost, and failed to win broad consumer support despite oceans of government subsidies for manufacturers and buyers alike. It’s long past time for government to take off its rose-coloured glasses on the EV transition. There are better uses for government’s time and money. Getting people’s food and housing costs down, for example, might be a good place to start.
Author:
Business
Warning Canada: China’s Economic Miracle Was Built on Mass Displacement
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again: Dimon Liu’s warning to Canadian Parliament.
Editor’s Note: The Bureau is publishing the following testimony to Canada’s House of Commons committee on International Human Rights from Dimon Liu, a China-born, Washington, D.C.-based democracy advocate who testified in Parliament on December 8, 2025, about the human cost of China’s economic rise. Submitted to The Bureau as an op-ed, Liu’s testimony argues that the Canadian government should tighten scrutiny of high-risk trade and investment, and ensure Canada’s foreign policy does not inadvertently reward coercion. Liu also warns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain leverage over Canadians and treat them as it has done to its own subjugated population—an implied message to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has pledged to engage China as a strategic partner without making that position clear to Canadians during his election campaign.
OTTAWA — It is an honor to speak before you at the Canadian Parliament.
My testimony will attempt to explain why China’s economic success is built on the backs of the largest number of displaced persons in human history.
It is estimated that these displaced individuals range between 300 to 400 million — it is equivalent to the total population of the United States being uprooted and forced to relocate. These displaced persons are invisible to the world, their sufferings unnoticed, their plights ignored.
In 1978, when economic reform began, China’s GDP was $150 billion USD.
In 2000, when China joined the WTO, it was approximately $1.2 trillion USD.
China’s current GDP is approximately $18 trillion USD.
In 2000 China’s manufacturing output was smaller than Italy’s.
Today it’s larger than America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined.
If you have ever wondered how China managed to grow so fast in such a short time, Charles Li, former CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has the answers for you.
He listed 4 reasons: 1) cheapest land, 2) cheapest labor, 3) cheapest capital, and 4) disregard of environmental costs.
“The cheapest land” because the CCP government took the land from the farmers at little to no compensation.
“The cheapest labor,” because these farmers, without land to farm, were forced to find work in urban areas at very low wages.
The communist household registration system (hukou 戶口) ties them perpetually to the rural areas. This means they are not legal residents, and cannot receive social benefits that legal urban residents are entitled. They could be evicted at any time.
One well known incident of eviction occurred in November 2017. Cai Qi, now the second most powerful man in China after Xi Jinping, was a municipal official in Beijing. He evicted tens of thousands into Beijing’s harsh winter, with only days, or just moments of notice. Cai Qi made famous a term, “low-end population” (低端人口), and exposed CCP’s contempt of rural migrants it treats as second class citizens.
These displaced migrant workers have one tradition they hold dear — it is to reunite with their families during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, making this seasonal migration of 100 to 150 million people a spectacular event. In China’s economic winter of 2025 with waves of bankruptcies and factory closures, the tide of unemployed migrant workers returning home to where there is also no work, and no land to farm, has become a worrisome event.
Historically in the last 2,000 years, social instability has caused the collapse of many ruling regimes in China.
“The cheapest capital” is acquired through predatory banking practices, and through the stock markets, first to rake in the savings of the Chinese people; and later international investments by listing opaque, and state owned enterprises in leading stock markets around the world.
“A disregard of environmental costs” is a hallmark of China’s industrialization. The land is poisoned, so is the water; and China produces one-third of all global greenhouse gases.
Chinese Communist officials often laud their system as superior. The essayist Qin Hui has written that the Chinese communist government enjoys a human rights abuse advantage. This is true. By abusing its own people so brutally, the CCP regime has created an image of success, which will prove to be a mirage.
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again.
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Business
Judge Declares Mistrial in Landmark New York PRC Foreign-Agent Case
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declared a mistrial Monday afternoon in the high-profile foreign-agent and corruption case against former New York state official Linda Sun and her husband Chris Hu, after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked on all 19 counts.
After restarting deliberations Monday morning with an alternate juror, the panel sent a note to Judge Cogan stating:
“Your honor, after extensive deliberations and redeliberations the jury remains unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors’ positions are firmly held.”
Cogan brought the jury into court and asked the foreman whether they had reached agreement on any counts. They replied that they were deadlocked on every one. The judge then declared a mistrial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Solomon immediately told the court that the government intends to retry the case “as soon as possible.” A status conference is scheduled for January 26, 2026, to determine next steps.
Jury selection began November 10, 2025, and the government called 41 witnesses to the stand, compared with eight for the defense and one rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Deliberations began on December 12, and by this afternoon the jurors had sent three notes to the court — each indicating deadlock.
As The Bureau reported in its exclusive analysis Friday, the panel’s fracture had become visible as jurors headed into a second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reached into two governors’ offices — a case asking a jury of New Yorkers to decide whether Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and Hu built a small business and luxury-property empire during the pandemic, cashing in on emergency procurement as other Americans were locked down.
Prosecutors urged jurors to accept their account of a dense web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and Hu allegedly secured many millions of dollars in business deals tied to “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing. The defense, by contrast, argued that Sun and Hu were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.
Sun and Hu face 19 charges in total, including allegations that Sun acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling counts tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.
Prosecutors have argued that the clearest money trail ran through New York’s COVID procurement scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails. In closing, Solomon told jurors that Sun’s “reward” for steering contracts was “millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes,” contending the money was routed through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.
The government has tied those claims to a broader narrative — laid out in Solomon’s summation and dissected in The Bureau’s reporting — that Sun functioned as a “trusted insider” who repurposed state access and letterhead to advance Beijing’s priorities, including by allegedly forging Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used for Chinese provincial delegations, while keeping those relationships hidden from colleagues. The defense, in turn, urged jurors to reject the government’s picture of clandestine agency and argued prosecutors had overreached by treating ordinary diaspora networking, trade promotion, and pandemic procurement as criminal conduct — insisting none of the evidence proved the “direction or control” element central to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Whether a future jury will see the same evidence as corruption and covert foreign agency or as culturally familiar commerce and politics — will now be tested again, on a new timetable, in a courtroom that has already shown just how difficult this record is to unanimously interpret.
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