From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

GM’s Ontario EV plant was sold as a green success story. Instead it collapsed under subsidies, layoffs and unsold vans

Every age invents new names for old mistakes. In ours, they’re sold as investments. Before the Carney government unveils its November budget promising another future paid for in advance, Canadians should remember Ingersoll, Ont., one of the last places a prime minister tried to buy tomorrow.

Eager to transform the economy, in December 2022, former prime minister Justin Trudeau promised that government backing would help General Motors turn its Ingersoll plant into a beacon of green industry. “By 2025 it will be producing 50,000 electric vehicles per year,” he declared: 137 vehicles daily, six every hour. What sounded like renewal became an expensive demonstration of how progressive governments peddle rampant spending as sound strategy.

The plan began with $259 million from Ottawa and another $259 million from Ontario: over half a billion to switch from Equinox production to BrightDrop electric delivery vans. The promise was thousands of “good, middle-class jobs.”

The assembly plant employed 2,000 workers before retooling. Today, fewer than 700 remain; a two-thirds collapse. With $518 million in public funds and only 3,500 vans built in 2024, taxpayers paid $148,000 per vehicle. The subsidy works out to over half a million dollars per remaining worker. Two out of every three employees from Trudeau’s photo-op are now unemployed.

The failure was entirely predictable. Demand for EVs never met the government’s plan. Parking lots filled with unsold inventory. GM did the rational thing: slowed production, cut staff and left. The Canadian taxpayer was left to pay the bill.

This reveals the weakness of Ottawa’s industrial policy. Instead of creating conditions for enterprise, such as reliable energy, stable regulation, and moderate taxes, progressive governments spend to gain applause. They judge success by the number of jobs announced, yet those jobs vanish once the cameras leave.

Politicians keep writing cheques to industry. Each administration claims to be more strategic, yet the pattern persists. No country ever bought its way into competitiveness.

Trudeau “bet big on electric vehicles,” but betting with other people’s money isn’t vision; it’s gambling. The wager wasn’t on technology but narrative, the naive idea that moral intention could replace market reality. The result? Fewer jobs, unwanted products and claims of success that convinced no one.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has mastered the same rhetorical sleight of hand. Spending becomes “investment,” programs become “platforms.” He promises to “catalyze unprecedented investments” while announcing fiscal restraint: investing more while spending less. His $13-billion federal housing agency is billed as a future investment, though it’s immediate public spending under a moral banner.

“We can build big. Build bold. Build now,” Carney declared, promising infrastructure to “reduce our vulnerabilities.” The cadence of certainty masks the absence of limits. Announcing “investment” becomes synonymous with action itself; ambition replaces accountability.

The structure mirrors the Ingersoll case: promise vast returns from state-directed spending, redefine subsidy as vision, rely on tomorrow to conceal today’s bill. “Investment” has become the language of evasion, entitlement and false pride.

As Carney prepares his first budget, Canadians should remember what happened when their last leader tried to buy a future with lavish “investment.”

A free economy doesn’t need bribery to breathe. It requires the discipline of risk and liberty to fail without dragging a country down. Ingersoll wasn’t undone by technology but by ideological conceit. Prosperity cannot be decreed and markets cannot be commanded into obedience.

Every age invents new names for old mistakes. Ours keeps making the same ones. Entitled hubris knows no bounds.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Sylvain Charlebois

And you may never find out if Health Canada gets its way

Cloned-animal foods could soon enter Canada’s food supply with no labels identifying them as cloned and no warning to consumers—a move that risks public trust.

According to Health Canada’s own consultation documents, Ottawa intends to remove foods derived from cloned animals from its “novel foods” list, the process that requires a pre-market safety review and public disclosure. Health Canada defines “novel
foods” as products that haven’t been commonly consumed before or that use new production processes requiring extra safety checks.

From a regulatory standpoint, this looks like an efficiency measure. From a consumer-trust standpoint, it’s a miscalculation.

Health Canada argues that cloned animals and their offspring are indistinguishable from conventional ones, so they should be treated the same. The problem isn’t the science—it’s the silence. Canadians are not being told that the rules for a controversial technology are about to change. No press release, no public statement, just a quiet update on a government website most citizens will never read.

Cloning in agriculture means producing an exact genetic copy of an animal, usually for breeding purposes. The clones themselves rarely end up on dinner plates, but their offspring do, showing up in everyday products such as beef, milk or pork. The benefits are indirect: steadier production, fewer losses from disease or more uniform quality.

But consumers see no gain at checkout. Cloning is expensive and brings no visible improvement in taste, nutrition or price.
Shoppers could one day buy steak from the offspring of a cloned cow without any way of knowing, and still pay the same, if not more, for it.

Without labels identifying cloned origin, potential efficiencies stay hidden upstream. When products born from new technologies are mixed with conventional ones, consumers lose their ability to differentiate, reward innovation or make an informed choice. In the end, the industry keeps the savings while shoppers see none.

And it isn’t only shoppers left in the dark. Exporters could soon pay the price too. Canada exports billions in beef and pork annually, including to the EU. If cloned origin products enter the supply chain without labelling, Canadian exporters could face additional scrutiny or restrictions in markets where cloning is not accepted. A regulatory shortcut at home could quickly become a market barrier abroad.

This debate comes at a time when public trust in Canada’s food system is already fragile. A 2023 survey by the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity found that only 36 per cent of Canadians believe the food industry is “heading in the right direction,” and fewer than half trust government regulators to be transparent.

Inserting cloned foods quietly into the supply without disclosure would only deepen that skepticism.

This is exactly how Canada became trapped in the endless genetically modified organism (GMO) debate. Two decades ago, regulators and companies quietly introduced a complex technology without giving consumers the chance to understand it. By denying transparency, they also denied trust. The result was years of confusion, suspicion and polarization that persist today.

Transparency shouldn’t be optional in a democracy that prides itself on science based regulation. Even if the food is safe, and current evidence suggests it is, Canadians deserve to know how what they eat is produced.

The irony is that this change could have been handled responsibly. Small gestures like a brief notice, an explanatory Q&A or a commitment to review labelling once international consensus emerges would have shown respect for the public and preserved confidence in our food system.

Instead, Ottawa risks repeating an old mistake: mistaking regulatory efficiency for good governance. At a time when consumer trust in food pricing, corporate ethics and government oversight is already fragile, the last thing Canada needs is another quiet policy that feels like a secret.

Cloning may not change the look or taste of what’s on your plate, but how it gets there should still matter.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain.

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.