hello everyone welcome inside the CBC Newsroom I'm Natasha fata and we begin once again in Alliston Ontario automaker Honda along with the Prime Minister and Ontario's Premier have just announced a $15 billion investment it's being touted as Honda's largest investment ever in North America the company says it will buil an electric vehicle battery plant next to its existing aliston operation to further accelerate our electrification efforts in Canada Honda will take another major step forward I pleased to announce that Honda intends to establish a vertically integrated and comprehensive EV value chain in Canada uh this include
all aspect of e production from procurement of raw materials mainly for Batteries to the production of finished ABS we have extensive coverage for you now because Megan Fitzpatrick is in aliston Ontario she was on hand as that $1 15 billion plan was being unveiled we'll also check in in Ottawa where Janice McGregor has more on the political aspects of a project with major federal and political uh provincial involvement so let's begin with Megan who was there Megan what can you tell us about the specifics of this Landmark deal well as you heard In that clip
there it is a $15 billion investment by Honda uh and it involves the creation of four new facilities that will be built two of them here in Alliston sort of adjacent to their existing facilities here and then two others we don't know the locations of those yet uh but they will be somewhere in Ontario and we're expecting those details to be announced in the coming weeks and months uh so altogether what they're building is an EV assembly plan an EV battery manufacturing plant and then the two other facilities involve um this gets kind of technical
a cathode active material and precursor processing plant uh as well as a separator plant and those two facilities will be in partnership with two other companies they are Korean companies now they're expecting these new facilities to be up and running around 2028 so still a few years away before they're uh producing these EV Vehicles here um but they are ing once they're running to be making upwards of 200,000 Vehicles a year and one of their key details here are the number of jobs that they say this announcement will create in the neighborhood of 1,000 direct
jobs uh here in the Alliston area but then they also we're talking about the number of spin-off jobs that will be created even just the construction jobs alone to build these new facilities now in terms of taxpayer support and contributions to this uh major investment being made by by Honda Premier Doug Ford outlining uh that his government is prepared to provide what they call direct and indirect incentives uh now we didn't get many details on exactly what that entails but those incentives are worth about 2.5 billion doar the premier said here's a little bit more
of what he said at the announcement this is historic it's a largest Auto investment in Canadian history it's a tremendous win for Ontario for our workers for all of Canada Honda's new facilities will strengthen our electric vehicle supply chain securing and creating thousands of new paying jobs across our Province and on the federal side um an investment uh in the area of $2.5 billion as well but that is coming in the form of tax credits uh so what we heard from the number of federal ministers who were here including Philipe franois Shan the industry Minister
Christia Freeland the Deputy Prime Minister talking about the new electric vehicle supply chain investment tax credit that was part of the most recent budget uh Honda will be making use of that TRX credit we heard as well as the existing clean technology manufacturing tax credit so the officials here um very pleased to announce this deal they said it was 2 years in the making a lot of negotiations we heard some of those talks Natasha involved Premier Doug Ford having Honda Executives over to his home here in Toronto a lot of face-to-face meetings here in Ontario
but also in Japan as well we heard over the last two years to secure this uh major investment talking we're talking about this major investment I've been teasing all day uh Megan about how happy everyone is at that press conference but for the people in Alliston Ontario and for their economy just explain to us how significant this deal is for them yeah I think the mayor of Alliston was maybe one of the happiest people here because of what this means for his community now Honda has a long history already in this uh Community uh they
first opened their first plant here in the 1980s uh we heard at the news conference with 350 people since then they've grown a lot and opened two more facilities another plant as well as a a facility that produces engines and they uh employ more than 4,000 people now and we heard from the mayor uh what a major pill uh he said Honda has been in this community here's a little bit more of what he said at the news conference well I think you've heard it's probably the biggest deal that's ever been made in Canada so
to trickle down to where we are we are absolutely thrilled we are so impressed we're so grateful to the federal government The Province Hond of Canada uh the Investments they're making in the town of nud comsi in the Allison area it is absolutely it's astronomical they are securing jobs for a minimum of the next four generations of new to comes with residents that want to live and work here it's phenomenal and he did acknowledge though there might be some challenges with this growth for example for new employees that come to work here with those new
jobs where are they going to live he says they do have housing projects uh planned under construction to grow uh the housing Supply in this community so he said there will be challenges Natasha but he's confident they can uh overcome them and again with those incentives from the Prov that could include funding for infrastructure projects like New Roads uh sewer systems water that kind of thing to support both the housing projects as well as the new facilities that'll be built here in Alliston okay thanks so much Megan I want to turn now to cbc's Janice
McGregor who's joining us once again from Ottawa Janice as you've outlined for us before behind the scenes there was so much work that had to be coordinated between the federal and provincial governments and of course with Honda itself let's talk uh everyone through what needed to happen in order to get to this deal right because the federal government has made a change in tactics here when it was bidding for the first two battery plants that it brought to Ontario it was trying to keep up with match the production subsidies available to uh Volkswagen or stellantis
uh if it had located those same facilities in the US uh production subsidies uh pay out over time the more the plant produces the more taxpayers uh kick in it's kind of on a perun basis and prime minister Justin Trudeau had warned that that gets really expensive it's very difficult for Canada to keep up with the federal treasury in the US and that they might not be able to keep doing that as much as they really really really wanted to land the EV business of at least one if not more Japanese automakers uh in part
for geopolitical reasons Japan and Canada have a common goal they both want to move away from their dependency economically on China uh for a lot of strategic reasons including political and security ones and Canada has the critical minerals to make this happen but they have to get the Investments flowing uh to pull this off today with this Honda deal they have uh but they are not getting production subsidies like the other two plants are I Honda is getting tax credits that have rolled out over the last two Federal budgets and also the 2023 Ontario budget
offering up a 30% share of what they uh are purchasing in new uh equipment uh and Technology uh that is green and clean uh including uh at the mineral extraction uh level but also a a 10% credit for the cost of new buildings and you can see in these pictures the size of these sites these are going to be massive buildings um and and that tax credit uh specifically designed you might say for a very vertically integrated business like Honda where they're building an assembly plant and a battery plant and investing with Partners in sort
of the components of a battery um because they were able to check all those three boxes they qualified for for yet even more money but important to understand that money kind of is loaded out into the future first they're going to construct these sites taxpayers aren't showing up with A5 billion do novelty check here today uh this is going to be rolling out through kind of to 2034 in some of the government documents of we've seen um so so this could be something that is committing future governments to to keep on sort of backstopping it
um important to understand another aspect of the politics here too um the Ford government I had some sharp things to say about Christia freeland's last budget not necessarily happy ones didn't think it got what it wanted um but today all smiles uh between the two levels of government and what they have in common I think is a common type of voter that they're really pitching this as a success for and that would be the working class that is the voter everybody's going to be going after in the next federal election for example so listen to
how prime minister Justin Trudeau was positioning this not as something that was a success only because of the vast resources underground in Canada's North uh but also because of its people Canada has great natural resources we have clean energy we take climate action seriously we have great access to markets through our are more free trade deals than any of our partner countries we have stable Democratic institutions and strong vibrant communities those are all part of the advantages of Canada but the central part of my pitch the biggest advantage that Canada has in drawing investments from
all around the world are Canadian workers who are the best in the world thank you for making our job of bringing in investment so much easier and he wasn't the only ition to have real kind words for Canadian uh workers in all of this uh look as the day goes on we are going to see Federal ministers Fanning out across the country there is a fear I think here politically that this would be seen as something they're doing just to boost Ontario in fact Federal ministers are going to be out talking about how these tax
credits could help other parts of the country too as they build what FR Philip champagne is called an ecosystem in Canada where these critical minerals are available to the world and they're open for business for other Investments I as well Melanie Jolie especially going to be talking in Saskatchewan later today and I expect she will be positioning this as very much in Canada's national interest for reasons that go beyond the economy Janice what are we hearing from the federal conservatives about the deal well this is the other interesting part of the political story because we
have a statement out uh from conservative critics uh today I'm not going to read the whole thing but just to quote part of it they talk about how the conservatives have seen before were Justin Trudeau announces massive subsidies that are supposed to create jobs and then they mentioned something that's been a bit of a an issue in Windsor about how I there were a few dozen jobs on a job site that employs thousands of Canadians that actually uh went to uh some foreign workers who were bought in to install special uh equipment there and conservatives
saying they can't trust this latest announcement of five billion uh for another multinational corporation will be any different uh some real skepticism there as we've seen from the conservatives all along when it comes to this industrial policy prime minister Justin Trudeau uh swung back very very hard against this notion I said that ultimately voters are going to have to decide but that he thinks uh what they're saying is wrong he doesn't think that a government just sits back and prioritizes balancing the budget over all else that it needs to have a vision for where it
wants its economy to go explaining why they're betting big on this and then he said it was his pleasure to be there with a progressive conservative like Ontario Premier Doug Ford and handed the mic over to Doug Ford to also make the case for this deal take a listen the last five and a half years we went from the previous government provincial previous government chasing jobs out of this province to a tune of 300,000 to over 700,000 people bringing home better and bigger paychecks because of the policies because of the Partnerships that we've had at
all three levels of government municip I provincial and federal Partners investing in the future this is generational this is decades and decades down the road decades and decades down the road uh so we will see I but it is very interesting to see this space between the provincial conservatives in Queens Park and the federal conservatives uh in Ottawa who of course opinion polls tell us uh are are well poised for the next election the the fight uh to to convince people on this one is very much on cbc's Janice McGregor in Ottawa thank you Janice
you're welcome
