Inside a monument to a Rust Belt city’s past, the path to its brave new future was being paved.
It’s a heartening story, about the way that the transition to a low-carbon economy can bring hope to places that once prospered from carbon-intensive ones. The only way these subsidies will really be worth it is if the Volkswagen factory – along with another battery plant being built by Stellantis NV and LG Battery Solution in Windsor, which in the interest of fairness will now probably get production subsidies of its own – is successfully leveraged to build a Canadian EV supply chain that brings growth to other communities across Ontario and beyond.
Not all the successes or failures of potential offshoots will rest on governments’ shoulders. It’s incumbent on the many southwestern Ontario auto-parts manufacturers that have to this point supplied internal combustion engines to transition to EV components .