We don't need yet another B2B SaaS that won't generate more than a couple hundred jobs in its lifetime, but we need EV battery manufacturers to continue to allow the Canadian automotive manufacturing hub in Southern Ontario to exist otherwise Thiusands of jobs are lost as well as to allow for backup energy storage facilities to be built as nations begin migrating to renewable energy, which has production peaks

I didn't say fund B2B SaaS instead, I said just don't do corporate welfare. B2B SaaS gets R&D credits here which doesn't make sense either.

That "corporate welfare" helps employ 136,000 Ontarians as well as maintaining an robust industrial base that can expand into newer critical technologies such as Battery Tech (as is clearly seen in the article above).

The libertarian "free market" myth is effectively dead -- welcome to the age of industrial policy.

Governments understand that their taxes are barriers to the jobs and goods they want so they are willing to selectively get out of the way.

It's not a free market, but libertarian treatment for specific companies that they want to succeed.

In this case, nobody wants to build batteries in Canada if the government takes 25% of any profits, so the government has to reduce their take if they want battery factories

> The political staffer took the instructions from two developers in envelopes handed to him at a September, 2022 dinner hosted by BILD, the principal lobby group for the residential building industry.

This is not conjecture, but rather the determination of a newly released report from the province’s auditor general.[1]

This is also the same province that leased a major highway, the 150km-long 407, to a private corporation for 99 years for just $3b in 1999 (in a deal facilitated again by the Progressive Conservatives). It is estimated this highway is worth over $30 billion dollars today.[2]

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Now, the Stellaris and Volkswagen deals are a federal/provincial partnership, but my goal here was to highlight that Ontario has a history of self-owns.

[1] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ontario-auditor-general-unwraps-do...

[2] https://www.thespec.com/news/canada/birth-of-a-fiasco-how-th...

You can't pay workers for 10 years with a tax exemption alone. You still have to make money selling product.

Similarly, those workers won't have income tax exemptions

That's 10% of Canada's entire GDP

The profits might not go to the workers, but whatever they will be getting paid to work at a battery Factory is more than zero for not working. If a battery Factory doesn't pay more than the next best job, they won't have any employees

Seems unfair - why not give workers tax exemption instead, let the companies pay there way. You will attact the best talent, or so the theory goes!

However, the general Canadian public would flip their s** some people were given income tax deductions based on their job while they weren't.

It goes back to 2003, the ontario liberals got into power and implemented manufacturing taxes against the autoplants. Ontario shed about 800,000 manufacturing jobs over this idiotic move.

But what ended up happening is 2 fold, they outsourced their assembly to live external plants. Avoiding these new taxes but also greatly reducing the number of employees needed for the main plant itself. So you are hiding the thousands of other workers.

The final major change is that the ontario government eventually had to come in and effectively give them all those taxes right back in subsidies. Why stay?

This is also why the Ontario Liberals basically dont exist anymore. They crushed Ontario pretty badly.