Ontario’s auto industry getting $500M boost from governments to build electric vehicles, pickups – by Rob Ferguson (Toronto Star – April 5, 2022)

https://www.thestar.com/

Ontario’s auto industry is getting another boost as governments pour $500 million into helping General Motors set up Canada’s first full-scale electric vehicle production in Ingersoll and a third shift making pickup trucks in Oshawa.

The extra work for Oshawa will bring the total number of jobs at the plant to 2,600 with 600 new hires. There is no firm commitment to build electric vehicles there yet, although it will be the only GM factory in North America with the capacity to build both light- and heavy-duty pickups.

Ontario and the federal government are each giving up to $259 million toward the $2 billion project announced Monday, two weeks after automaker Stellantis — parent company of Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep — revealed it would break ground on a massive $5 billion electric vehicle battery factory in Windsor with hundreds of millions in government aid.

The key investments come less than two months before Ontario’s June 2 election, at a time when industry observers had been worried the country’s automotive heartland was being left behind in the growing rush to electric vehicles.

For the rest of this article: https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2022/04/04/ontarios-auto-industry-getting-500m-boost-from-governments-to-build-electric-vehicles-pickups.html