Opinion Martin Regg Cohn: Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau got squeezed in a multibillion-dollar bidding war they couldn’t afford to lose
Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau didn’t just come together because it was smart politics or sage economics. For there is no great glory in good government — not when critics accuse you of giving away the store.They couldn’t risk Stellantis pulling up stakes — and pulling the rug out from the rest of the auto sector.
It was always going to be a slippery slope, yet this is not a race to the bottom. It’s a competition to see who will stand their ground in a North American bidding that requires nerves of steel for batteries of lithium. Which is why Unifor, which represents auto industry workers, lavished praise on two politicians from two different parties it doesn’t always love.
Economists like to call them “tax expenditures,” rather than tax breaks or credits. There is an undeniable “opportunity cost,” in economic parlance, because those foregone revenues will have to be made up elsewhere — hence more tax breaks for carmakers means less money for hospitals. Purity has its price. The more germane question is whether the subsidies are saving jobs and securing future tax revenues, or merely rewarding investments that would have come our way anyway.
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