Ontario lost 70 thousand jobs in January and many of those loses came in the auto industry. The economic engine of Canada is sputtering and were all worse off for it.
I propose a brand new Canadian car company. Of course being a massive old school lefty I would want this project to be a Crown corporation. If the Government is going to spend billions of dollars on stimulus what better way to get results than directly putting people back to work?
Now I haven't been living in a cave, I know that no new Crown corporations are allowed under NAFTA. I know that the world has been going in exactly the opposite direction. Car companies are no longer of a certain country but are instead international corporate entities that make pieces of their product all over the world. That's globalism and the church of globalism still has many parishioners. I'm not one of them but that is an argument for another post. The Americans ignore the rules of NAFTA constantly, (Softwood lumber, The buy American first act) so I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over breaking the rules. It could be done privately though, some sort of public private partnership, say with Ballard. Again not my first choice, I know that most public, private partnerships just mean public finance, private profit but I'm not cynical enough to think it couldn't be done properly.
The car pictured above is called the Nano and is produced in India. It has a retail price of about $2500 US. I would like to see Canada's car company produce something similar. Now obviously we could not produce these cars for the same price as India and still maintain the high wages and working conditions enjoyed by Canadian Auto workers but we could maybe offer something better. A hydrogen fuel cell version perhaps. Burnaby BC's Ballard company is a world leader in this technology.
Ontario already has the infrastructure and thousands of highly trained auto sector workers ready to work or go back to work. If were gonna play globalism lets do it right. Let's put a Canadian made, non polluting small car in every driveway in China, in India, hell in America. Save the world economy and the environment all at once. Maybe it's a pipe dream, maybe it would never work, maybe it's a crazy idea but it's something. And it's got be a better idea than giving Billions of dollars to bankers who still refuse to loosen up credit.
