BATRA’S BURNING QUESTIONS: Honda choosing to expand in the U.S. - not Canada

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]One of the world's largest automakers has abandoned its plans to expand to EVs in Canada, but is still continuing its expansion in the United States. Honda has recently said they will not expand in all and instead will carry on with looking at hybrids and EVs as the market for electric vehicles is in the tank.

[00:00:25]Hello everyone, I'm Adrien Bacher. With me are Lorie Goldstein and Brian Lily. I want to be very clear, Brian, that in spite of the pro province of Ontario and the federal government announcing that there will be financial support for Honda to do the expansion, no money has flowed to dispel that notion. No taxpayers money has actually flowed. But the elbows up crowd would like us to think that this is all because of Donald Trump's tariffs when in fact the reality is quite the opposite. Brian, >> yeah, thanks for making me defend Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney, Adrien, but uh yeah, >> has to happen now and then.

[00:01:03]>> Okay, I'm gonna swim against two narratives here. A narrative from the left and a narrative from the right. The narrative from the left is Honda's pulling out because of Donald Trump's tariffs. Not true. And the narrative from the right is we gave them $5 billion and they walked away with it.

[00:01:20]Neither one of those is true. Look, the the Honda deals, like all the other ones, were performance-based tax credits. You produce, you get a tax break. Um, it this was not the old style, hey, uh, we want to subsidize you. Let let us give you billions and then you just do what you want with it.

[00:01:38]It was if you produce, if you hire, you get a tax break. Okay, so that's pushing back against the the false narrative from the right. Um the false narrative from the left is this is all due to Donald Trump's tariff. No, it is due to Donald Trump in in large part, but not because of his uh tariff situation. It's because he got rid of the American EV mandates. See, here's Trump talking about this back in June 2025 when he signed an order that rescended.

[00:02:12]So, California had this uh ability given to them that they could set their own emission standards, and that was given to them by the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal agency. Trump rescended that. And here's what he was saying back then.

[00:02:26]>> Good. It doesn't work. And I'm all for electric. If you want to buy electric, you can buy electric. Cars are great. If you buy the right ones, your cars are great. and uh you should be given the option. Buy the electric car, buy a gasoline powered car, buy a hybrid.

[00:02:44]>> So, I agree with Trump. It should be your choice. I have no problem with EVs and there are times when they make great sense and there's times when they make no sense, but consumers should have the choice. Here's the thing. When consumers are not given great incentives to buy EVs, they don't. Um, the Americans got rid of their $7,500 federal uh, subsidy for EVs in September of 2025. In the leadup to that, you can watch the chart. It the the sales of EVs go up and up and up and they hit 18% of all new cars sold and then they plummet down to about 6%. In Canada, we got up to about 10 11% of all new EVs sold and then subsidies went away in early 2025 and EV sales plummeted to about 5%.

[00:03:36]The Americans do something different and I'll be very quick on this. They break out luxury versus the others. Luxury EV sales are not hindered by this. If you're a rich guy that wants an EV, you're going to buy one. But everybody else, they're not buying EVs because they're too expensive.

[00:03:55]>> So, in the shadow of this, Lori, we have the Carne Liberal government signing a deal with China to then flood Canada's market with Chinese EVs. Uh, and yet we can see that the consumer desire for them is is plummeting. So, I I'm I'm trying to make some sense out of out of uh the Carne Liberals, you know, plowing ahead with EV mandates, yet we're seeing manufacturers that aren't Chinese manufacturers saying, "Hey, we're looking more at the hybrid model as opposed to just straight EVs."

[00:04:30]>> Justin Trudeau two years ago did a a video on on X where he talked about specifically the Honda plant. And what he said was, "We in Canada are we bet on the EV industry and they're betting on us." No, they're not. They're bailing.

[00:04:45]And the simple thing here is, you know, you can go all over the place. People aren't buying them in Canada and the United States, as Brian said, unless they're subsidized, right? And we've already put out nine billion almost 9 billion in subsidies provincial. And that is money that all taxpayers paid for to give basically higher income earners um help when they buy EVs. So it it really comes down to the government tried to bet on EVs and EVs are bust.

[00:05:16]Now the irony is when the industry talks about going hybrid, right? What they're talking about is is cars that go on a combination of um of gas and electricity. but there's no plug-in.

[00:05:31]Those aren't the ones they're subsidizing. In other words, what what buyers want and there's been studies on this are the hybrids where and they make a lot of sense. They use gas power and they use electricity and their emissions are much lower than conventional um uh cars, right? But we're not subsidizing those, the ones that people actually want to buy. We're subsidizing EVs, totally electric, which are the most um unpopular, and plug-in hybrids, which are okay, they have a combination, but you still got to plug them in. Now, and why don't people want to buy them here?

[00:06:08]Well, a they're more expensive than a comparable traditional. They have limited range. Um the range goes down when it's cold. Um so obviously, and also, you know, you need gas. I mean, even if it's a two bucks a liter, you can go to any gas station anywhere in the country, you're going to get gas. There aren't enough charging stations. If if you're trying to go across the country, you've got to map out where you're going to go, how much time you're going to have to spend to recharge, right? If you want one for yourself, you got to add in a charger at home. So it's it's it's just a and while look while um we're protected from most of the cost increase look at what's done the government committed over $50 billion to something that's a bust.

[00:06:58]Provincial governments and municipalities based their economies on okay we're going to get we're going to get this huge plant. We're going to get a thousand more employees. Our tax base is going to increase. We can start buying stuff that we couldn't afford. And now that's all gone. So, so the whole thing of this disaster, it goes right down the chain, uh, right down to the thousand workers who weren't going to get jobs at at Honda that they thought they were going to get. Um, and we don't seem to talk enough about those things. What this does to ordinary people, you're relying on, you're trying to hang on.

[00:07:32]You know, the cost of living's exploded, but this plant's if I can just make it for a couple more years, right? I can I can and and then it's all gone. And the way they publicized these things at the beginning like in one of them they said we're going to get back this investment in five years. The parliamentary budget officer looks at it and goes no actually it's going to be two decades. Uh Jack men figured out in some of these ones well what's the cost per job? If you look at what the government says it's going to commit and how many jobs are going to create it. He goes, "It costs about four million per job."

[00:08:12]This whole thing was just a disaster.

[00:08:15]It's it's government's doing the same thing over and over again. They think they can pick winners in the marketplace. They can't.

[00:08:22]>> And then juxtapose that, Brian, with this idea that we are going to have the Canadian market flooded with what Doug Ford River Ontario called the Chinese spy vehicles.

[00:08:33]>> Yeah.

[00:08:33]>> Up to the tune of nearly 49,000.

[00:08:37]And yet to what Lori was just talking about is um you know Canadian auto workers not getting uh jobs, not you know getting more ships because there's no expansion of of say the Honda plant for example. So I I I I'm I'm one I'm I'm I'm troubled by the Carney government's uh focus on allowing that deal with China to come into the market when we can clearly see that there is no business case for that amount of EVs to come into Canada.

[00:09:13]>> So let's point out first off that we make about a third of the cars that we made roughly 25 years ago. We used to make about three million cars a year. We make just over a million cars a year. Um that's problematic. We have lost jobs in on that front. Um we have lost production on that front. And you know, for all Donald Trump's uh mistakes in saying that, uh cada took our jobs. Uh you know, really he means Mexico. And that's where our auto manufacturing went as well was to Mexico because it was lower cost. now we're going to be exporting it out to China. That makes no sense. Uh we, you know, for everyone that's upset, uh and I say this to you, Lori, I say this to you, Adrian, I say this to all the viewers and the readers.

[00:10:01]If you're upset about the fact that we even had to propose these weird financial subsidies, structures, tax credits to attract EV uh investment into Canada. blame Joe Biden because everything that the federal and provincial governments did was to offset what Joe Biden did in the inflation reduction act. And you know the difference between Joe Biden and the Democrats coming for our auto industry and Donald Trump coming for our auto industry is that Donald Trump comes at you screaming saying he's going to take it and Joe Biden gives you a hug while he slips the knife in between your ribs.

[00:10:44]That's the only difference. They both have come for our auto industries and the reaction of the Trudeau government, which I was always loathed to support.

[00:10:54]The reaction of the Trudeau government and the Ford government was to say we've got to counter that. And that's why they came up with these uh programs which mimic them. I only wish that Donald Trump would get rid of and completely abolish the inflation reduction act. And the reason for that is as soon as that disappears any production tax credits or any other you know money going to these companies disappears bringing in for you say 49,000 it starts at 49,000 and goes up from there.

[00:11:25]>> Yeah.

[00:11:26]>> You look at what happened in Brazil.

[00:11:29]Brazil a lot of Canadians are going to know what what does Brazil have to do with car making? They don't make cars.

[00:11:34]They make as many cars now as we used to 25 years ago. about 3 million but they are being decimated by the uh introduction of Chinese cheap Chinese EVs which are heavily subsidized. This is a bad policy all around and they are spy cars. Look, um, in Britain, if you work for the Ministry of Defense or defense contractors, you can't bring your Chinese EV to work. I if you are Israel had signed contracts for their senior officers to be given Chinese EVs and they got rid of them. Why? Because the the information on where everyone was going, what was happening was being transferred back to China. the the cars, if you haven't been in them, they have cameras and sensors everywhere, and all that information is transmitted back to China.

[00:12:30]You can't have that going on. Um, and and so bringing that into this country, cars that won't even be allowed to cross the Canada US border, I don't get it.

[00:12:41]>> So, what will be the future of Canada's auto sector as it takes yet another hit?

[00:12:47]Let us know what you think in the comments below. Like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel and go to the toronto sun.com. You'll find commentary and coverage there you will not find anywhere else.