Scott Stinson: Doug Ford’s love affair with corporate subsidies shows no sign of waning

Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to reporters outside his office at Queen's Park in Toronto, on Friday, September 25, 2026. Photo by Peter Power/Postmedia News

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Ministers with the Ontario government lined up on Friday to declare that an announcement from a Volkswagen subsidiary that it was delaying the opening of an EV battery plant in St. Thomas by two years was, in fact, good news. Great news, even.

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“To me, it’s a great news story,” said Vic Fedeli, the minister for Economic Development, citing the fact that PowerCo now has a contract to begin building the facility, supported by at least $10 billion in subsidies from all levels of government, that it hopes will be ready by 2029.

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Premier Doug Ford said at Queen’s Park that the delay was a sign of confidence in Ontario’s economy despite uncertain times.

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Both men sounded heartened that Volkswagen hadn’t pulled the plug on the project entirely, which given developments elsewhere in the industry was fair enough. General Motors and Honda pulled out of major EV commitments in the province last year, while Stellantis has said it plans to sell an idled Brampton plant after shifting Jeep production to the United States.

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Fedeli went on to say that the estimated $400 million that the Ontario government has given to automakers in just the past year is money well spent because it is only handed out when certain milestones regarding hiring or expenditures are met.

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Which leads to a question: What would the Vic Fedeli of, say, 2014, have thought of that argument? Fedeli was the finance critic when Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives were in opposition at the time. Hudak told anyone who would listen that corporate subsidies were a mug’s game. He had a whole spiel about it, insisting that “government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers” and that companies were taking advantage of handouts to make investment decisions that they were going to make anyway. “Let the markets decide” was another Hudak staple.

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Hudak was hardly on an island with this argument. A massive government spending review led by economist Don Drummond in 2012, ordered by former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty, found that business subsidies were often “an inefficient use of public resources” with outcomes that were “vague or difficult to measure.”

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Two years later, the provincial auditor-general found that despite having spent more than $1.4 billion on corporate subsidies over a decade, the Ontario government had “no information on whether jobs created or retained are long-lasting,” while noting that the majority of the money went to big business.

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The Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne promptly ignored those worries and increased business subsidies significantly, such that they were over $2 billion annually by 2014. The opposition PCs had all kinds of criticism for that, labelling it “crony capitalism” and “corporate welfare” and other such pithy terms.

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But once the PCs came to power under Ford, they found they couldn’t get enough of it. An analysis from the Montreal Economic Institute published in July found the Ford government now subsidizes private business by more than $11 billion annually. Public cash goes out the door to corporations in huge chunks: $259 million for General Motors in 2022, $2.5 billion for Honda in 2024, and more than $5 billion to Stellantis-LG Energy Solutions in 2023.