Governments across the Western world have been unreasonably enthusiastic about electric vehicles for years. But nowhere more so than Canada, where politicians have hurled tens of billions of dollars in subsidies into manufacturers of the cars, their batteries and so forth, rushing from photo op to photo op while assuring us that in some mysterious way they knew far better than investors and corporate managers what people would actually want to buy in five, 10 or 15 years. It’s a delusion to which elected officials and bureaucrats frequently succumb, strangely in light of the limited or disastrous business experience most of them bring to government, and eventually it results in disaster not dividends. And this one was especially bad; as Lorne Gunter noted last month, “In the past six years, the federal government alone has spent or committed to spend over $50 billion on electric vehicle (EV) production and sales. Provincial governments (mostly Ontario and Quebec) have committed another $20 billion-plus.” Which brings us to the looming bankruptcy of Northvolt which … oops, make that the actual bankruptcy of Northvolt despite being the wave of the future in the minds of politicians now underwater in the polls who have saddled Canada with a national debt north of $1 trillion. As the wise old saying routinely not repeated in the corridors of power has it, governments can’t pick winners but losers sure can pick governments. And Canada’s was especially ripe for the plucking.

As Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan says in Magnum Force, “a man’s gotta know his limitations”. But in politics it’s either not true or they don’t notice the importance of it. For instance Parker Gallant describes the breathless enthusiasm of the mayor of Calgary, Alberta’s largest city, and Canada’s federal ministers of intergovernmental affairs and of natural resources last year in pouring very nearly half a billion dollars into “up to 259 new zero-emission battery electric buses and charging stations” and so on blah blah blah green economy good jobs. Wanna bet?

You lose. The number of buses they’re hoping for is now down to 180 “due to the rising cost per vehicle” of all things once the subsidies start pouring in. They’re now projected at $1.7 million each versus $800,000 for a diesel bus. Plus if you buy a diesel bus you get a working bus whereas here you get… hype and delays. Partly because the initial supplier, of all things, went bankrupt.

Which seems to be a “thing” in this industry as Quebec’s Lion Electric contemplates selling itself in a scramble for cash after its shares fell from $24 in mid-2021 to… oh dear… 46 cents. (No prize for guessing that it got nearly $50 million in subsidies from the Canadian government, or that Northvolt got $2.7 billion from it and the Quebec provincial one.) Not to mention “About 125,000 Enel EV chargers are in limbo. Customers hope a buyer of its shuttered North American charging business will do the hard work of making things right.” Almost exactly as if these things were a bad investment even when they don’t literally flame out.

Alberta’s capital city of Edmonton, which actually did get 40 expensive buses that have proved disappointing and is trying to build a half-billion-dollar “zero emissions” garage, whatever that is, purchased its buses from, um, a company “now going through bankruptcy proceedings” so good luck getting a refund because they totally didn’t get the promised 328 km/charge. Oh, and from southeast of there we hear from AP that “Progress on New York City school bus fleet electrification is slow, advocates say”. Aka they have 43 cool buses out of 10,000 clunky old smelly ones. In response to which one such activist, “Lonnie Portis, policy manager for West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT for Environmental Justice)” says:

“It comes down to what the vendors are able to do and the challenges they might be facing. We really need to get a better understanding of what challenges might exist for different bus operators.”

Yeah. And maybe you should have thought of it sooner.

The city of Calgary, on springing into committee, did manage to get a request for proposals out the door by September 2024, with possible delivery in uh 2026, which if all goes well and it won’t will apparently reduce CO2 emissions by 13,000 tonnes a year (out of an estimated national total of around 670 million tonnes) which won’t change the weather or anything else except the government balance sheet.

Speaking of which, the city of Toronto seems to have found ways to spend over $2 million of other people’s money per electric bus. But not to get the buses. Just the press releases and the financial obligations.

In this fast-motion bus wreck, we note a warning from the Globe & Mail way back on November 18, when Northvolt was still sticking up out of the water a bit, that:

“Several Canadian pension funds have sizable financial exposure in the event of a bankruptcy filing by Northvolt AB, the Swedish battery maker that is burning through cash as growth in demand for electric vehicles lags expectations. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Investment Management Corp. of Ontario (IMCO), Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec participated in US$2.3-billion in convertible debt financings for Stockholm-based Northvolt, joining major automakers and financial institutions to support the European battery hope as its future looked bright. OMERS also bought an undisclosed number of Northvolt shares in 2021.”

Now the Globe was a bit delicate, being part of Canada’s Establishment aka “Laurentian elite”. But if you look closely these “Canadian pension funds” are in fact all public-sector. Even IMCO which boasts that “We are the only investment management organization purpose-built to serve Ontario’s public sector.” By putting people’s hard-filched retirement savings into failed trendy green projects, evidently. And the exposure is serious, possibly $3 billion, rather a lot to pay to look cool or follow a trend.

It’s curious how compelling these modern equivalents of the tulip craze look to governments when all the cool kids are pouring in money, and how stupid they look once the bubble has burst. Prime Minister Trudeau boasted that vast state subsidies for Northvolt were “win-win-win – for workers, for communities, and for the environment”. The question how would he know did not seem to detain him. It should have.

In fact the Wall Street Journal just ran a piece headlined “The Withering Dream of a Cheap American Electric Car” which pretty much says it all. But um if that dream is withering, where are all the sales coming from?

D’oh. Especially since as Dan McTeague of Canadians for Affordable Energy warns, Donald Trump’s skepticism about climate change generally and electric vehicle subsidies in particular makes the Canadian Liberal federal government and its supposedly partisan adversary Ontario Progressive Conservative government’s smugly visionary bet with our cash on EVs look exceptionally short-sighted:

“Canada’s EV subsidies were pitched as an ‘investment’ in an evolving auto market, but that assumes that those pre-existing lines of trade will remain essentially unchanged. If American EV demand collapses, or significantly contracts without mandates or tax incentives, we’ll be up the river without a paddle.”

Still, if there’s a sucker born every minute globally, the rate seems higher in government. Thus Canary Media tells us as if it were good news that:

“Moment Energy plans to mass-produce grid storage from used EV batteries/ The Canadian startup repackages electric-vehicle batteries for commercial customers. Now it’s got $20 million from the DOE to build its first gigafactory in Texas.”

Not from customers. From a government department. And there’s more where that came from.

For instance another Canary Media item says:

“The emerging world of electrified air travel has experienced big highs and lows in the past few days. Late last week, the Vermont-based startup Beta Technologies announced that it landed $318 million in Series C equity capital to produce and commercialize its all-electric aircraft and battery charging systems. The new investment, which was led by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, brings Beta’s total funding to more than $1 billion in equity capital. Meanwhile, German air-taxi startup Lilium may be grounded for good. On Monday, the company said it had failed to secure new funding to continue its operations and would file for insolvency ‘soon,’ Reuters reported. Lilium, which has an office in Florida, debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2021 through a SPAC deal initially valued at $3.3 billion.”

Say, would that “sovereign wealth fund” by any chance be a state entity? Though we take grim satisfaction in noting that the German government actually refused to bail Lilium out. Just maybe they’ve had enough of the Energiewende and the prosperity it so stunningly failed to deliver.

Hope springs eternal. Yet another Canary Media piece gushes that:

“New York City utility Con Edison will need to be able to charge about 10,000 electric school buses on its constrained power grid within the next 10 years or so. A $9 million pilot project in Brooklyn could help it figure out how to do that.”

Yeah. Unless it doesn’t. But listen, guys and gals: I wouldn’t worry about 10,000 electric school buses appearing in New York City this decade, or even after, if I were you.

Meanwhile Inside Climate News gushes that:

“Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD is charging across Mexico. The company has opened dozens of dealerships, boosted sales, and announced plans to open a factory that will build 150,000 EVs per year. BYD’s expansion is a vivid demonstration of how China has positioned itself to dominate the EV future. What does it mean for the United States?”

Ideally, we say, that it won’t emulate a Communist dictatorship’s economic strategy. Especially since the Wall Street Journal wrote in early November that:

“Talk about an October surprise for Michigan auto workers. Ford Motor Co. on Thursday said it will idle production of its F-150 Lightning electric truck in Dearborn from mid-November through the end of the year. Ford’s production stoppage follows a string of ominous announcements, starting in October 2023 when it announced plans to lay off about 700 workers who build the Lightning. In the spring Ford said it would eliminate two of three work crews at the Dearborn plant. In August it scrapped a planned electric SUV.”

But we’re weird that way. Possibly because we live in Canada where the bad news on EVs pours in faster than we can pour it out again.