So here’s a weird story on the Canada pivots but doesn’t file. Its government has been shoveling subsidies at EV manufacturers, in such haste and quantity that a number of them have been spewed back. And yet we also learn that it is shoveling money at conventional auto manufacturing. For instance “The federal government granted Ford Motor Co. $464.5 million earlier this month so it can reopen its Oakville, Ont., assembly plant and start producing Super Duty pickup trucks this year”, those being Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) trucks. And that being half a billion dollars. Odd given that supposedly EVs are the future and our government was looking 100 years ahead back when the current Finance Minister was the Industry Minister.

Also odd since half a billion is not chump change even to a government blithely spending well over half a trillion of the things (and borrowing $78 billion this year while facing nearly that much in interest charges a few years hence). So are we all going to make a living taking in one another’s subsidies? Will the government run everything, pay for everything and redistribute everything? Shall they catalyse the transformative leverage?

Apparently so; a recent Department of Finance press release tells us:

“The Government of Canada is focused on catalyzing private sector investment in Canada that enhances long-term growth potential and that will help jumpstart and sustain productivity growth, to ultimately bring in $500 billion in new private sector investment in Canada over the next five years.”

Will we own nothing, and be happy? Or is it just rushing about like a man with his cuffs of his pants ablaze trying to stamp out a brush fire? Because as Gabriel Friedman also notes in the Financial Post, they’ve thrown open the door to Chinese EV imports (speaking of governments that run everything, directly or indirectly, and lose on every sale hoping to get it back on volume), messed up trade negotiations with the US and assumed ephemeral American subsidies under the previous administration were permanent. Hapless Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, who incredibly seems even further out of her depth on this file than as Foreign Minister, told executives and academics:

“I really, really think we’ve been able to square the circle with our auto strategy, which is indeed not an easy one.”

Squaring the circle being a metaphor for things that have been proven to be impossible, not something she’d know. As she would also not know that subsidizing things when you run out of cash is impossible. Or that the essence of markets is free consumer choice meeting free price formation.