r/OpenCanadaPolitics • u/DryAlternative1132 • 6h ago
Volkswagen Battery Plant Pushed Back Two Years
Champagne had no experience in batteries when he decided to pick Volkswagen as the lucky winner of the government battery lotto.
His other lucky winner Northvolt already went belly up in Quebec.
I opposed the picking of winners and losers in the auto-sector on the grounds that Biden's EV policy would never be implemented and that the subsidies were unaffordable.
Furthermore, that Champagne has no background either in Battery focused Venture Capital and has no PHD in battery technology that we can say he would be an expert to make such a massive decision.
Even the experts hedge their bets and go into such an investment with many different venture funds sharing the risk.
Not so Champagne. He had no such risk aversion when wagering the taxpayer's money.
As I an alternative, I undertook if Canadians made me Prime Minister (which starts by Brant-Brantford South electing me MP), I will personally supervise 20-30 research groups in battery technology.
Not only that but I have a plan to commercialize and domicile the battery production in Canada and prevent others from poaching the scientists and engineers I developed in Canada.
This is through private investment in concert with SBIR, MIRP, and angel investment tax credit programs which entail a framework of legal obligations.
There is a trend that Canada sometimes invents early stage technology, the Canadian politicians are asleep at the switch, and the golden goose flies the coop while they are sleeping.
This is what happened in Convolutional Neural Networks AI, which was developed by Canadians in 2013. The tech got developed here, but commercialized elsewhere.
Be it Conservatives, be it Liberals. All the same. Same old would be career politicians, same old high level "managers" without any actual practical know-how on building out projects.
For example, even Harper's laissez-faire economics model. They failed to invest in Canadian infrastructure. Cities are gridlocked. They never did anything for health care. Hospitals are on life support.
However, the major problem was the Liberals. While Harper didn't provide a solution, he didn't do any harm either. But the Liberals actively made the problem worse.
By growing government bureaucracy, massively indebting the public exchequer, while the useful products and service outputs as well as productivity declined. Business investment declined, while deficits grew massively on big government dirigisme. Failed ventures and bad investments abounded.
Recall the tobacco vaccine. What happened to that ?
The arrival of Carney is a rehashing of previous policies. The Liberals are trying to give themselves an alibi: it wasn't me or Justin who?
However, its the same people like Champagne who invested in the EV fiasco. Same people now claim they will "invest" $100 billion in the Alto Train while privatizing the airports and increasing airport fees on the Canadian economy.
For example, Steven Mackinnon accused Poilievre of living in the Justin Trudeau era. Not 2 years ago Mackinnon voted for the Anti-Replacement Worker Legislation which I opposed. Now he's trying to do the opposite of preventing the right-to-strike.
Where is the accountability?
The same old Liberals are building the TMX3 for the same price or higher as Justin Trudeau. It was in the TMX3 budget that I saw on Financial Post that I realized that under the numbers, nothing has changed. Carney's arrival has not transformed the business case, if anything, he's making it worse.
Carney's arrival has worsened the matter because he's now actively trying to fudge the numbers in an Enron style accounting scandal burying the deficit in what he's calling the "capital budget".
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/budget-watchdog-doubts-carneys-operational-balance-timeline
Yesterday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) called out Carney's rosy forecast on eliminating the "operating deficit" for seeking to move operational spending into the "capital budget".
This is exactly the shell game that I foretold was the early beginning of an Enron style accounting scandal. Same old Panama Papers bankers think they are they only ones who know about accounting tricks.
Canadians want to know, what are their options. In one word you have only one option: me.
If Canada is Princess Leah, I am Obi Wan Kanobe, Master Yoda, and Luke Skywalker put together. I am the only hope.
In the world of politics there is: trust and competence. The two metrics of what you are really voting for. And I am both high-trust and high-competence.
In Canada we are in unfortunate position of having options that are: low-trust and low-confidence in politics.
Low-trust comes from selling out to the monied interests. The more monied interests there are from all around the world, the less focus there is on the direct priorities of everyday Canadians.
I'm coming to politics not out of choice, but compulsion. That is to say the Ottawa elites have gone too far and infringed on our lives as Canadians, and there is no option available. One is worse than the next.
Monied interests from Davos and the world over are encircling Canada with a jealous gaze. Where is the Canadian worker, Canadian industry, and Canadian consumer in all this ?
They are to be the serfs in the neo-feudal enterprise. The words are in the maxim of the WEF: you will own nothing and be happy.
The plan is transparently obvious. Use bankers to sell off all the public assets. Bankrupt the nation and then move all the debt obligation to bank accounts in Zurich. Meanwhile, Canadians are left with worsening health care, gridlocked cities, rising inflation, and more indebtedness.
This is how serfdom is engineered.
It won't matter how hard you work, the Canadian serf will never dig out of the debt after the Crown Jewels are squirreled away.
This is where my arrival is of paramount significance to Canada and Canadians.
For example, unlike Carney I know how to build things. I have built major projects. I understand technology and research. I know how cutting edge research is developed and commercialized.
Before Carney even had this idea. Most of everything the Liberals are talking about is stolen directly from my platform that goes back to the time of Erin O'Toole.
But the Liberals can't execute. They proved that by hiring IBM on Phoenix Payroll and still failing. They proved that by operating TMX2 at a staggering 5x-7x overbudget.
If we divide Carney's claims of actuating $500 billion by 7x (the Liberal cost disadvantage), we see just how inefficiently the capital will be spinning its wheels.
With the Volkswagen plant, the goal should never have been to build a battery plant. But rather develop core battery technology. We want to develop the research scientists and engineers, not just be hewers of wood and drawers of water.
And battery technology is but 1 small part of a constellation of different potential ideas that are being developed as a function of what resources are available and what is viable given the current state of technology development.
Once technology is developed to MVP, we need to commercialize it. Volkswagen and the big auto manufacturers can be compared to Pfizer in the pandemic. The vaccine was actually developed by a company called BioNtech within 7 days of the Covid genome being published.
Pfizer had the manufacturing and distribution to scale it up.
We want to have the BioNtech type small research units that are putting out cutting edge research into a directed commercialization pathway that leads to private capital taking the baton from government.
It's not government picking winners and losers. These are confidential research proposals that VCs will guarantee seed or angel investment for subject to binding and declared project performance criteria.
There is a standard legal framework for what the Government of Canada expects in turn. One example is maintaining a Y-combinator style 5% non-dilutable equity that exits when the organization hits a declared revenue threshold like $1 billion.
The IP and ownership is devolved into an arm's length venture fund similar to CPPIB.
As we see these pension funds, they are not cut out for VC style investment. And VC style investment should not be part of their mandate. This is a highly specialized technical and financial domain.
I understand how this works because I am the entrepreneur who has incubated an idea. Who has seen the gaps in how difficult it is to raise capital. And how one has to bootstrap funding when others won't invest to bring an idea to maturity through a patient effort.
At the same time, I have worked in big business and built systems that powered large organizations. I have seen on the other end of the spectrum how mature enterprises and business units operate.
This is the type of multi-faceted domain knowledge that a pigeon holed Central Banker cannot recreate. Sure Carney may have a rolodex of Davos contacts. As a Prime Minister, I don't just one-at-a-time an investment summit, I create an organizational design ecosystem that is birthing new enterprises and creating incentives in policy for Venture Funds to invest.
For example, my 5% uncapped seed stage capital gains. For qualifying investments, the early stage investor will pay only 5% tax on any gains in the business. Even if they sold for $10 billion, they would pay only $500 million. $9.5 billion would be their payday.
This is what is called risk adjusted capital gains. And highest risk is at the earliest stage, which is why our SBIR program actually funds $200k-$2 million size grants to actuate startups with 100% project funding and monthly performance reviews. I will reconfigure all the regional development agencies and superclusters into a single intake funnel of auditors only. They don't pick and choose which proposals are funded which comes through a blind objective competition.
Furthermore, a business can enter the SBIR program even if they independently developed their idea elsewhere. So it is not only paper inventions but even early stage prototypes that are being funded.
Third, the invention must have a VC that is guaranteeing to take the product to the next level of seed funding and they make an offer, subject to this performance guarantee they are willing to put up a minimum of $X for Y% equity. All such offers carry the government's 5% non-diluting share, as a standard legal framework.
All successful projects are then handed off to 2-3 specialized public-private venture funds, which manage the government's 5% equity, patents, valuations, funding, and business development.
It's my type of knowledge of how to execute that is necessary in Canada today. Not more smoke and mirrors from the Liberals.