To the Point for the Week of November 29, 2025
To the Point for the Week of November 29, 2025
The Premier celebrates a purchase order from the US government. The federal government is about to make the same mistake twice.
ONTARIO
ICE, ICE, Baby
As is always the case this time of year, Canadians deal with more frequent and more intense snowfalls. Icy roads, icy sidewalks, just part of life in the great white north. And while southern Ontario only saw a light dusting this week, many people were more upset about a different kind of ICE. The Premier was not one of them.
The usual suspects are fuming over the United States Government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency placing a $10 million rush order for 20 Senator armoured vehicles from Roshel, a Canadian defence manufacturer based in Brampton. The Senator is no toy. It is a multi-purpose tactical vehicle built to withstand small arms fire and explosives; a serious piece of kit associated with Ontario’s growing defence sector. ICE has since said production of the vehicles “originates in the United States,” fulfilling Buy American requirements. That detail complicates the story but does not change who designed the platform, who owns the company, or where the core industrial capacity behind it resides.
ICE procurement documents show the agency needed Emergency Response Tactical Vehicles immediately and warned that delivery delays would hinder its ability to deploy what it called mission critical resources in a timely manner. While the documents do not spell it out, it is difficult to imagine these vehicles are not destined for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. That is where the outrage begins.
Certain observers and advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, accuse ERO of human rights violations. That is the fuel for critics like NDP MP Jenny Kwan and Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine Smith. Erskine Smith said he did not feel good about the sale and needed more details. Kwan argued that Canadians expect industries and government to uphold human rights domestically and internationally and that the contract raises questions about Canada’s responsibility for how its technology is used abroad.
Premier Ford had a very different reaction. He said the sale was fantastic and noted he had toured the Roshel plant and was impressed. He also acknowledged the irony of cheering on an American purchase of military vehicles linked to a Canadian firm but added that Ontario will take orders from anywhere and that he is grateful the Americans chose Roshel.
This is the part critics prefer to glide past. Their objections have less to do with the vehicle and far more to do with who signed the purchase order. If this were a Harris administration, the reaction would be quieter. And it is worth noting that the Biden administration also purchased Roshel vehicles for counter narcotics operations abroad, something that would likely bother the same critics if they looked closely. They want the benefits of a strong, high wage manufacturing sector in Canada but only when the political optics suit them.
The Premier’s position is the pragmatic one. In this economic climate, governments do not have the luxury of being choosy. With major investments in advanced manufacturing becoming increasingly competitive, and with Ontario and Ottawa spending billions to land new projects, the Premier cannot afford to pick favourites among sectors. This is an all hands on deck moment for Ontario’s industrial base. Keeping high value design, engineering and production capacity here matters more than symbolic politics, even when a Buy American requirement shifts part of the actual assembly across the border.
There is also a strategic layer that should not be ignored. The Premier’s response suggests a shift in how Ontario plans to position itself during ongoing tariff threats and economic pressure from the United States. The Roshel sale allows him to reinforce Ontario’s value to the United States not only as a trading partner but as a security asset. Minister Vic Fedeli has been travelling through the United States and Europe promoting Ontario as a defence manufacturing hub. This purchase, even with cross border production involved, fits that strategy neatly. It shows how integrated North American supply chains already are and how difficult it is to draw clean lines around where economic value begins and ends.
And the strategy is grounded. Ontario is the largest defence industrial base in Canada and accounts for roughly half of all national defence industry revenues and employment. Tens of thousands of people work directly in the sector, and more than one hundred thousand others work in related supply chains, engineering and service roles. The footprint extends across the province, with heavy land systems in London, advanced optics and sensor technologies in Burlington, and aerospace and defence technology clusters across Ottawa and Toronto.
Many Ontario firms are Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers to the United States Department of War and to the Department of Homeland Security. Ontario does not simply participate in the continental defence ecosystem. It is built into it. And the Ford government’s 2025 Fall Economic Statement makes clear that defence, aerospace and security industries are priority growth sectors tied to economic security and supply chain resilience.
Seen from that angle, Ford’s defence of the Roshel sale is not just political instinct. It is part of a broader effort to place Ontario at the centre of the North American security and trade relationship. Alberta has spent years telling Washington that it is the United States energy partner. Ontario is increasingly making the case that it is a defence partner as well.
If Ontario wants meaningful leverage the next time Washington reaches for tariffs, that argument may prove far more valuable than anything Ottawa brings to the table.
FEDERAL
The Definition of Insanity
A meeting took place in the Oval Office this week that the typical pool of Canadian pundits and politicos either missed or chose to ignore. It could be because the meeting was a stark reminder for those who revel in a certain type of anti-American punditry that while the United States economy is feeling the squeeze of tariffs, the tariffs themselves are acting as a forcing function for companies to rationally decide to relocate to the United States. Companies are faced with a simple dilemma: see your products face higher export costs or produce them in the United States.
That was the dilemma faced by Stellantis, one of the world’s largest automakers and now corporate enemy number one to the Ontario and federal governments after moving the assembly of four car models from its Brampton plant to various United States production sites. Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa thanked President Trump in the Oval Office shortly after announcing the company was investing $13 billion in its United States operations. He did not cite tariffs directly as the reason for the move, but he did point to the Trump administration’s changes to Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, lowering the required fleet average to 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031 from President Joe Biden’s 50.4 miles per gallon target. It is a target that can be reached without widespread use of electric vehicles. Filosa noted that the regulatory shift aligned with “actual market conditions” and was a significant factor in the decision to invest.
Why would this be such an irritant to many talking heads here, so much so that it barely registered in Canadian mainstream news. Because it undermines the federal government’s current approach to attracting and retaining investment. Politically motivated subsidies and chronic regulatory delays are not a replacement for a competitive business environment.
This does not mean that government support in the form of guaranteed loans or grants is ineffective. Targeted support is valuable when directed to Canadian companies with established domestic operations and expansion plans. In practice, these supports work when paired with competitive economic conditions.
This is not a new problem. Canada has spent an estimated $352 billion on corporate subsidies since 1961. The most recent example is the $52 billion commitment to build an electric vehicle manufacturing ecosystem. Despite the scale of this investment, the returns have been weak. The Macdonald Laurier Institute’s review of the EV strategy calculates a cost of roughly $4.5 million for every job created. The Parliamentary Budget Officer also projects a break even point of two decades rather than the promised five years. Major projects are already faltering. Northvolt collapsed, Honda pushed its supply chain timeline back by two years, and the market itself shows how dependent it is on public support. When consumer rebates were paused, EV sales fell from eighteen per cent to nine per cent.
The Fraser Institute’s historical analysis reaches a similar conclusion. It finds that between seventy-five and ninety-eight per cent of subsidized firms would have located in the same place without government support. To put it simply, the subsidies created no net job growth because the job creation would have happened anyway or crowded out investment that might have occurred elsewhere. The study also shows that subsidies distort markets by keeping uncompetitive firms alive and diverting public money away from sectors that could generate real productivity gains.
The government may be making the same mistake again with Nutrien, the world’s largest producer of potash and the second largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer based in Saskatchewan.
Nutrien recently announced its intent to invest $1 billion in a new export terminal in Longview, Washington, rather than exporting through the Port of Vancouver. The decision comes despite a federal investment of $380 million in 2017 to upgrade the port. An investment of that size should have improved competitiveness and efficiency. Instead, most of the money went to rail and road upgrades, not the port itself, including the elimination of a rail crossing forty kilometres away to expand bike paths.
The spending did nothing to resolve the efficiency bottlenecks flagged by Nutrien and other exporters. Worse, the Port Authority recouped the cost of the upgrades by increasing fees, making shipping even more costly.
Ottawa spent $380 million trying to make Vancouver competitive and failed. Now it is offering Nutrien access to a new $5 billion Trade Diversification Corridors Fund to improve port efficiency so the company can export from Canada. The fund is not open for applications. There are no timelines and no specifics. It is simply another promise of money.
This is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Nutrien did not leave because Canada lacks subsidies. They left because Canada lacks competitiveness. No amount of new funding will change that until the government is willing to address structural problems such as permitting delays, labour disruptions and port inefficiency instead of writing bigger cheques.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, more than sixty major corporations, including Softbank, IBM, Amazon and Toyota, have made a pilgrimage to the Oval Office, announcing a combined $2 trillion in new United States investments. It is a stark reminder that even in a tariff laden economy, the United States remains a more competitive environment for business investment than Canada.
It also underscores how ineffective and wasteful corporate subsidies have become. Until the Prime Minister and the federal government take seriously the desperate need to improve investment conditions in the country, and begin acting with urgency, the only meetings held in the Prime Minister’s Office will be ones with a blank taxpayer chequebook on the table. As long as that remains the approach, the real investment announcements will continue to be made in Washington, not Ottawa.
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