Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with the committee and for your interest in our story at General Motors Canada.
As you may be aware, GM Canada is making large investments in Canada with the reopening of our Oshawa plant and the transformation of our plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, to be Canada’s first full-scale electric vehicle manufacturing operation, starting later this year.
We have grown to more than 1,000 engineers doing R and D, software and technology testing in Canada, and significantly we recently announced a half-billion-dollar investment in Quebec with a joint venture partner. We will build a factory to process cathode active materials from critical minerals needed for our General Motors Ultium EV battery supply chain in North America.
At GM we not only depend on well-functioning supply chains; we are often the purchasing customer at the top of the chain. As you study supply chains, it is often useful to follow the money.
At GM, our supply chains are much more than containers moving parts to our factories on boats, trains and trucks. In the auto sector, supply chains are global. Our supply chains have not only been disrupted by COVID pandemics, wars, the effects of climate change, sanctions and disruptions at the Canadian border, as Brian has mentioned; they have also been impacted by the new CUSMA agreement, or USMCA; by other regulatory changes; and by changing technology. The wider shift from a goods-based economy to a digital or intangibles economy also has impacts that policy-makers need to understand.
I would like to offer a few initial thoughts.
First, it may be human nature to focus on the problems in supply chains. I think, however, that the disruptions that we faced in the past few years are actually far less remarkable than the supply chain solutions that have been found to keep things moving. Supply chains are about infrastructure, logistics and technology, but mostly they are about people solving problems.
For example, when the pandemic hit, General Motors was able to quickly leverage our expertise and our supply chain partners to quickly make ventilators at scale to save lives, and here in Canada, we quickly secured a medical manufacturing licence at the Oshawa auto plant and made 10 million medical masks for first responders across Canada. When semiconductor chips were scarce or when bridges were blocked at the border in Windsor, the solutions to keep our factories working were, frankly, remarkable.
My point is that there is amazing capability and resilience in our supply chains and the people who run them. If we work together with the private sector to learn, prepare and adjust, we can remain competitive.
A second thing I encourage you to consider is that supply chains are changing as our products and services change. General Motors is rapidly shifting to electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles. This has led us to re-examine our traditional supply chain approaches to now take a more integrated hands-on approach, including new partnerships and investments.
Part of our electric vehicle strategy has been to own our own battery technology, branded Ultium, as we innovate to reduce costs and benefit our customers. As we ramp up to make millions of electric vehicle batteries, we want to be purposeful in building a sustainable EV supply chain in North America, including critical minerals, processing and battery systems development.
This presents a generational opportunity for Canada with its distinct abundance of key minerals and our very good fortune, since the 1960s, to have our auto sector fully integrated into the North American market. As the new EV market grows, we in Canada have the opportunity to not only mine and move critical minerals; we should also process them, recycle them, and purposefully develop the technology and intellectual property all around them so that we're no longer Harold Innis’ hewers of wood and drawers of water.
As I noted, we are very excited to be back manufacturing in Quebec, where we plan to begin processing materials for EV batteries by the start of 2025.
In this regard, we welcome the budget’s $3.8-billion critical minerals plan. Now the challenge will be to think carefully not just about how to best to spend that money; we must also follow the money and the market. If Canada and the United States are to be the best of integrated EV supply chain partners, we will need to align our approaches to regulation and supply chain resilience.
Supply chains, therefore, are not just a challenge. They are a generational economic and environmental opportunity, but we will need to get the policy framework right.
Thank you.