Dan Knight

After betting taxpayer billions on a green-industry deal that collapsed under U.S. tariffs, MPs move to expose what Ottawa promised Stellantis and what Canadians actually got for the money.

Parliament just blew the lid off one of the biggest corporate giveaways in Canadian history.

For years, Ottawa and Queen’s Park have bragged about “historic investments” in green manufacturing. What they didn’t say is that $15 billion of your money went to Stellantis, the Dutch auto conglomerate behind Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram, only for the company to announce it’s cutting 3,000 jobs in Brampton and shipping them south to the United States.

That betrayal is what triggered a heated meeting of the House of Commons Government Operations Committee on October 21. What started as routine procedure turned into a full-scale reckoning over how billions were handed to a foreign corporation with almost no strings attached.

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis opened with a blunt motion: produce every contract, memorandum of understanding, or side deal the government signed with Stellantis and its affiliates since 2015. Every page, every clause, in both official languages, “without redaction.” The demand wasn’t symbolic, it was about finding out if Trudeau’s government ever required the company to keep those Canadian jobs it was paid to “protect.”

Liberals scrambled to block it. MP Jenna Sudds proposed an amendment that would let bureaucrats black out whatever they deemed “sensitive.” In practice, that meant hiding anything embarrassing — from cabinet discussions to corporate fine print. Opposition MPs called it exactly what it was: a cover-up clause. It failed.

The committee floor turned into open warfare. The Bloc Québécois tried a softer sub-amendment giving the House Law Clerk power to vet redactions. Conservatives countered with their own version forcing departments to hand over unredacted contracts and justify any blackouts in writing. After a suspension and some backroom wrangling, a rare thing happened: compromise.

The motion passed unanimously. Even the Liberals couldn’t vote against it once the light was on.

The debate itself revealed how badly Ottawa has lost control of its own economic agenda. Conservatives pressed officials on why Canadians were paying billions for “job creation” only to see Stellantis pack up for Illinois once U.S. tariffs came down. Liberals blamed Trump, tariffs, and “global conditions,” the excuses were almost comical. Liberal members blamed Donald Trump —yes, really— for Stellantis abandoning Canada. According to them, Trump’s tariffs and “America First” trade policy scared the company into moving production south.

But here’s what they didn’t say: Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign on November 15, 2022, promising to rip up Joe Biden’s green industrial agenda and bring manufacturing back to U.S. soil. Everyone heard it. Everyone knew it. And yet, on July 6, 2023, more than half a year later, Ottawa proudly unveiled its $15-billion subsidy for Stellantis and LG Energy Solution — a deal built entirely on the assumption that Trump wouldn’t win.

So let’s be clear about what happened here. They didn’t just hand billions to a foreign automaker. They gambled that the next U.S. president wouldn’t change course. They bet the house —your tax dollars— on a political outcome in another country.

Think about that. Fifteen billion dollars of public money wagered on a campaign prediction. They bet on black, and it landed on red.

Even if the gamble had gone their way — even if Trump had lost and Biden’s green subsidy regime had survived untouched — the deal would still have been a terrible bargain.

During the committee meeting, the Bloc Québécois pointed to the 2023 Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report, which projected that the combined federal and Ontario subsidies to Stellantis and Volkswagen, roughly $28 billion total, including Stellantis’s $15 billion share, wouldn’t even break even for twenty years. That means taxpayers would have to wait until the mid-2040s just to recover what Ottawa spent.

So imagine the “best-case scenario”: the U.S. keeps its green-industry incentives, the plant stays in Canada, and production runs at full capacity. Even then, ordinary Canadians don’t see a financial return for two decades. There are no guaranteed profits, no guaranteed jobs, and no repayment. It was a long-odds bet on a global policy trend, financed entirely with public money.

In other words, whether the roulette wheel landed on black or red, the house still lost because the government put your chips on the table in a game it never controlled.

Behind the numbers, the story is brutally simple: Ottawa slid its chips across the table, wrote the cheques, and Stellantis walked away with the winnings. When MPs tried to see the receipts, the government grabbed for the cover of secrecy — no sunlight, no scrutiny, just “trust us.”

Now, for the first time, Parliament is about to peek under the table. The committee will finally see the real contracts — not the press releases, not the slogans, but the fine print that tells Canadians what they actually paid for. The review will happen behind closed doors at first, but the pressure to show the public what’s inside will be enormous.

Because if those documents confirm what MPs already suspect —that there were no job guarantees, no clawbacks, and no consequences —then this isn’t just a bad hand. It’s a rigged table.

Ottawa didn’t just gamble with taxpayer money; it gambled against the odds, and the dealer —in this case, Stellantis— already knew the outcome. Even if the wheel had landed on black, taxpayers were still stuck covering a twenty-year “break-even” fantasy, as the Bloc reminded everyone.

The next two weeks will show Canadians whether their government actually bought jobs or just bought headlines. One thing is certain: the high-rollers in Ottawa have been playing roulette with your money, and the wheel’s finally slowing down.