With just weeks left in the Ontario provincial election, one engineering CEO thinks Premier Doug Ford’s wasteful spending in an unresponsive electric vehicle market should be a ballot box issue.
Michael Nitefor, the founder, president and CEO of Air Labs Inc., an Ontario-based hybrid engine developer, wants Ontarians to wake up to the wasteful spending the “so-called conservative” government has dumped into foreign companies in pursuit of climate action.
“Why are we spending billions on foreign companies, and what are we getting out of this?” he asked in an interview with True North.
Nitefor is a self-described disgruntled conservative voter who feels that Ford’s government overlooked his made-in-Ontario designs for a carbon fibre hybrid pneumatic powertrain engine, which he says is more socially and environmentally friendly than the EV batteries made by foreign companies in which Ford has invested.
“My company, Air Lab, is developing a hybrid technology that is not electric. And I have been talking to people in the Ford government over the last seven years at the ministerial level, and they’re just tone-deaf. All they want to do is the EV… electrification,” Nitefor said. “Electrification is going nowhere.”
In April, Ford announced he and Trudeau had invested $5 billion into a multinational multi-billion dollar company, Honda, to make EVs in Ontario. He said the corporate welfare would create 1,000 jobs, meaning it would cost Canadians and Ontarians $5 million per job.
Ford boasted that his government had secured $43 billion in handouts for the EV industry last June, announcing that he would impose tariffs on China’s EV exports to protect his investments.
Taxpayers paid $590 million to Ford Motor Company through a subsidy partnership between the federal and provincial governments to transform an automotive plant in Oakville, Ont. The company previously stated it would pour $1.8 billion into the Oakville plant.
Despite this extra money from the state for the EV market, Ford began scaling back its EV operations due to a lack of vehicle demand. The American-owned company said the plan to transform the Oakville plant for EV production would instead be halted until 2027.
Ford’s latest quarterly report states its EV efforts lost the company $5.1 billion in 2024, an increase in lost revenue from the $4.7 billion it lost in previous years. General Motors, too, announced it would be scaling back EV production for the same market reasons.
Just last October, an Ipsos poll found that most Canadians were not interested in EVs. Just nine per cent surveyed said they owned an electric vehicle; out of those who don’t currently own one, less than a quarter said their next vehicle would be electric.
Seven in 10 respondents said they were worried about the cost of EVs compared to other models, and two-thirds said there was a lack of EV charging infrastructure and the vehicles were not suited for Canada’s winter. Nearly half said the over-reliance on charging stations being nearby was enough for them not to purchase EVs.
“The government knows that they blew it, and they don’t want to talk about it because it’s potentially a political embarrassment,” Nitefor said. “It’s a monstrous fraud on the tax-paying public.”
Nitefor said unlike EV batteries, his technology is a low-cost commodity that is fully recyclable and can use various forms of fuel, including natural renewable gas. But the tech was ignored by Ford’s government in favour of EV battery vehicles.
Nitefore said that on top of EV batteries not doing well in the market, they also require heavy sourcing of materials from China, often via unethical mining practices. They can have issues with the Canadian climate and create unrecyclable waste that has devastating effects on the environment.
“I am offering what I call Plan B, an alternate way of tackling environmental and emission issues, but they’d rather be writing billion-dollar checks to foreign companies rather than spend some modest amounts on an Ontario-based company with good idea,” Nitefor said.
According to Statistics Canada, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) made up 10% of new motor vehicle registrations, with 140,308 in 2024. He said the government’s investment into a market with such little demand is “like putting lipstick on a pig.”
“It’s a distortion of the markets, and the government has absolutely no business being in the car business,” he said. “They can create certain circumstances by which that would be helpful, but they have no business putting taxpayer money into these kinds of enterprises.”
Hybrid EVs made up 8.7% of new vehicle registrations with 122,215. But 90 per cent of Ontario’s auto production Canada goes to the U.S.
According to a report from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, 2024 was the first time EVs lost overall market share growth since it began collecting data in 2016. EVs saw a decline in market share growth 0.1 per cent Meanwhile, the HEV market grew by 2.15% and the Plug-in Hybrid EV market grew by 0.26 per cent from the previous year.
National Post columnist Randall Denley predicted that US President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders, which ended mandatory sales quotas for EVs, cancelled tax credits for EV buyers, and cancelled federal support for EV plants, will further devastate Ontario’s EV auto sector.
He said Ontarians should remember the Ford government’s wasteful spending in the fruitless EV market at the ballot box. He said the money spent on EVs could have been spent on healthcare and education or simply balancing the budget, as Ford originally pledged.
“Even with all the incentives provided by state governments and the recent Joe Biden administration, EV sales in the U.S. still hovered around eight per cent of total sales in 2024. That’s a small piece of the market and it’s likely to get smaller without all the government rules and inducements,” Denley wrote in an op-ed labelling Ford’s investments as a “lost gamble.”
A Fraser Institute study found that despite Ford vowing to balance the provincial budget in 2018, by 2025 his “progressive conservative” government has spent more annually than any provincial government in Ontario’s history – barring only Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty’s in 2010.
Neither Doug Ford nor Adam Wallace, a director of policy with the government, who allegedly met with Nitefor several times about his technology, responded to requests to comment.
Nitefor said corporate welfare has made lobbying the government “the only game in town” and made it near impossible for developers to compete in the Canadian economy.
Nitefor, like other developers and business leaders in Canada, is looking to American automotive companies instead and said he already has international investors committed.
“They’re much more open to progress and innovation, and they’re just as interested as anybody else in building capacity and creating jobs and creating prosperity, and they’re very good at it,” Nitefor said “In terms of productivity and everything. They’re way ahead of Canada. And Canada seems to be running on one leg.”
He said Trump’s vow to reduce business regulation appeals to business owners. He said Canada has so much “red tape,” regulations, endless filing out of forms and a lack of incentive and the“fewer obstacles” America promises is the “fundamental” principle on which value is built.