This announcement on Monday, which should create 200 jobs, follows another that occurred a few days earlier in the battery sector. The German chemical giant BASF had indicated that it had reached an agreement to acquire land in the industrial and port park of Bécancour for the establishment of another factory for the manufacture of materials for cathodes and battery recycling.
GM’s facilities, in partnership with South Korea’s POSCO Chemical, will power electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Silverado EV, GMC HUMMER EX and Cadillac LYRIQ in three years.
The construction of the site will leave room, according to the American auto giant, for the possibility of future expansion as GM continues to pursue many potential projects related to the supply chain of electric vehicles.
Loans expected from Ottawa and Quebec
The governments of Canada and Quebec will financially support half the value of the project in equal parts, but the terms of the loans, part of which will be pardonable
still need to be finalized. The federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, maintains that Quebec has been in strong competition with several American states in this file.
The battery ecosystem is taking shape here, he said at a press conference in Montreal. What is new and fundamental is that we are part of a supply chain in the world.
The Minister of Economy and Innovation of Quebec added that the objective of his government is to build a sector equivalent to that of the multimedia sector in the early 2000s
. To do this, Pierre Fitzgibbon relies on the transformation of Quebec minerals such as lithium, the connection of electric cars and the recycling of batteries, as well as the production of commercial and intelligent electric vehicles.
A controversial departure
In 2002, GM stopped manufacturing its Camaro and Firebird models at the Boisbriand complex, resulting in the loss of more than 1,200 jobs. Today, the factory has been replaced by a shopping center.
Fifteen years earlier, the two levels of government had granted interest-free loans totaling $220 million to modernize the plant and encourage GM to stay in Quebec.