Five years ago, Vic Fedeli was sure he’d got as high up the mountain of Ontario politics as he could. Yes, he’d run for leader of the Progressive Conservative party in 2015, but he didn’t make it to the finish line. And when leader Patrick Brown was turfed by his caucus in early 2018, MPPs picked Fedeli to hold the fort as interim leader.
But that was all temporary crisis management until party members chose a permanent leader in Doug Ford. After seven years in opposition, Fedeli figured he’d finally landed where he could have the most impact when the newly elected premier installed him as the first Tory finance minister in 15 years, back in June 2018.
It didn’t go well.
That was a time when Ford and Co. tried to make their mark as a disruptive populist government pitching “buck-a-beer,” and the majority of Ontarians were less than impressed. Then Fedeli introduced the first PC budget in April 2019, and it landed with such a thud that Ford shuffled him out of his dream job two months later. No one could remember a more ignominious debut for any Ontario finance minister.
But rather than cry in his buck-a-beer, Fedeli took the premier at his word when he said he needed to move the MPP for Nipissing to a different portfolio. Fedeli and I talked about this Thursday during a “fireside chat” at a Mines to Mobility conference in Sudbury that was focused on the manufacturing of electric-vehicle batteries.
“I treat the boss as the coach,” Fedeli explains. “It’s up to him to shuffle the lineup. And I think he made a really great decision in making me the minister of economic development. After one year, he recognized the talents of everybody and said, ‘I need you right there.’”
While being shuffled out of finance after just one budget no doubt stung, Fedeli hit the ground not running, but sprinting. Ford had tapped him with being the chief salesman for “Ontario Inc.,” and the timing couldn’t have been better. Fedeli was taking on a portfolio in which he — along with his federal counterpart, François-Philippe Champagne — would be laser-focused on making Ontario one of the top places in the world for the entire cycle of electric vehicles. That covers everything from mineral extraction in mines in northern Ontario, to battery-manufacturing plants in southwestern Ontario, to the nearby plants for parts and components that go into those batteries, to car assembly in Windsor, Woodstock, Oakville, Alliston, and Oshawa, to battery recycling.
“Then rinse and repeat,” Fedeli says.
Many were dubious about the Ford government’s interest in this sector when, almost immediately after coming into office, the premier eliminated the generous rebates for EV purchases that the previous government had offered. But Fedeli insists that take was wrong. He says the PCs simply wanted whatever subsidies they were offering to go into job creation in Ontario, as opposed to toward purchases of EVs that were mostly manufactured at that time in the United States.
He says the province’s extraordinarily generous subsidies for EVs have been motivated by the need to support the 100,000 people already working in the auto sector. “Every one of them was at risk,” he insists. When General Motors initially shut down its auto-assembly plant in Oshawa in 2018, Fedeli says the premier saw it as a sobering moment. “We feared it was the beginning of the end,” he says. “The premier said, ‘We’re all in’ and slid all the chips to the middle of the table.”
Today, Fedeli says that GM plant is back in business, with three shifts of 900 people, half of them women. “That’s 2,700 people showing up who didn’t have a job,” he says. “It’s all about the people.”
Of course, Ontario’s big recent scores have been the Volkswagen battery-manufacturing plant in St. Thomas and the Stellantis auto-assembly plant in Windsor. Fedeli insists the difficulties completing the Stellantis deal are a “temporary controversy” and instead focuses on the $25 billion of EV deals that have landed in Ontario over the past two and a half years. Bloomberg now ranks Canada as number two in the world when it comes to the EV global-supply chain, behind only China and ahead of the U.S. Fedeli looks to the future in St. Thomas: a VW plant with 3,000 employees, surrounded by additional component plants.
“That’s a $7 billion plant surrounded by $10 billion more in supplies,” he says, marvelling in his boosterish way at the size of the numbers.
Fedeli is entitled to show some enthusiasm. When it’s finished, the VW plant will be 1.6 kilometres long by one kilometre wide. Its 1,486,448 square metres will make it one of the largest buildings in North America.
There have been 34 economic-development ministers in Ontario since the cabinet post was first created in the 1940s. Fedeli is one of only two from northern Ontario. He’s adamant that the north should experience a kind of permanent prosperity, different from the boom-and-bust mining cycles that have characterized its past. That means not only extracting these important minerals from northern mines, but also processing them in the north. Besides well-established nickel mines in Sudbury and gold in Timmins, he sees four or five lithium mines in the Ring of Fire by 2027 and a lithium-hydroxide processing hub in Thunder Bay.
“For the first time in 120 years, northern Ontario will be integrally involved in the auto sector,” he insists. “And Sudbury will be the pointy end of the spear.”
Fedeli, now 66, was a millionaire himself in his 30s, having sold his advertising business. After travelling the world, he successfully entered politics, first as the dollar-a-year mayor of North Bay in 2003, then as the MPP for Nipissing in 2011. Do the numbers he deals with now ever shock him?
“Sales are sales,” he says matter-of-factly. “Doesn’t matter whether you’re selling shoes or battery plants.”
Ever since he got his current post, Fedeli has made it a point to text the premier every day with what Ford calls his “one-a-day vitamin.” Fedeli texts him the name of the company, where they’re locating or expanding to, how many millions they’re investing in Ontario, how many people they’re hiring, and whether Ontario has “any skin in the game.”
“It’s every single day,” Fedeli smiles. “We haven’t missed a day. And on the big ones, he texts back, “Aww, buddy, that’s beautiful.”
Fedeli describes Ford, another former businessman, as “the Closer.” After Fedeli and his team finish negotiating with foreign business executives, he’ll often bring them into the cabinet office to meet Ford. “He puts the hammer down,” the minister says of the premier. Apparently, when the VW officials came to Queen’s Park, Ford called another German executive he knew, put him on speaker phone, and told him to sing Ontario’s praises to the VW execs.
“I’m selling Ontario around the world every day of the week,” Fedeli says. “Who wouldn’t want that as a job?”