I, too, would like to welcome a dear friend of mine, Jay Aspin, the former Nipissing MP, the long-time member of the Near North District School Board and former chair of that board as well and current Ontario Health board member.

Firstly, thank you to the member from Elgin–Middlesex–London for the integral role he played in landing Volkswagen into his riding in St. Thomas.

And the member is correct. We landed an historic investment from Europe’s largest automaker and it’s making headlines around the world: the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and, overseas, the Financial Times—all positive stories about Ontario’s skilled workforce, clean energy, our EV ecosystem, critical minerals, all the things we wrote in our Driving Prosperity plan when we began this monumental turnaround of our auto sector and our move to lead the EV revolution.

Speaker, the auto world now knows what Volkswagen saw, that Ontario has everything a company needs to be part of the EV future.

In 2019, Reuters revealed that car companies planned to spend $300 billion globally, but none of that money was planned for Canada or Ontario. So we put our Driving Prosperity plan in place. It started with lowering the cost of doing business by $7 billion each and every year. We met worldwide with companies looking to be part of the EV revolution and told them about Ontario’s skilled workforce, our clean energy, our EV ecosystem, our critical minerals. Within 24 months, we attracted $17 billion in EV auto investments in Ontario, and that’s before the Volkswagen announcement.

This year, Bloomberg ranked Canada as second in their annual global battery supply chain, first in North America, ahead of the US. We went from zero investments to the global leader.