LOYALIST TOWNSHIP, ONTARIO, CANADA – The plant was expected to produce batteries for a million electric vehicles a year. Once up and running, it was supposed to create hundreds of permanent jobs in a small southeastern Ontario municipality.
It was, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time, “big news” that Belgium-based Umicore chose Loyalist Township for its battery component production facility — evidence, the federal and provincial governments said, of success in the quest to make Canada a global electric-vehicle production hotspot.
But two years later, spending on the construction of the Umicore plant has been delayed in what the company calls a “significant worsening of the EV market context.”
