Electric Car Subsidy Wars; Where Cash is King; Falling Living Standards and a Night at the Opera.
April 24 2023 Volume 4 # 1
Subsidy Wars: Canada vs the USA
Canada will give Volkswagen up to $13-billion in subsidies to build an electric battery plant in St. Thomas, Ontario. It will only cost Volkswagen $7-billion to build the factory. Canada is proving the subsidy to match what the United States would have offered under the protectionist legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act. If the US reduces its subsidies, so will Canada.
Volkswagen is going full on into the Electric Car business. Its current offerings don’t match the competition from Tesla and Hyundai in range but it is planning to bring out an ID7 model with an estimated range of 300 miles or 480 kilometres. Only the batteries, not the cars, will be built in St. Thomas. No EVs are built in Canada
Canadians Aren’t As Rich as They Used to Be
Maybe the country Canada should be compared to in this chart is Australia. In 1981 Canadians were much richer than Australians. Not anymore, according to this study by HEC Montréal (whose long name was once École des hautes études commerciales de Montréal) Canada’s top French-language business school.
Forty years from now Canada’s relative decline is expected to be even more dramatic with Australia pulling further ahead, in the top five of rich countries, while Canada is down near the bottom. Both countries are rich in natural resources. The current Canadian government finds natural resources, especially oil and gas, a distasteful evil.
One of the reasons the authors of the study give for the fall in Canadian living standards is insufficient competition. They cite the example of the proposed merger of Air Canada and Air Transat: the Canadian government welcomed it because it saved jobs; the European Union objected to the merger because it would cost travellers more. It never went through.
Click here to read the HEC study
And Who is a Canadian?
Prime Minister Trudeau accused Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre of cozying up to an “American billionaire”. The billionaire in question is Elon Musk, who is in fact a Canadian citizen. Pollievre was equally over the top.
It is all about a ridiculous pissing match over whether the CBC should be described as government-funded on Twitter. Both the CBC and NPR (National Public Radio) have abandoned Twitter for the time being. Good. When I worked at the CBC, which I loved doing, it annoyed me when I heard announcers going on about “trending on Twitter”. Who cares? Back then it was a small percentage of the population, many of them political aides hyper-active on their Blackberries.
Where Cash is King
Few of the people I know carry cash. In the morning lineup at Espresso Mercurio in Toronto or Cafe Bolt in Knowlton, people pay with debit cards or credit cards. Judging by the map below, it seems it is more than an anecdotal trend. What is surprising are the huge number of countries that still want to live on cash including most of western Europe and Britain.
Then there are countries that would have a hard time going cashless because many people don’t have credit cards or even a bank account. It’s shocking because some of these countries are relatively advanced.
You Say Petrol, I say Gasoline. And Benzene?
Your Should have bought Art. Or Handbags?
Who Knew
Boo-boo
Last week I said Ferrari was in Turin. Wrong. It is in Maranello. Mea culpa.
Speaking of Cars
A Lotus Super Seven on the Corso Italia in Genoa. Can’t remember the last time I saw one of these. There were actually two of them. Super fast and light. Patrick McGoohan drove one in the opening scene of the The Prisoner, a 60s TV program.
Essay of the Week
A Night at The Opera
Almost every opera I have been to is in Italian. I don’t really need to understand it, the performance, the music and the opera singers move me, sometime to tears.
The other night I went to an Italian opera house to hear a cover band do Queen. In English. The Teatro Sociale di Camogli came alive with Freddie Mercury look alike, speaking Italian to the audience but singing in English. When the singer did speak English he had a recognizable London accent. He was fabulous, athletic and funny.
The Italians loved it. A lot of them knew the words to the songs from Queen. Sixty-year old women were dancing in the aisles. People were standing in the loges, moving to music and clapping. It was a riotous success.
When the finale came, after a curtain call, you knew it had to be “We are the champions” and the audience chanted the words and again went wild.
The audiences familiarity with the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody does not match the country’s overall understanding of English. Living here for a month you don’t experience any antagonism towards English, but certainly a lack of knowledge. It is a delight to try and speak Italian.
Italy is on the low end of European countries whose citizens can speak English.
One could argue that Italian its such a beautiful language, so why should they bother? A businessman I met a few days ago, a Brit who has been living and working here for 20 years, said most business people can speak English.
Into this world of language peace marches Georgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister. She is considering a law that would fine Italians who used English, and other foreign words, in formal communications. The purpose of the law is to fight `Anglomania’. It would forbid the use of acronyms and job roles in English.
Good luck. Even the nationalistic Prime Minister referred to herself as an “underdog” when her party won a surprise election victory. Just a few minutes before writing this I heard an Italian couple by their car talk about `parking’.
There is a historical reason for the world dominance of English. The United States was the big winner of the Second World War, the British historian Norman Stone said bluntly in his brilliant 200 page book: World War Two: A Short History. Add to the cultural dominance of Hollywood and British music, like Queen.
English is all over the place in Italy. On the excellent Italian train service arrivals and departures are announced in Italian first, then in English. Signs warning you not to cross the tracks are in Italian and English
In the town of Camogli, which is actually part of greater Genoa, there are signs in English everywhere, in small shops such as Wally’s Wine Store Local Goods Beer Shop…
… to more formal businesses.
The nationalists of Meloni’s party should take a Valium. Had they been at the Queen concert the other night they would have seen their fellow Italians singing in English, dancing to universal music and then speaking just Italian in the lobby before and after the program. Italian is not under any threat from English. Just from their own loopy nationalistic fringe politicos.
.