Former Premier François Legault defends his decision to invest in the battery sector and says he disagrees with the conclusions of the damning report by Quebec’s Auditor General, Christine Roy.
The latter claims that the CAQ government’s investments in the battery sector were “poorly planned” and that “significant risks” were not “sufficiently considered”.
According to Legault, “it was difficult to plan the development of an entire nascent industry.”
“We were also dependent on companies that would agree to invest in Quebec. We were in a case-by-case dynamic. But with the presence in Quebec of critical minerals like lithium, it was desirable that part of the transformation take place in Quebec, rather than exporting our unprocessed resources,” he wrote on the social network X on Monday.
For its report, the VGQ analyzed 29 files related to 11 companies in the battery sector which together have authorized financial assistance of approximately $2.2 billion as of September 30, 2025.
Of this sum, $760 million was authorized for four companies that placed themselves under the protection of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act.
The report specifies, however, that this “amount should not be considered as the total of the losses, since part of these sums have not been disbursed, and others have been recovered or could be recovered in the future.”
Otherwise, $90 million was authorized for two companies whose projects were suspended or abandoned and $1 billion for three companies whose projects saw their costs increase by more than 100 per cent.
Legault states that the “main risk was geopolitical.” He adds that as early as 2018, his government chose to “take a more dynamic approach to attract business investment to Quebec.”
“Overall, we have done well since, since 2018, economic growth per capita has been stronger in Quebec than in the rest of Canada,” he points out.
For her part, Premier Christine Fréchette defended herself by stating that 95 per cent of the losses in the battery sector were linked to Northvolt and Lion Electric and that she had put a stop to the injection of public funds into its two projects due to “too much exposure to risk”.
She has also stated on several occasions that she wants to reduce economic interventionism.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
