Honda receives $83.6M for Alliston facility upgrade

Honda Canada Inc is receiving $83.6 million from the federal and Ontario governments to build a new paint shop that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The project is part of a $500-million upgrade to Honda’s Alliston ON plant which produces the popular Honda Civic and four-cylinder engine blocks. The public support will be split equally between the two governments with the federal portion coming from the recently revamped Automotive Innovation Fund (AIF). The last federal Budget announced that the AIF would be extended from FY17-18 to FY20-21 and that it would “examine approaches that will allow it to maximize the impact of federal support offered to the automotive sector, including through assessing the terms of the Automotive Innovation Fund”. Those terms have now been modified and include outright grants in addition to loans – an option that the sector has been lobbying for since AIF was established in 2008. The fund has received $1 billion in three tranches, most recently in 2014.