Onshoring low-carbon supply chains: Can subsidies meet the challenge?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Framing Chinese dominance in low-carbon supply chains as a strategic threat, Western governments have responded by deploying a range of subsidies to secure end-to-end supply chains, from critical minerals to batteries and EV production. This article addresses Canadian subsidies' approach to onshoring green manufacturing, with a focus on EV supply chains in Ontario. Based on 20 interviews with government officials and industry leaders and a literature review, we find several challenges to subsidizing supply chain integration – (1) opposition to new mining and infrastructure projects, in particular from some Indigenous communities, (2) policy makers lacking understanding of the complexity of low-carbon products’ supply chains, and (3) slowing global EV demand and regional trade barriers at a time of uncertainty for the sector under the second Trump administration. These challenges are responsible for the suspension or cancellation of projects which have received subsidies, undermining the broader onshoring strategy. • An independent and non-partisan financial office of the Canadian Parliament estimates that the Canadian and Ontario governments have spent $43.6 billion over a ten year period to subsidize the on-shoring of EV supply chains to ensure the future of the Canadian automotive industry. • Ontario aims to create an integrated supply chain by opening new mines in the province's north to feed processing and manufacturing facilities in the industrialized south. • The approach faces challenges including the deteriorating financial position of companies who have received subsidies and subsidized firms suspending investments, including Umicore and Ford. • Canadian officials and business executives leverage a mix of environmental, nationalist, commercial and security arguments to support their vision for, and subsidies to, a new EV supply chain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".