Canada won’t recover the full investment it made in General Motors and Chrysler in monetary terms but did reap job abd industry benefits, finance minister Jim Flaherty said.
“We’ve got all those jobs, and we’ve got an industry that has persisted,” he told Dow Jones after a private meeting with private sector economists in Toronto.
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“The taxpayers of Canada made an investment in Chrysler, and also in General Motors, and we want to make sure we get good value on that investment in a monetary sense,” he said.
He said Canada has “obtained good value in the sense of jobs,” with some 52,000 jobs “preserved and protected” as a result of controversial 2009 bailout.
He said the decision to lend assistance during the recession to the ailing automakers “was not an easy decision for the government to make.” But, he added, “It has turned out well.”
In addition to having auto assembly plants operating domestically, Canada also retained a large number of parts companies, he said.
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By GlobalData“That’s a big win in preserving the automative sector as a dynamic sector of the Canadian economy,” he said.
