Developing Canada’s battery supply chain is vital to maintaining the competitiveness of Canada’s major economic sectors—automotive, critical minerals, and advanced manufacturing—and ensuring Canada captures the jobs and value created in the transition to net-zero, while supporting the growth of new jobs and industries in the clean energy economy. Canada has a chance to establish itself as a major player in the global battery industry, but it must act swiftly and strategically to seize this opportunity.
The federal government has acknowledged Canada’s “mines to mobility” advantage and has taken steps to support projects along the supply chain. What Canada needs now is a public-facing, national battery strategy that pulls these efforts together, identifies Canada’s competitive advantages and where along the battery supply chain it is best-positioned to compete, and guides policies and investments to unlock Canada’s top priority opportunities.
This Blueprint offers a starting point for developing a national battery strategy. It focuses on on-road electric vehicles, which are expected to account for the vast majority of battery demand through 2030, but could be expanded to include other battery applications such as off-road vehicles and stationary storage.
This Blueprint sets a vision for Canada’s battery industry and identifies six goals based on Canada’s value proposition and its highest potential opportunities to compete, each with their own near-term (2025) and longer-term (2030) actions. Our hope is that the federal government—in coordination with industry, labour, academia, and other levels of government—take this Blueprint and develop it further, setting targets for investment and production capacity to scale up activities in the priority areas of the supply chain identified herein. Canadian Battery Task Force members also intend to leverage this Blueprint as a resource when providing input on the broad suite of battery-related federal policy and programs currently being developed.