Growing up in Canada, I became inured to government waste and wrongdoing, particularly during my time living in La Belle Province, as Quebec fashions itself. Among the more infamous debacles was the construction of an airport in Mirabel, a city about 33 miles northwest of Montreal. Pitched as a futuristic airport that would replace Montreal’s aging Dorval, it was a massive public works project costing billions in construction and infrastructure and clearing tens of thousands of acres of land.
Airlines and Montreal residents resisted Mirabel because even with no traffic it took about 45 minutes to get there. Add a snowstorm—which isn’t all that uncommon in Montreal—and the trip could easily stretch into a two-hour ordeal. By contrast, when I lived in Montreal, I could get to Dorval from the city center in less than 15 minutes.
Mirabel was officially closed to commercial passenger traffic in 2004. Dorval was renovated, expanded, and remains Montreal’s primary airport. Mirabel wasn’t just a bad project. It was a failure of assumption—the belief that government planning could override real-world behavior.
That’s why the failure of electric school bus manufacturer Lion Electric has an eerily familiar ring. The company was promoted as part of the Biden administration’s climate agenda. Instead, the company ultimately filed for bankruptcy, laid off employees tasked with building its buses, and paused manufacturing operations.
Lion’s financial demise left dozens of U.S. school districts—including those in California, Montana, North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, and Maryland—having never received the buses the Biden administration promised them. Lion failed to deliver about $95 million worth of electric buses to 55 districts across the country.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker two weeks ago delivered the final indignity: Hyundai Translead is moving into Lion Electric’s former U.S. manufacturing facility in Joliet, Illinois. Hyundai Translead, a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company, manufactures conventional diesel-powered transportation equipment, including dry and refrigerated van trailers, flatbeds, truck bodies, and dollies.
Biden’s electric bus godsend officially became an old-school trucking warehouse. Pritzker, frequently mentioned as a possible Democratic Party candidate, had this to say about Lion Electric at the plant’s opening in July 2023:
“This is about more than just cars on the road. It’s also about making sure that we have the buses, the community experience of the new clean energy economy,” Pritzker said, addressing younger people in the audience. “Because while all of that is very important, it’s predicated on having a planet that’s environmentally sustainable for your generation and beyond.”
Lion Electric was the Biden administration’s green energy version of Mirabel Airport – a failure reflecting the collective wisdom of the Quebec, Canadian, and U.S. governments, as well as Wall Street.
Quite fittingly, Mirabel is where Lion Electric chose to build its Quebec battery assembly plant.
Yes, that Mirabel.
Lion Electric was based in Quebec, and its business model was predicated on taxpayer handouts awarded by bureaucrats with no business sense or experience.
In 2021, the Quebec provincial government and the Canadian federal government announced a joint $100 million CAD loan ($50M each) to build its Mirabel battery assembly plant.
Beyond direct corporate aid, Quebec mandated that all new school buses be electric by 2030 and offered subsidies of up to $240,000 per bus. As Quebec’s handouts required that the EV buses be assembled in Canada, Lion Electric enjoyed a virtual monopoly on these funds for years.
Lion’s management knew how to milk the Biden administration’s EV hype. The company took advantage of the 2021 SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) Wall Street euphoria to go public via a “blank check” merger with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. This maneuver allowed Lion to bypass the rigorous scrutiny of a traditional IPO, valuing the company at nearly $2 billion based on little more than PowerPoint presentations and government promises.
The SPAC merger netted Lion approximately $490 million in cash, which the company and its government backers touted as the fuel for their massive expansion into the U.S. market.
Lion’s projections proved to be pure fantasy. In its SPAC merger filings, Lion projected it would deliver 18,400 vehicles annually by 2024. The reality? By the time the company hit the wall, it was delivering fewer than 1,000 units a year while hemorrhaging hundreds of millions in cash.
Under the Biden-backed 2021 infrastructure law, the EPA received $5 billion for its Clean School Bus Program. Between 2022 and 2024, the EPA awarded Lion Electric roughly $159 million to supply electric buses to U.S. school districts. Lion agreed to build a manufacturing plant in Illinois, allowing the Biden administration to tout the creation of U.S. jobs.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s EPA appointee was Michael Regan, a career regulator who became a de facto venture capitalist, allocating capital and selecting companies—functions typically reserved for investors risking their own money, not taxpayers who have no say in the outcome.
While the Biden administration and the EPA were using Lion as a “green” prop, CEO Marc Bédard was quietly ensuring his own financial landing was far softer than the company’s. Insider filings show that between the 2021 merger and the beginning of the company’s terminal decline, Bédard liquidated approximately $30 million in shares.
Bédard’s selloff raised accusations—even in Canada’s Parliament—of a subsidy-driven “pump and dump” dynamic, with governments providing the hype and insiders exiting before reality caught up.
Today, Lion Electric’s Mirabel plant—intended to be a hub for 1,400 jobs and the heart of the “new economy”—stands as a monument to government hubris. Canadian and U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions in direct support, and school districts are left waiting on undelivered buses.
In Quebec, the provincial government last September ordered roughly 1,200 Lion electric school buses off the road after a fire triggered concerns about a manufacturing defect. The result disrupted transportation across multiple school districts, with routes canceled and even entire school days called off.
Lion Electric wasn’t a one-off Biden administration EV debacle. There was also Proterra, the failed electric bus company whose former board member included none other than former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Proterra was one of the primary beneficiaries of federally subsidized transit electrification, a push that accelerated under the Biden administration. Billions of taxpayer dollars flowed through Federal Transit Administration programs to help cities purchase electric buses, creating demand that did not need to be earned in a competitive market.
Transit agencies responded as expected—placing large orders and, in many cases, building fleets around a single supplier.
That demand came with an assumption: that the companies supplying those buses were ready to deliver at scale.
Proterra wasn’t.
In 2023, the company filed for bankruptcy after years of losses, production challenges, and an inability to operate profitably. The consequences didn’t stay on a balance sheet.
U.S. and Canadian cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Asheville, North Carolina, Colorado Springs, and Edmonton, were left with sidelined electric bus fleets—vehicles awaiting parts, suffering from reliability issues, or rendered unusable without manufacturer support. As Proterra’s technology was proprietary, the company’s bankruptcy left transit agencies dependent on a supplier that no longer exists, forcing them to improvise to keep service running.
The political optics of the failure are particularly sharp due to the involvement of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Before joining the Biden administration, Granholm served on Proterra’s board of directors and held more than 240,000 shares in the company. When she divested in May 2021, she realized approximately $1.6 million in gains.
Mirabel assumed passengers would follow the plan.
Lion Electric and Proterra assumed markets would follow subsidies.
The Biden administration assumed it could spend billions to force a green transition without ensuring the companies it funded could actually deliver.
The result is exactly what you’d expect: failed companies, stranded assets, and taxpayers left holding the bill.
It’s as if I never left Canada—only the scale of the debacles got bigger.