Last Friday, Quebec’s Minister of Economy and Innovation, Pierre Fitzgibbon, fought Highway 15‘s busy traffic heading north to St. Jerome, bringing with him $20 million in much needed funding and subsidies.

He stopped off first at a conglomerate of seven Quebec companies specializing in heavy electric vehicles, namely the commercial EV platform developed by Compagnie Électrique Lion and underlying its St.-Jerome-built electric school buses (sold mostly to California).

The $7.9-million provincial contribution should help materialize projects like electric ambulances, dump trucks and firetrucks, which together could “reduce greenhouse gas emissions totaling nearly 3 million tons of CO2 over a horizon of ten years,” reads the press release.

While that news garnered the most headlines, the real deal, was the non-profit connecting those companies, the beneficiary of the largest portion – $12.7 million – of governmental aid: L’Institut du Véhicule Innovant (The Innovative Vehicle Institute, or IVI).

St. Jerome: Where “modern” EVs were first tested

Thanks to IVI, Ville de Saint-Jérome has been a hot-bed of EV development for more than 20 years. In the beginning, it was all about electric cars — remember in 1996, Tesla wasn’t even a gleam in Elon’s eye — and the garage-laboratoire, then named CEVEQ (Centre d’expertise du véhicule électrique du Québec), was something of a global pioneer.

It made Laurentians’ capital the first Canadian city inundated with zero-emission cars. An electric Citroën Berlingo was used by municipal administration; local police drove an electrified Peugeot 106. And the corporation helped develop and commercialize the St. Jerome-assembled ZENN, a Zero Emission No Noise low-speed two-seater. (If you don’t remember the ZENN, it’s because it barely sold 500 units from 2006 to 2010, mainly Stateside.)

“At that time, we were a voice in the wilderness,” says IVI’s executive director, François Adam. Then, around 2010, electric passenger cars took off with the likes of Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt. Since 2015, the Institute has focused on electrifying heavy-duty vehicles, industrial equipment and even autonomous machinerie.

More square feet — for crazier ideas

So, yes, Quebec has a specialized think tank bringing to life all kinds of strange vehicles for clients who want to reduce their carbon footprint. There’s the MadVac, from Longueuil’s Exprolink, an electric garbage collector currently cleaning up New York’s Central Park; the Manufacture Adria, from Rouyn-Noranda, a piece of specialized electric mining equipment. IVI helped with the Lion electric school bus mentioned above, as well as electric motorcycles and boats.

In the last five years, IVI worked with 120 companies from all over La Belle Province, generating more than $12 million of retombées, says its executive director. While initiating those commercial and industrial energy efficiency solutions, it’s also been training future technicians — IVI’s a collegiate center of technology transfer, affiliated with Cégep de Saint-Jérôme.

But until now, IVI’s 30 employees were spread out between the downtown college and a business park, its current garage-laboratoire so small only one project can be tackled at a time. There’s no room in this 100-square-meter laboratory to welcome any other innovation en devenir.

That’s about to change, with the $12.7 million issued by Quebec’s Infrastructures for Research and Innovation. The money, plus some land granted by the city of St. Jerome and another $1.3 million from IVI’s own pockets, will help erect a new 2,712-square-meter building uniting the firm’s employees under one roof, while adding a much-needed bigger “prototyping” room.

The new pavilion should be ready early 2022. “We have so many interesting projects but with our current limited space, we’re always on the brake,” says Adam. “With this new facility, not only will we add 10 haute technologie jobs, but we’ll quadruple our laboratory space.”