Ontario’s auto industry getting $500M boost from governments to build electric vehicles, pickups
Ontario's auto industry is getting another boost as governments pour $500 million into helping General Motors set up Canada's first full-scale electric vehicle production in Ingersoll and a third shift making pickup trucks in Oshawa.
The extra work for Oshawa will bring the total of jobs at the plant to 2,600 with 600 new hires. There is no firm commitment to build electric vehicles there yet, although it will be the only GM factory in North America with the capacity to build both light- and heavy-duty pickups.
Ontario and the federal government are each giving up to $259 million toward the $2 billion project announced Monday, two weeks after automaker Stellantis - parent company of Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep - revealed it would break ground on a massive $5 billion electric vehicle battery factory in Windsor with hundreds of millions in government aid.
The key investments come less than two months before Ontario's June 2 election, at a time when industry observers had been worried the country's automotive heartland was being left behind in the growing rush to electric vehicles.
It is really nice to see Ontario to be on the case because they were missing in action," analyst Joanna Kyriazis of Clean Energy Canada told the Star from Ottawa.
The third shift making gas-powered pickup trucks in Oshawa is good news" for local suppliers and, more importantly, a strong sign that the plant will be a future site of electric vehicle production - perhaps in five to seven years, said Flavio Volpe of the Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturers' Association.
It looks like Oshawa," he said, noting it would make sense for GM to convert the plant in the coming years because of its trained workforce and supplier base.
This could set the stage," Kyriazis agreed. We could be one step closer."
Hiring of the 600 workers has already begun in Oshawa, which stopped operations three years ago but was later revived, and the automaker is aiming for 50 per cent of them to be women.
As previously announced, the General Motors CAMI plant in Ingersoll, near London, Ont., will start building the BrightDrop Zevo 600 electric delivery van later this year. It is expected to be in demand for fleet purchases as courier companies increasingly switch away from gas-powered vehicles. Batteries for the BrightDrop are being made at a GM Ultium plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
That's the beginning of what we're doing," outgoing GM Canada president Scott Bell said about Ingersoll when asked about the prospects for adding electric vehicles to the assembly line at Oshawa, where the automaker used to employ more than 20,000 workers in the plant's heyday making models like the Chevy Impala and Camaro.
We've made a commitment to be all electric by 2035, our entire portfolio. It's a transition, a transformation as you can imagine," added Bell, who is becoming global head of GM's Chevrolet division.
It's going to take us some time to get there."
Premier Doug Ford hailed the retooling of the two plants as a major investment" that bodes well for the future.
We're building on our province's long tradition of automotive excellence and investing to lead the electric vehicle revolution," said Ford.
Partnerships like these are crucial to putting Canada on the cutting edge of the clean economy, creating thousands of new jobs," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau add in a statement.
Ingersoll has been building Chevy Equinox SUVs, but production is moving elsewhere in North America later this month, clearing the way for a summer retooling of the plant to produce the BrightDrop vans, which use a detachable and electric-powered rolling locker" system that can service large buildings or city blocks about 25 per cent faster than traditional delivery methods.
General Motors announced in 2018, shortly after Ford's Progressive Conservative government was elected, that it would shutter the Oshawa plant. That changed in the wake of a campaign by Unifor, the union representing Canadian autoworkers.
GM subsequently invested more than $1 billion in the plant as demand for pickup trucks increased. Forty per cent of the vehicles GM sells in Canada are pickups.
Rob Ferguson is a Toronto-based reporter covering Ontario politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robferguson1