GM Shutdown Hits Canada — Ottawa Fires Back With a Brutal Counter

Yet again I'm grateful we can get a wide view of politics thanks to the internet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEa73xqplGA

Transcript (not full)

So General Motors just shut down every one of its remaining manufacturing operations in Canada. Not scaled back, not restructured, not transitioned to a reduced footprint while the trade environment stabilizes. Shut down every assembly plant, every parts facility, every engineering center. The Ashawa assembly complex, one of the most productive auto plants in North America, a facility that has been building vehicles for nearly a century, the economic heartbeat of an entire city, the St. Catherine's powertrain facility, the Markham Technical Center, the Woodstock Parts operation, all of it closed.

11,000 workers told their jobs are gone. Not because they failed, not because the plants were unprofitable, not because they built a bad product, but because a foreign government told their employer to leave. And the announcement came wrapped in corporate language about strategic portfolio optimization and global capacity realignment. Language designed with the precision of a legal department that has done this before to make the destruction of 11,000 livelihoods sound like an accounting adjustment. Ottawa didn't beg to stay. Ottawa didn't offer a penny in subsidies. Ottawa didn't negotiate. Within 72 hours, Mark Carney announced the Canadian Automotive Sovereignty Initiative, a 12 billion dollar plan to replace every job GM eliminated with something GM never anticipated. A Canadian-owned, globally partnered electric vehicle and advanced manufacturing ecosystem built on the exact factory sites GM is abandoning.

European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers have already committed to production partnerships. Every displaced GM worker has been guaranteed priority placement, fully funded retraining and wage protection during the transition. And one provision in the initiative, a regulatory measure targeting critical battery mineral exports, just put a chokeold on GM's own electric vehicle supply chain that the company's board of directors reportedly called the most aggressive regulatory action a government has ever taken against a departing manufacturer. Warren Buffett said GM just made the most expensive exit in corporate history, not because of what it lost in Canada, but because of what Canada took from it on the way out. And then he explained why abandoning a country that controls your supply chain is the one business decision that cannot be survived. But the line that every displaced auto worker in Ontario is repeating tonight, the line Carney delivered standing on the floor of the shuttered GM assembly plant in Ashawa, surrounded by workers who had just lost their livelihoods, some still wearing their uniforms, some holding their ID badges. Some holding their children as 11 words that turned a corporate shutdown into a national declaration of intent.

"They closed a factory. We're going to build an industry."

When you understand the real reason GM left Canada, the human cost the corporate press release was designed to hide, what the 12 billion initiative actually built, how the mineral provision just crippled GM's electric vehicle future, what Buffett said about the one mistake a company doesn't recover from and why this shutdown will cost GM more than it will ever Canada, You'll understand why this isn't a plant closure. It's the beginning of the end of GM's competitive position in the electric vehicle market and GM did it to itself.