Toronto council claims solidarity with Oshawa

As of this week’s meeting of Toronto city council, General Motors vehicles are now banned from municipal fleet procurements if they’re made in Mexico — subject to change if GM reverses its decision to shutter its plant in Oshawa.

There was no debate. The vote was 22- 2. It’s a very strange look.

Where to begin? The motion, sponsored by left-wing councillor Mike Layton and co-sponsored by politically unclassifiable but usually wrong councillor Jim Karygiannis, declares itself in “solidarity” with the assembly line workers in Oshawa currently staring down pink slips.

More accurate would be to say it’s in solidarity with Unifor and its # BoycottMexicoGM campaign. (“Boycott Mexico”? What country is this? What year?)

What it might actually do to help assembly line workers in Oshawa or elsewhere in Ontario — even in a symbolic sense, if there is such a thing as symbolic assistance in unemployment — is far from clear.

Oshawa’s GM assembly lines aren’t moving to Mexico.

The company is abandoning the Cadillac XTS and Chevrolet Impala — the plant’s only long-term products — altogether, because nobody wants sedans any more.

More recently, as a temporary program, Oshawa had assembled so- called “previous-generation” Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups. Many of the “next- generation” pickups will be produced in Fort Wayne, Ind., others, in Mexico.

What good would it do Oshawa’s GM workers — present or former — if Toronto bought a bunch of American-made GM pickups, but eschewed Mexican ones?

Layton has argued the motion would send a “pretty strong signal to (GM)” that it had better reconsider shutting the Oshawa plant, but there’s no earthly reason to believe a customer like the City of Toronto, which has purchased fewer than 200 GM vehicles in the past two years, would change its mind — especially if it’s happy to keep purchasing the vehicles GM builds in the States!

Just 26 of 372 GM vehicles in the City of Toronto fleet are Mexican-built, according to city staff, and the youngest are 2012 model years.

Moreover, if GM does close the Oshawa plant as planned, Toronto will be in the position of boycotting Mexican- made cars containing transmissions, engines and other parts built in St. Catharines and other parts of the Golden Horseshoe — but not banning American-built GM cars that contain no Canadian content at all.

It will be in the position of boycotting a company that still has a compelling presence across the GTA, including its head office in Oshawa and roughly 1,000 engineering jobs at its Markham and Oshawa technology centres.

One of the most common arguments in the motion’s favour is that it’s “mostly symbolic,” which is essentially to say pointless. “Relax, dude! It’s useless!”

Councillor James Pasternak, one of the two nay voters, isn’t so sure about that. “We have a Mexican consulate in Toronto. We have a ( Mexican) Trade Commission in Toronto,” he says. “I can see the relationship actually growing under the revised NAFTA agreement, and we want them to see Toronto as a good, friendly, supportive place to invest.”

You mightn’t think a few hundred cars here or there would disrupt more than $40 billion in annual bilateral trade between two nations.

But Pasternak argues you can often trace trade disputes back to surprisingly “petty” squabbles. Councillor Stephen Holyday, the only other nay voter, shares Pasternak’s concerns about sending a negative message to business: If city council is willing to weigh in on big labour’s side against big business outside its jurisdiction, imagine what it might do within the 416.

But he also subscribes to a simpler and more radical notion that “motions before council are supposed to be for the benefit of the citizens of Toronto.”

What sweet, strange music that is.

As far as the practical effects of this motion go, there probably aren’ t many. It seems unlikely that GM will ever make a vehicle in Mexico that Toronto needs where no alternative exists.

Mind you, if the alternative was also made in Mexico by another company, and Oshawa’s GM plant was closed anyway, and the GM vehicle is the superior option, it’s impossible to see how Torontonians come out ahead.

Toronto should be miles beyond buying anything for reasons other than best product and best price, especially as its decades of loyalty to Bombardier — whose Thunder Bay plant is roughly as near Toronto as Nashville — were repaid with shoddy streetcars delivered months and years behind schedule.

More to the point, with tens of billions of unfunded capital projects on the books, a provincial government neutral- to- hostile to the city’s very existence and who knows what to come in next year’s federal election, it should be clearer than ever to Toronto that it is basically on its own out there in the big bad world, and ought to behave accordingly.

This would include, at the very least, more than two councillors, and a nominally conservative mayor, voting against this kind of student union bullcrap.