‘HEARTBREAKING’ LOSS FOR OSHAWA
GM’s move to pull the plug on production at the end of 2019 to invest in new technology has triggered anger, uncertainty — and faint hope the plant that’s ‘woven in the fabric’ of the city can be saved For thousands who owe their livelihood to GM, this de
Maybe it was a brother. Or a sister. An uncle, a cousin, a friend. Maybe even — like this writer — it was your own dad who once worked within that wonder of industrial wonders, GM’s sprawling auto plant in Oshawa.
Almost a million square metres under a single roof. A facility so vast you could fit 600 hockey rinks inside and still skate circles around General Motors Canada’s crown jewel without getting snow on your face.
And now, unthinkably for multiple generations of middleclass southern Ontarians who knew its power to change lives — to feed, house and bankroll futures, so that the children of autoworkers could spring forth with college-educated hope — GM Oshawa will be mothballed. A manufacturing behemoth whose roots stretch all the way back to the horse-and-buggy era is soon to be dust.
Can we still call ourselves the Golden Horseshoe, now that GM is about to strangle what for decades was the golden goose? For those raised to understand Ontario’s place as the engine of industrial Canada, Oshawa was, decade upon decade upon decade, the spark plug.
“I owe my entire livelihood to GM,” Oshawa native Bronwyn Cawker, a Toronto chef, told the Star.
“From my grandpa, who worked managing the stamping plant to support a family of eight, to my father, who apprenticed there as an electrician and worked there for over 30 years to support our brood of eight, every adult I knew as a kid worked at GM in some capacity,” Cawker said.
“I even spent a summer working on the line at GM when I was 21. This place is woven in the fabric of my being. Of the town’s being.”
For anyone paying more than passing attention, Oshawa’s pain has been slow-motion agony, as the city, like the rest of the Canadian auto industry, has struggled with the twin forces of globalization and automation — and now, a wholesale shift to retool for the age of autonomous, electric vehicles. Oshawa has withstood and survived a generation of cuts that reduced the plant from its million-vehicles-per-year peak involving a payroll of 40,000 to a workforce now less than a tenth of what it was. But amid the bailouts, buyouts, outsourcing and downsizing, GM Oshawa was still there. And if shrinking numbers showed the majority of the economic pain had already been felt, nothing quite kills like actual death. And barring what would almost certainly be controversial government intervention, GM now appears determined to mothball the facility, ending an Oshawa legacy of car-making that stretches back 111 years and beyond, back to the horse-andbuggy era.
As many online commenters have noted, the symbolic heft of mothballing Oshawa means, among other things, that Col. R. Samuel McLaughlin is spinning in his grave. In 1887, McLaughlin started out as an apprentice in the upholstery department of his father’s company, the McLaughlin Carriage Works, which was doing a thriving business building and exporting horse-drawn buggies throughout the British Empire, and went on to re-engineer the vehicles for the motor age, using Buick engines.
In 1907, his McLaughlin Motor Car Company roared to life in Oshawa and soon thereafter, in partnership with GM, he became president of the newly formed General Motors of Canada. He remained on the board until well into the 1960s, when the already thriving Oshawa plant expanded into a facility that would command global interest with the arrival of the 1965 Auto Pact, the forerunner to our modern-day NAFTA free-trade agreement.
“In the 1970s, China sent a large trade mission to Canada and all they wanted to do was go to Oshawa and see the GM Autoplex — they wanted to build what we had and 40 years later we are slowly but surely losing it,” said Dimitry Anastaskis, a history professor with Trent University and the author of three books on Canada’s auto sector.
“I’m not being nativist here, I’m not saying, ‘Oh it would be nice to go back to the1950s.’ The fact is that manufacturing in Canada is going to continue to shrink, inevitably.
“But the reason the Golden Horseshoe is the Golden Horseshoe is because of the high-paying manufacturing jobs and the idea that we just walk away from that is just silly. I am an advocate for managing that shrinkage in the least painful way possible, while still retaining enough of it so that you are still a player,” Anastaskis told the Star in an interview during the three-way negotiations to update NAFTA.
“The goal needs to be managing that transition to a postindustrial economy where you still have some left — because the alternative is an entirely service-based economy that exacerbates problems around inequality and leads to a precariousness in the workforce that is so destructive and unhealthy for ordinary workers.”
McLaughlin, a noted philanthropist, steered much of his fortune to public works, donating generously to York and Queen’s universities, University of Montreal and Oshawa General Hospital, and, perhaps most memorably, establishing the planetarium in Toronto that bears his name.
East of Toronto McLaughlin’s name echoes still in such donated sites as Camp Samac, a 66-hectare (163-acre) scouting retreat in Oshawa. His former mansion, the 55-room Parkwood Estate, now a National Historic Site, occupies an entire city block in central Oshawa, where it has served as a film and TV backdrop for productions ranging from X-Men and Murdoch Mysteries.
He lived to age 100 before his death in 1972, and once was described by Toronto financier E.P. Taylor as “a man with a voice of brass, a body of iron and a heart of gold.”
McLaughlin and Oshawa, it is worth remembering, had experienced industrial disaster once before. In 1899, the McLaughlin factory in Oshawa was destroyed by fire, leaving its founders destitute and a crew of 600 jobless. But within a month, McLaughlin was able to move the men to a temporary plant in Gananoque, personally walking door-to-door in search of people willing to lend his team a place to sleep. There they were able to produce 3,000 carriages in six months, keeping the firm solvent, while the Oshawa plant was rebuilt with the help of a $50,000 loan from the city.
Years later, McLaughlin reflected upon that struggle, saying, “The Gananoque operation confirmed my belief that the willing, conscientious worker is the backbone of any business.”
Backbone. Brass. Iron. Gold. If there’s another like that today, please let Oshawa know.