MADE IN CANADA
For a while, this country manufactured its own vehicles. Jill McIntosh looks back at that time when Canadians bought Monarchs, Meteors, Gray-Dorts and Bricklins.
While there are a few automakers producing vehicles in Canadian factories, all of them are now subsidiaries of companies based outside the country. We don’t have any mainstream Canadian automakers making cars now, but we used to, and we made some pretty cool stuff when we did.
What might have been our first vehicle is as old as the country itself. Henry Seth Taylor, a watchmaker in Quebec, made a steampowered buggy in 1867. He couldn’t get any buyers interested in it, and after he crashed it — for all the work he put into it, he never added brakes — it got stashed in a barn and was forgotten. But after the first modern gasoline automobile was created in Germany a little less than two decades later, everyone wanted in on the action.
A few Canadians had vehicles around the turn of the 20th century, including a hand-built electric one made for a Toronto lawyer in 1893 that’s believed to be the country’s first battery-powered car. Because they didn’t have to be cranked, electric cars were popular until the gas engine self-starter was invented. By 1903, small Canadian companies were building low-volume cars such as the LeRoy, Queen, and Redpath.
Ultimately, the key to Canadian success was with the United States, which had far more automakers serving a larger market. To cut down on development costs, most Canadian cars were versions of American vehicles built under licence, or assembled from U.S. components. Seeing potential in a car that Henry Ford was making south of the border, even before the famous Model T, wagon builder Gordon McGregor obtained the rights to build it and formed Ford of Canada in 1904 in Walkerville, Ont., which is now part of Windsor.
In Oshawa, Ont., the McLaughlin Carriage Company also wanted in on making the horseless variety. After a stalled attempt to engineer its own design, it partnered with Buick and built its first McLaughlin-Buick for 1908. Ten years later, it became General Motors of Canada. Chrysler, the youngest of the “Big Three” automakers, would form its Canadian subsidiary in 1925.
Up until the late 1920s, Canada had about 75 automakers. Some turned out only a handful of cars, such as Montreal’s Forster and Manitoba’s Winnipeg, while others did very well, including Ontario’s Gray-Dort, Tudhope, and Russell. But as small, independent U.S. companies failed, unable to keep pace with the huge Detroit automakers, the firms that built Canadian versions of them closed as well.
In 1936, to protect Canadian manufacturing, Ottawa imposed a 17.5 per cent tariff on imported vehicles. This eventually resulted in an odd assortment of “Canadaonly” models to get around it. Most were trim changes, such as the Pontiac Beaumont, based on the U.S. Chevrolet Chevelle, and the 1960 Frontenac, a maple leafemblazoned version of Ford’s new Falcon. Others were cobbled out of the parts bins, including the 1963 Plymouth Valiant. Canadians couldn’t buy the all-new Dodge Dart that debuted south of the border that year, and instead got that model’s larger body but with a Plymouth hood and fenders hung on the front.
Canada also had different dealer networks. Our brand allocation could leave some dealers out of popular segments, so American models received differentiating trim for Canadian stores. That created the Mercury pickup truck, so that Lincoln-Mercury dealers could sell a truck alongside their Ford brethren, while the Fargo pickup was sold by Plymouth-Chrysler dealers who couldn’t get Dodge trucks. Our Ford dealers got an upscale model with the Monarch, while Mercury stores sold the entry-level Meteor. Both brands were unknown in the U.S.
Most of the Canada-only models wrapped up shortly after the 1965 Auto Pact, which eliminated the tariffs. Still, many Canadians had grown attached to the names. Fargo lasted until 1972, while the Pontiac Acadian, a version of the Chevy Chevette, held on until 1987.
There were a few other blips on our auto radar. Studebaker’s subsidiary plant in Hamilton, Ont., made cars from 1947 until 1966, two years after the company in Indiana went bankrupt and closed in 1964. Luxury automaker Packard briefly built cars in Windsor in the 1930s. Volvo assembled knockdown units from Sweden for more than three decades in Nova Scotia, while Hyundai had a short-lived plant in Quebec.
Perhaps the flashiest Canadianmade vehicle was the Bricklin, a gull-winged, plastic-bodied sports car built by American entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin after he convinced the New Brunswick government to fund his factories there. Canadians couldn’t buy them, because Bricklin sold all of them to his American distribution company for less than they cost to build. The futuristic cars were fraught with manufacturing issues, and the province finally called a halt in 1975 after sinking $23 million into the boondoggle.
Today, all of the major auto plants in Canada are subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies. We do get a couple of cars that Americans can’t buy, such as the Nissan Micra and Kia Rondo, but they’re made elsewhere. Still, for a while, we had an auto industry that we could actually call our own.