Innovation will be crucial if GM Oshawa to be saved

Can the General Motors plant in Oshawa be saved, and should it be?

With the notable exception of the union that represents about 2,500 GM production workers in Oshawa, the response to that first question has been “no.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have said they will talk to GM, but those conversations won’t involve offers of cash or pleas for salvation.

Ford has already spoken to GM once. His summary of the chances the plant will stay open beyond the next 12 months: “That ship has already left the dock.”

Both governments and their local cabinet ministers – Laurie Scott for the Ontario Tories and Maryam Monsef for the federal Liberals – are talking about how to support the families of those who lose their jobs.

This would once have been a big issue for Peterborough. As many as 1,000 city and county residents worked at the assembly plant and many more were employed by local manufacturers and service companies that counted GM as a major customer.

Today the number of local GM employees is in the low hundreds and its spin-off effect is not nearly as big.

But jobs are jobs. Everyone who is discounting union president Jerry Dias’s chance of changing GM’s mind would still like to see him succeed.

It has happened here before. Decades ago, the U.S.based head office of Quaker Oats announced its Peterborough plant and others in the U.S. would be shuttered.

Peterborough-based executives of Quaker Canada convinced the company the local operation was successful and closing it would be a bad business strategy.

The plant is still here with most of the hundreds of jobs that were at stake.

And Unifor, the auto workers union, has fought off past threats to close or significantly dismantle GM’s Oshawa operation.

To have any chance of success a campaign would have to focus on the plant’s strengths.

Give up the two car production lines, which have been cut back as car sales decrease.

Make a case for continuing to assemble the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, where sales are strong.

Go after production of electric vehicles, which GM says are its beacon for the future. Push the fact that Oshawa is the company’s highest-rated plant for quality production and reliability.

And make the case for more R and D and engineering work on electric vehicle technology here.

The company already has R and D staff in Oshawa, Toronto and south-western Ontario. Toronto and the Waterloo Region are recognized as leading international centres for innovation and research.

That same “massing” strategy that has GM shifting production work to the southern U.S. and Mexico could apply here on the innovation side.

The argument that GM owes Canada something after Ottawa and Queen’s Park helped save the company with a $10.3 billion “loan” deal in 2008 won’t get any traction.

The company has made good on everything it agreed to in that deal and has no legal obligation to stay in Oshawa. Morals and ethics, unfortunately, don’t apply.

That deal – which ultimately cost taxpayers $3.5 billion – is all the evidence needed for not offering cash incentives.

The realistic approach is for the union and both levels of government to push GM hard on the innovation front.

That won’t save GM Oshawa, but it’s a future-friendly strategy.