Premier Ford tours auto show
Ontario Premier Doug Ford spent Monday afternoon admiring the handiwork of automotive manufacturers on display in Detroit before meeting with industry executives to attract them to — and keep them in — Ontario
For more than an hour, Ford traversed the North American International Auto Show, shaking hands with company representatives and listening to descriptions of new vehicles at each stop. He looked inside a variety of automobiles, but didn’t sit in any of them.
His goal was to convince manufacturers that Ontario is the best place to invest, he said.
“The message I’m sending out there is that Ontario is open for business,” Ford said before entering a private meeting to talk about General Motors with Unifor national president Jerry Dias and Navdeep Bains, federal minister of innovation, science, and economic development. Ford sidestepped reporter questions about the possibility of keeping GM’s plant open in Oshawa, opting instead to discuss other areas of job expansion. “It’s open for jobs,” Ford said, repeating the Ontario PC endeavour to make the province as inviting for investors as possible by reducing taxes and creating businessfriendly legislation. That includes reducing the number of regulations businesses must comply with, a decision Ford announced in December.
In October, the Ontario PCs announced the Making Ontario Open for Business Act, which reversed most of the employment law reforms created by the previous provincial Liberal government. Although the world’s largest automotive manufacturers compete to some extent on a dealership level, the real issue is manufacturing, Ford said.
“When they’re manufacturing, they’re competing against their own plants around the world,” Ford said. “We want to make sure that we’re the most competitive regions in the world to manufacture automobiles — but also on the technology side.”
Ford pointed to General Motors’ Technical Centre in Markham as an example of current provincial growth in the auto industry. There, the company hired at least 500 people last year, and plans to hire more.
“That’s what we’re encouraging.” Automotive executives were excited to hear about opportunities in Ontario, Ford said after a number of them on the showroom floor. “Our goal is to make sure we attract new businesses,” Ford said. “That way we don’t have to worry every few years if a plant is closing or not.”