Stellantis hires 1,000 new employees in Windsor, as dispute with government festers

Automaker and Ottawa embroiled in a fight over decision to indefinitely pause renovating an Ontario assembly plantYou can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.Global automaker Stellantis NV says it has hired 1,000 new employees in the past month in Windsor, Ont., where it is adding a third shift at its assembly plant, plus an additional 240 employees from its Brampton, Ont., plant have transferred there.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Typically, such a hiring spree and a third shift would signal boom times and might even be celebrated, but Stellantis is embroiled in a dispute with the federal government about its decision to indefinitely pause renovating its assembly plant in Brampton.That decision has left thousands of workers worried about their future and raised concerns about how the United States tariffs are impacting jobs in the Canadian auto sector.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againInterested in more newsletters? Browse here.In recent weeks, Stellantis executives have appeared at parliamentary hearings, and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has accused the company of breaching its contract to retool the Brampton plant. The project was tied to a $3.6-billion package of investments in the company’s Canadian operations, for which it negotiated roughly $1 billion in support from the federal and Ontario governments.Trevor Longley, who took over as the chief executive in Canada for Stellantis in October, said the company is being unfairly targeted given it has invested $7.9 billion in the country since 2022, which is more than any other automaker. It intends to add 1,500 new jobs in total at the Windsor plant to bring employment up to 6,000 people.“The reality is that especially in Windsor, we’re the largest employer, to my knowledge, in that area and really kind of a central industrial figure,” he said. “Adding 1,500 jobs is a massive increase … so the story is not really out there that we’re not employing fewer employees than we used to in Canada.”Longley said Stellantis is responsible for Canada’s first and only battery cell manufacturing plant so far, a roughly $6-billion joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution Ltd., which has hired 1,100 employees since 2023 and is still hiring.Furthermore, the company said it has hired 600 engineers since 2022 at its automotive research and development centre in Windsor to work on “future mobility,” such as battery technology and other aspects of electrification. Stellantis also invested in the auto assembly plant there so it could make electric vehicles (EVs), hybrids and internal combustion engine vehicles.The same work was underway at its Brampton plant, which closed in late 2023 for retooling and was supposed to reopen next year. But in February, Stellantis paused work, and then shocked its workers in October by announcing that the Jeep Compass, which it had said would be produced in Brampton, would be produced in Illinois.That tied into a US$13-billion investment in its U.S. operations. The transfer of investment that had been earmarked for Canada to the U.S. ignited a political controversy in Ottawa.“Stellantis’s decision to move production from Brampton to the U.S. is completely unacceptable,” Joly said last week on CPAC, “so we’re suing Stellantis. We had a deal; they broke it and we want our money back.”Earlier this month, Joly served a notice of default — a precursor to a potential lawsuit — to Stellantis on the agreement it signed. In her televised interview, Joly said the government made protecting Brampton jobs a priority, including when it agreed to provide production subsidies and financial support so that Stellantis could build its battery plant in Windsor.So far, the federal government has given Stellantis about $222 million, while Ontario said it has not dispersed the roughly $132 million that was specifically tied to the Brampton reopening, so the company has not yet taken all of the $1 billion it negotiated.The situation underscores the volatile state of affairs in the auto sector, where there are multiple headwinds. U.S.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to eliminate Canadian auto exports and erected a complex tariff regime to that end.The EV transition is also proceeding in fits and starts, creating new costs for automakers, and a newly ascendant auto industry in China is creating fresh competition.On top of that, the Canadian auto sector is still bouncing back from several years of lean production during COVID-19, when supply chain snafus, lockdowns and a semiconductor shortage all challenged its ability to operate.Charlotte Yates, president emerita at the University of Guelph, who has long studied the auto sector in Canada, said it is being hurt by uncertainty in at least two policy areas.Most immediately, she said the U.S. has constructed a tariff regime designed to chip away at the sector, including by drawing parts supplier companies to the U.S.“The way in which the tariff regime has upended the auto industry is kind of bizarre,” she said. “I don’t think anyone would have predicted that of all the people Trump wants to go after, it’s Canada and Mexico.”Yates said there is also uncertainty about the EV transition. Trump has scrapped many of the policies that favoured EVs in the U.S. Canada, meanwhile, temporarily suspended its EV mandate policy that required EVs to make up 20 per cent of automakers’ total sales by 2026.The result is that EV sales are growing nearly everywhere in the world except North America.China, which has built massive EV production facilities, is likely to be the major winner as the U.S. and Canada retreat from the technology and battle one another over market access, Yates said. Amidst such uncertainty, she expressed doubt that Stellantis would reopen its facility in Brampton anytime soon.Greig Mordue, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton who was formerly general manager of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, also expressed doubt that the Brampton facility would reopen.Mordue said if it only comes down to paying back the $222 million in federal funding Stellantis received, that would amount to a “rounding error” for the global automaker. It posted approximately US$164 billion in revenue in 2024.But he said the government is right to pressure Stellantis because the longer it takes to figure out a solution for Brampton, the less chance there is that it will be reopened.“Everybody’s waiting to see if we can ride out Trump,” he said. “The answer is no. There will be no industry left and all of the Trump edicts will be so baked in that it’ll take generations, if ever, to undo.”Longley said he is a proud Canadian and wants to protect jobs here, not eliminate them. He said there are complex shifts underway in the auto sector, but that reopening Brampton is his priority.“I get up every morning, literally, trying to figure out a solution for Brampton,” he said. “That is the conversation we’re having inside. We’re not having any conversations, not a single one, about how do we wrap this up? We’re having conversations about what is the next stage.”The company is paying the plant’s 3,000-plus employees about 70 per cent of their salary and recently topped up their payments until the next collective bargaining agreement later this year, Longley said.“Obviously it’s complicated by the political landscape right now, but I would say we’re trying to work in very good faith with the government to get to a solution that’s sustainable for Brampton,” he said. “It’s not good for anybody to put a solution in that’s going to blow up in a year or two; we really need to do the right thing by the employees there, and certainly by the community there.”• Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.