Mr. Speaker, I rise today in the House to once again call upon the government to create an auto policy to deal with the ongoing issue of losing auto jobs to Mexico, the United States and other parts of the world.
I asked a question on December 11 which highlighted the fact that Economic Development Canada, a crown corporation, provided a loan guarantee to General Motors without any conditions on it. What it effectively did was it led General Motors to outsource part of that automotive work by the CAW members to Bombardier, which then outsourced down to Mexico, eventually putting up to 800 workers in London, Ontario, out of work. That is a shameful practice. It is certainly not the type of policy we want. We are creating a policy for workers in Mexico but not for Canada.
I want to touch on another part of the question. I asked about getting something concrete in place so we could compete and ensure that we had those plants for the future, especially now that we were looking at new technologies and opportunities to reduce emissions and make Kyoto targets. Tailpipe emissions is where the improvements will be made. However right now that is not happening. Those plants are being lost.
As good example, a Sprinter plant was lost last summer. This plant was to go to Windsor, Ontario. It would involve $1.2 billion in investment and 3,000 jobs. Windsor offered them “one of the best sites available”. It was lost because the Ontario and federal governments balked at providing infrastructure and other training costs. The key obstacle was also training flexibility.
One of the arguments that the government and the Minister of Industry relied upon at the time was not actually correct. I will read from an article. It states:
[The Minister of Industry] said he “was involved in the process” to bring the Sprinter to Windsor, but that the deal fell apart because the van would not have met free trade rules requiring that most of a vehicle's content come from Canada, the United States or Mexico.
The reason was not the failure of governments to come to the table.
That is not accurate. I had the parliamentary library do some research. What happened under that suggestion was we could not do it because of the content laws of production under the North American Free Trade Agreement. However there is a clause in the agreement that when a brand new plant comes to a community, it allows five years to reduce that content. They did not exercise that option.
This plant comes from Europe. The plant has now moved into the southern U.S. It will not do just on time delivery on ships, barges and whatnot to get them across the Atlantic Ocean. Those plants will eventually be built in those communities, and we have lost that.
The Oakville plant, a Ford flexible plant, has 1,500 jobs that could be lost. The Holy Grail in the auto industry is up for grabs right now. In Windsor 3,000 jobs are up for another billion dollar plant from DaimlerChrysler. Navistar in Chatham is losing its last jobs because it is moving to Mexico.
After all this time, why does the government still not have a clear auto policy?