moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Madam Speaker, I want to thank you for granting this emergency debate tonight and I want to thank my colleagues for being part of this. I want to say how much it meant to me. After the Conservatives requested an emergency date, following the terrible news that leaked out last night about the General Motors closure in Oshawa, it was heartening to see the NDP and the Liberals also request an emergency debate on this, many of whom are in the House tonight.
This is an event that needs to be addressed and I am glad the Chair granted the debate tonight. It was earth-shattering news this morning with respect to GM Oshawa. The reverberations are being felt in Oshawa, Bowmanville, Whitby, Pickering and the greater Toronto area, but primarily in the Durham region. While my riding is called Durham, I do not claim to represent the entire region. Many people in the House represent the residents of Durham and we all feel the pain of the families impacted by the announcement of the closure of the GM assembly operation by the end of next year.
We often talk about numbers in the House, large deficit numbers or the number of people impacted, but every single number is a kitchen table. We heard today there would be 2,600 layoffs, some people said as many as 4,000. A report filed a few years ago about the impact of the operations of General Motors Oshawa suggested the closure would lead to 33,000 direct and indirect job losses as a result of stopping to make automobiles in Oshawa. Those are numbers, but at the heart of every one of them is a family, a kitchen table, where people will be talking tonight about the fact that mom or dad may be losing a job. I do not think that is lost on anyone in this place, regardless of the side of the House. That is why I hope an emergency debate will address some of the underpinnings of the decision that went into GM's announcement today. I certainly think it was a bad decision and badly executed, but we can maybe address some of the underlying causes that led to it.
Also, this is very personal for me as the member of Parliament for Durham. I grew up in a GM household. I knew my father John, who later went into provincial politics, as a guy who worked at GM. We used to go, like many families, to the forklift truck races held by the CAW, now Unifor, and the Christmas parties for families. I saw my dad as one of 25,000 men and women at the time, in the 1970s and 1980s, who worked at General Motors Oshawa.
I know first-hand the impact this is having on the 3,000 or so directly impacted by the news today. However, I also know that it is reverberating across the GTA and southern Ontario to many of the retiree families and pensioners, because they are part of the GM family. In fact, the private member's bill I introduced was, in part, to give a bit of certainty to pensioners, many GM pensioners, who were very worried about their pension a few years ago.
This personal impact is when Parliament functions at its best. Not only was my father an employee at General Motors, but when I was at Bowmanville High School, I worked there as a summer co-op student in the battery plant. The battery plant ceased to exist some time ago, but it was a great experience for a young person like myself to see a workforce in action, to see the jobs that created the opportunity across our region. I still remember the impact of that job for me. The engineer who I worked under, John Toomey, was a Royal Military College of Canada graduate, an engineer. I saw the problem solving he brought to efficiency issues within that plant. That was one of the factors that led me to look to the Royal Military College of Canada.
I have said that family tables are impacted by the announcement today. Around those tables are also the bedrock of our community: the hockey coaches, the soccer coaches, the dance instructors, the Kiwanis members, the Rotarians, the legion members. In the Durham region, there have been generations of GM families that have been building the community. That has to be part of this debate. This is why I am glad all sides wanted this to happen.
These are not just numbers. These are families. Their cumulative impact has shown that each year, at least $1.1 billion of the Canadian GDP is a direct impact of GM of Oshawa. That study I talked about earlier which projected the risk of 33,000 job losses as a result of the GM Oshawa closure also said that the GDP of our country and the province of Ontario would drop in the amount of about $5.7 billion over the two years following the closure.
As I have said often when speaking about the challenge facing our resource sector, the resource sector in western Canada benefits Ontario, and the success of the auto industry in Ontario has benefited all of Canada for a century or more. These are the important national debates we have to bring to this Parliament and that we have to address as a team.
I will speak for a minute about this 100-year origin. The plant itself is not 100 years old. I have heard that expression today so let us wipe that away. The McLaughlin family, which was the origin of GM Canada, and truly one of the founding partners of GM worldwide, was a small family from Enniskillen, Ontario, in my riding. The family made carriages for horse-drawn carts and vehicles as they were at that time. It was a remarkable family which lost one of its sons, who was a lawyer in the area, in the Great War. One of the other members of the family created Canada Dry. This company was at the forefront of innovation in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In my area, the town of Bowmanville made a big mistake. It would not lend the McLaughlin family some money, and so the family found its loan in Oshawa and Oshawa became “The City that Motivates Canada”. That was its slogan when I was young. The auto industry developed in Canada in Oshawa as a result of the McLaughlin Carriage Company and then later, McLaughlin Motor Works.
The McLaughlin family then partnered with the Durant family of the United States, and the McLaughlin-Buick became a key vehicle. Later on, the family acquired Chevrolet. The McLaughlin family was one of the original investors in General Motors.
That is the century of heritage and that is what makes this so disappointing. Were it not for the presence of our industry in Oshawa a century ago, there would be no GM today. It is not lost on the families in our community, who have had not just two, but in some cases, three generations of their families working at General Motors.
Does that mean that out of historic convention or out of feeling like it owes it to the community GM has to stay? No. We have to remain competitive. We have to show GM that Oshawa is a place where it wants to continue to build vehicles for the future. That is why we are having this debate tonight. The news today was less about there not being any allocation of vehicle to Oshawa. The news was that Oshawa was not considered to be part of the future of General Motors. It was not seen as part of its competitive ecosystem of making vehicles, assembling vehicles and their component parts.
That should concern people because in the past and in recent years, the men and women at General Motors have statistically been some of the most productive workers within the GM network of assembly plants. They have had the ability to respond and be very competitive. For many years, a skilled workforce, a community that has supported the development and growth of GM, our health care system, which provided a competitive advantage to manufacturing in Ontario through the 1960s, our dollar differential, all of these items were part of the competitive advantage that kept General Motors manufacturing vehicles in Canada.
Why I think we need the emergency debate is it concerned me today that the Prime Minister wanted to just turn the page and talk about how we have to support the families and the workers. I agree with him on that. However, within mere hours of that announcement, I felt that we, as the elected officials of the area, owe it to those families to at least determine what we can do in the next year to address the underlying conditions that made Oshawa appear as one of the facilities listed today.
I know that Oshawa has shrunk in size from its heyday when my father was there and I was a young kid, with 25,000 men and women working there. However, it remains a productive and effective facility. In fact, it is an adaptive facility which, just in the last few years, with investments and flexibility in the line, could produce sedans or trucks. Therefore, when I saw the news today that it wants to pivot production to electric, zero emissions, zero collisions, this is the type of flexible facility that could easily pivot to that as well.
I would also note that our university, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, or On Tech, as I like to call it, has world-class automotive supports, including the best and most advanced wind tunnel and research facility for automobiles in North America. We have a very advanced and progressive local distribution company for electricity, Veridian, which has been working on electric and hybrid car promotion within the region, working at making more spots available for GO train commuters, and these sorts of things. We also have the Darlington nuclear generation station, where we generate part of Ontario's electricity emission-free. We could pivot far easier than any other of the Great Lakes area manufacturing facilities that are impacted to a zero emissions, zero collision, high-tech smart car system off the line in Oshawa. Why not?
We owe it to the families to not just turn the page within hours, but to work together on a plan to address the underlying decisions which led to Oshawa's inclusion, that despite 100 years of history, it is no longer going to be on the production schedule for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Let us look at what the conditions are and whether we can, as a team, address them.
The minister for industry has been doing a lot of media interviews. I appreciate the compassion he has shown. However, I want to know what he has been hearing from General Motors. As is the normal case, and as was the case with the Conservative government, the industry minister impacts jobs and employers across the country, and is usually one of the most regularly met with, or might I say lobbied. In the last few years, the company that has met with him more than any other is General Motors. I would like to know what underlying concerns it had, because if we can work on some of those concerns, we will see the opposition supporting that.
I fear it is a cumulative effect of some things out of the hands of the federal government, in the hands of the provincial Wynne government. Some of the moves it made on labour rates put upward pressure and contributed to an environment where power rates and labour rates were making Ontario less attractive to manufacturers. I heard that everywhere I travelled in the last two years. Add on top of that payroll tax increases a few years ago by the Liberal government. Potentially we have an environment where, if we address some of these conditions, we can make it competitive again.
I would also note that the government's carbon tax plan it has levied would have exempted General Motors as a large emitter. As my colleague the member for Carleton noted today, perhaps the fact that it had to omit large emitters or risk the fact the emitters would leave because of competitiveness issues, might be a sign there was concern about a rush to a carbon tax at a time when there was no such tax in the United States.
For a few years in this House, I have said that the auto industry, since the 1960s, has been so integrated in Canada, it is really a Great Lakes auto production area.
Since 1965 in Oshawa, 85% of the cars we produce have been sold in the United States as a result of the Auto Pact, which led to the U.S. FTA, which led to NAFTA. We are integrated, so if Windsor faces a new input cost or rising pressures or payroll taxes, and communities across the border in Michigan do not, that is a competitive issue that we cannot let happen when there is a Great Lakes region for auto production.
It is the same with the carbon tax. The government recognized that and exempted emitters like the auto industry from it but it did not exempt small to medium-sized industries. The government knew there was going to be continued upward cost pressure from supply chain networks within Ontario. Is that part of it? Can we delay the implementation of this tax? That should be something we talk about.
I would be remiss if I did not reference the fact that I have had concerns for over a year with the NAFTA discussions. In the minister's speech that she gave two summers ago at the University of Ottawa outlining Canada's objectives for a renegotiated NAFTA, she did not mention the auto industry. We know the so-called progressive agenda, but we did not hear about the auto industry. There would be no free trade between Canada and the U.S. but for the auto industry. At the time, I said consistently, “Get auto right and the rest will fall in line.” Six months later, in January, when they proposed a new parts calculation approach for the North American, Great Lakes and now Mexican auto production industry, I praised that at the time. Get auto right between Canada and the U.S. and the rest of our trade concerns will follow.
We did not see that. In fact, we saw section 232 security tariffs applied toward steel and aluminum which have impacted General Motors and its suppliers. A lot of parts and chassis development are stamped steel. Much of that steel is from the United States. What we have seen are months of prolonged tariffs. We have seen now Canadian retaliatory tariffs actually hurting Canadians much more than they impact the U.S. I do not mind putting a tariff on bourbon, although I have friends who like bourbon, because the LCBO buys bourbon. It is a state monopoly in Ontario. However, to put in retaliatory tariffs when we know they are going to hurt Canadian manufacturers more than the U.S., the intended target of this retaliation, is dumb policy. The Liberals said they would be nimble and adapt. Was that part of it?
I said from the beginning my personal connection here through my family, and the fact that I remember in grade school at St. Joseph's that most of my friends, either directly or indirectly, were touched by or had a parent working at General Motors. This strikes at our community. I do not want to attach blame. Let us come up with a plan to make ourselves competitive, and let us not just wait for them to come to us. I know full well the government knew there were risks here before yesterday. The pace and quantity of meetings showed there were concerns about competitive operations. The minister has said that every time he met with GM's president he would mention, “What about Oshawa?”
Well, what about Oshawa? What are we doing to make sure this is not the first of big manufacturing jobs in Ontario which are now saying that after payroll taxes, after carbon taxes, after wage rate pressures, after tariffs, and after trade uncertainty, they may start looking at other jurisdictions? Let us address those issues. This is an opportunity where if the Liberals do not turn the page but come up with a plan to address some of the underlying risks, we will be there shoulder to shoulder to address these issues.
I believe in manufacturing. We have the best and most highly skilled workforce. We are innovators. We have a heritage, access to markets and great colleges and universities. We just need to be competitive within the Great Lakes market and with our U.S. neighbours. When they are making moves, we cannot go in the opposite direction, raising taxes and regulations.
I hope with this emergency debate that we show our support for the families impacted but also show them that until a lock is put on the gate, I am going to be looking for ways to showcase the opportunity in Oshawa, address some of the underlying competitive issues that must have gone into the inclusion of Oshawa on this list and show that we stand with the workers.