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

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”