The news that General Motors’ CAMI plant in Ingersoll will finally restart production in November should feel like a relief. But when you dig deeper, it’s hard not to see this as another warning sign for Canada’s auto industry and for the workers who keep it running.
Only one shift will return, at a slower pace, and just over 500 of the more than 1,200 employees will be recalled. For a plant that has been shut since May, that’s a cautious and frankly disappointing restart. GM insists this decision isn’t about tariffs, framing it instead as a “strategic step” to match slower-than-expected EV demand. But ask the people closest to the shop floor and you’ll hear a more complicated story.
Unifor Local 88 chair Mike Van Boekel points to sluggish electric vehicle sales and the escalating U.S.–Canada trade tensions as the real culprits. He’s not wrong. Even as EV sales inch upward, they’re nowhere near the volume needed to keep an entire assembly line humming. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs on auto imports from Canada have injected a heavy dose of uncertainty into a supply chain that depends on cross-border flow.
Consider the battery plant in Ingersoll, which remains closed despite its competitive pricing and quality. Van Boekel bluntly attributes that to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. GM couches it as “managing inventory,” but the timing tells a different story. When a factory that makes cheaper, better batteries can’t ship to its biggest market because of political brinkmanship, that’s not just market adjustment that’s a policy failure.
For the workers, the situation is more than numbers on a spreadsheet. Van Boekel is already looking for ways to encourage older employees to retire early to save jobs for younger ones. That’s admirable, but it’s a patch, not a plan. Each job “saved” this way is a quiet reminder that stable, well-paying manufacturing work is becoming less certain by the year.
GM will do what it must to protect its bottom line. That’s capitalism. But Canadian policymakers can’t shrug and call it a business decision. If Canada wants to be a serious player in the EV future, it needs to push harder for trade stability, provide clearer incentives for domestic production, and stand up when tariffs choke the very industries we’re betting on for a green economy.
The CAMI plant’s slow reboot isn’t just about one company’s production schedule. It’s about the price of political gamesmanship and the risks of pinning our industrial future on markets and neighbors that can turn on a dime.
