OTTAWA, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- The announcement of U.S. automaker General Motors (GM) to close its plant in Ontario in central Canada has caused strong reactions from the country's politicians.
Early Monday, GM announced that it has decided to stop operations of the assembly plant by the end of 2019, as part of a global restructuring.
The plant employs about 2,800 people in Oshawa, Ontario now. The workers walked off the job after getting the announcement of closure.
The news caught politicians at all levels and of all political stripes completely off guard despite their frequent conversations with the automaker about the plant's future over the past year.
"Are we disappointed? Yeah, we're disappointed in GM," Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters in Toronto, pointing out that the company benefited from billions of dollars in life-support from the government during the economic downturn of a decade ago.
Ford vowed that the provincial government will help Canadian workers look for new jobs, saying he has authorized Employment Ontario to deploy its Rapid Re-Employment and Training Services program.
The premier also called on the federal government to extend employment insurance eligibility by five weeks to a maximum of 50 weeks.
"We are deeply disappointed. This is disappointing news. This is a critical sector for our economy. There are many suppliers, many academic institutions, many employees that rely on this sector," Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains told reporters in Ottawa on Monday.
The Canadian government loaned GM 10.8 billion Canadian dollars (about 8.1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2009 to help keep the U.S. company afloat as it faced a possible insolvency. A condition of the loan was that GM would not reduce its manufacturing operations in Canada for six years.
Last week, the Canadian government gave corporations like GM a tax giveaway of 14 billion Canadian dollars (about 10.5 billion U.S. dollars) to guarantee jobs remain in Canada.
Bains said GM told the Canadian government this closure had to do with changing consumer preferences, downplaying any connection to an increasing economic nationalism in the United States.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government will do everything they can to help the families affected "get back on their feet," saying he had spoken with GM CEO Mary Barra to express his "deep disappointment" over the closure.
Trudeau then spent a good portion of question period fielding questions in the Canadian parliament from the opposition about whether his government has a plan to save these jobs.
Canada's Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer described GM's apparent plans as "a devastating blow" for auto workers and marks an end of a long and proud tradition.
Scheer said that his party will call for an emergency debate in the House of Commons "to press the Liberal government for a plan on how they will respond to the thousands of people out of work and how they will protect remaining manufacturing jobs in Ontario," he said in a statement.
During a press conference on the closure Monday afternoon, Scheer said that his party would be calling for the debate "so parliamentarians can talk about what can be done. We don't want to give up today. We owe it to those workers and their families to explore every single possible option to save these jobs and to save this plant that is so important, so critical to the economy of southern Ontario and indeed to Canada."
Canadian New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh called it "devastating news," and said that "clearly not enough has been done to protect these jobs."
The sudden and apparently irreversible closure of one of GM's oldest car plants represents a new challenge for Prime Minister Trudeau after a year of uncertainty over the future of North American trade, continuing tariffs on steel and aluminum and new North American content rules for autos.
Jerry Dias, president of Unifor which represents Canadian auto workers, told plant workers the union intends to fight the closure.
