Oshawa native Todd Forbes doesn’t want to leave his hometown.
His apartment is in the south-central area of the Ontario city, the industrial heart where tens of thousands of General Motors workers have made a living since the company’s plant there opened in 1918.
But come Jan. 30, when GM Canada is set to cut the midnight shift at its Oshawa plant, Forbes will be out of a job. He doesn’t think he’ll find employment in the city of some 185,000 people, where he was born and raised, where his four children and seven grandchildren live.
“It’s definitely gut wrenching … I’ve lived in this area my whole life,” he said.
Instead, Forbes, 48, is considering moving to Nova Scotia with his wife and their dog, Gizmo. He said he thinks he’s more likely to find a job there — despite having experience in manufacturing, maintenance, waste management, retail and sales.
For more than a year now, Forbes has worked at TFT Global Inc., which supplies auto parts to the Oshawa GM plant. It was his first full-time job after he finished treatment for cancer and completed a college program in law and security.
But Forbes thinks his employment gap, plus Oshawa’s nine per cent unemployment rate, will work against him.
“I’m looking at, ‘Is there a job possibility where I’m making the same kind of money or a little bit less?'” he said, noting that the prospects look better in the Maritimes.
Canada’s unemployment rate hits highest rate since pandemic
Forbes is one of some 2,000 people slated to lose their jobs due to the shift layoff at GM’s Oshawa Assembly. Workers will leave behind a downsized plant now under fresh attack by U.S. tariffs and face a daunting job hunt against one of the highest unemployment rates for a major city in Canada.
The layoffs also come as the national unemployment rate reached its highest pandemic-excluded level since 2016 last month, with Ontario leading the decline, shedding about 26,000 jobs.
The Oshawa Assembly directly employs around 3,000 GM workers, with an additional 2,000 supply-chain workers from eight different companies inside the plant daily, said Jeff Gray, president of Unifor Local 222, which represents workers at the plant, as well as some suppliers.
Around 750 workers will be laid off when GM cuts the midnight shift, but an additional 1,500 people who work throughout the supply chain — including Forbes — will also lose their jobs.
Earlier this month, GM workers and its suppliers were granted a four-month reprieve when the planned shift cut was postponed to the new year from its initial November date.
But thousands of well-paying jobs are still in jeopardy, Gray says. Many workers, including himself, belong to families who have worked hard on the line for generations, often working six or seven days a week.
“It’s all we know, to tell you the truth.… It would be devastating if we lost that way of life,” he said.
GM workers at the plant are afraid for their livelihoods, says Chris Waugh, the Unifor chairperson for the Oshawa plant.
“I have members selling homes, selling their vehicles, getting ready to be laid off,” he said.
For its part, GM says it “will continue to take proactive, strategic steps to respond to evolving market conditions and production needs to support a sustainable manufacturing operation at Oshawa,” company spokesperson Ariane Pereira said in an email to CBC News.
“GM has been building vehicles in Canada since 1918, and we are implementing a plan to keep building here for Canadians for another 100-plus years,” the email read.
Oshawa’s jobless rate currently sits only behind Windsor — another auto city dealing with uncertainty caused by the U.S. President Donald Trump’s auto tariffs. Trump levelled a 25 per cent tariff on auto parts that aren’t CUSMA-compliant and the non-U.S. portion of assembled vehicles in April.
A month later, GM Canada announced it was cutting its third shift amid what it called an “evolving trade environment.”
But GM has also increased production at its Fort Wayne, Ind., plant, hiring roughly 250 temporary workers south of the border. Both the Fort Wayne and Oshawa Assembly build the light-duty Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck.
It’s unclear to what extent unemployment rates in Oshawa and Windsor can be tied to the trade war, said Brendon Bernard, a senior economist with Indeed.
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Both cities were already seeing higher-than-average unemployment rates at the start of the year, he said, and payroll employment in motor vehicle-related manufacturing industries have been down three per cent since January.
It’s a clear downswing — but not entirely out of historic norms, Bernard said.
While there have been job losses in motor vehicle manufacturing, he said layoffs have not been dramatic yet. “This could be partially because companies in these industries are holding out to see where things ultimately land.”
It is getting tougher to find new work in Canada, Bernard said; hiring has been slow, pushing up the national unemployment rate.
Of the 66,000 jobs shed across the country in August, most of them were part-time positions. Transportation, warehousing and manufacturing — sectors vulnerable to tariffs — were among the top three sectors with the most job losses.
Oshawa Mayor Dan Carter says he’s heard from several families who are planning to move to find employment, particularly in the manufacturing and industrial sector.
“For them, the uncertainty is devastating,” he said.
Still, Carter says he remains optimistic for the future of Oshawa’s auto industry. He said he sees opportunities for Oshawa to be on the cutting edge of the sector through technological advancements and research by post-secondary institutions in the city.
Carter said he is in ongoing talks with companies based in the U.S. and parts of Europe about relocating to Oshawa. He said he’s also had positive conversations with GM about the future of the Oshawa plant, though he couldn’t provide details about what was discussed.
“We’re too stupid, too stubborn to give up,” he said. “I’m not willing to say that by the end of January that those cuts will happen.”
And while GM is a major employer in the region, manufacturing industries only employ three per cent of Oshawa’s workforce today. The top three sectors are health care (at 17 per cent), followed by retail trade and educational services.
To further diversify and attract more companies, the city is waiving development fees and maintaining fast approval times, Carter said. The mayor said he’s also constantly looking for ways to help people transition from their jobs into something similar, or a new opportunity.
“We also try and sell that we’ve got a really good workforce, ready to go. That’s where the competitive edge is,” he said.
But Waugh bristles at programming seeking to retrain autoworkers, hosted in the past in Oshawa and other parts of Ontario at locations known as action centres.
“When I hear the word ‘action centre,’ I can’t stand it — because obviously we have action centres because we’re losing jobs,” he said. “People would rather continue working at General Motors, Oshawa, instead of getting retrained.”
Meanwhile, Forbes said he knows there could be job opportunities in the skilled trades, but is leery of retraining, too. By the time he completes an apprenticeship, he said, he’ll nearly be at retirement age.
He currently lives within a 10-minute drive of all his children and grandkids; two years ago, he switched in his car for a van to accommodate more of his family, and recently, Forbes packed in as many grandkids as he could and took them to the Peterborough Zoo.
Now, he’s thinking about throwing all his belongings in that same van and heading to the Maritimes.
If he does move, he said he and his wife are planning to come back to visit as often as he can.
“I’s not just the community that I’d have to give up,” Forbes said. “It’s the family being close.”
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