Oshawa Mayor Frustrated Over Help For Auto Sector

As General Motors plans to temporarily cut at least 2,000 jobs across North America, the Canadian Auto Workers union says the newest layoffs will affect approximately 700 here in Canada starting February 9th. In a statement released by the Canadian Press, Oshawa Mayor John Gray said it’s discouraging to hear so much negative news about the fledging auto sector.

“We’ve gone through these types of things before but never, ever to this extent,” said Gray. “But to be consistently receiving bad news — first it was a shift at the truck plant, then it became the whole truck plant — now it is car production.”

News of the layoffs came on the eve of a deadline for Canadian automakers to provide a restructuring plan to federal and Ontario politicians who have been asked to bail out the troubled industry. At 400,000 jobs connected in some way to the auto industry, Gray says this comes as a “big frustration” for auto-dependent cities and what he calls “wishy-washiness” from the federal government.

“I think they just got to make a decision — do they want to shed 400,000 jobs in the province of Ontario?”

GM’s U. S. sales fell 41 per cent in November when compared with the same month last year, and they are down 22 per cent for the first eleven months of the year. Overall, U. S. sales were off 37 per cent in November, the worst level in twenty-six years, and were down more than 16 per cent so far this year.