An Opportunity Missed

It is a peculiarly Canadian trait that we, for the most part anyway, don’t engage in as much hand-over-the-heart patriotism as our friends to the south.

Still, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that the dual Magna-Onex takeover of the Chrysler business fell on infertile ground. It would have been nice to have a Canadian car company again. With apologies to those automakers who brand their logos with a maple leaf and add the word “Canada,” it has been decades since there was a truly Canadian car company–remember the Bricklin?– and a lot more than that since there was a bona fide populist manufacturer hailing from this country.

My reasons for lamenting the demise of the aforementioned takeover go deeper than just wanting a car to call our own–though that certainly has its charms.

Perhaps more than many, I have had the pleasure of an occupation that frequently affords me the opportunity to travel abroad. While I do not count myself anything close to the most highly travelled members of the aftermarket in Canada, I have been to Europe many times, and even to the Far East on a couple of occasions.

And when I do travel, people in the automotive business ask me whether there is an automotive industry in Canada. Not how big it is, but if we have one at all. And that has happened often enough for me to believe that it’s not just from a few insular folks, nor just the consumer at large–Canada is simply not viewed as a car-building country.

This despite the fact that more than 2.3 million vehicles were built in this country in 2006; we build more cars in Ontario than they do in Michigan, more cars than they do in the UK (1.4 million), almost as many as they do in France (2.7 million), and not quite three times the number of cars that Italy builds (892,000). Heck, Sweden only builds about 10% of the number of cars we do, but I can name two definitively Swedish marques: Volvo and Saab.

Even without a nameplate to call our own, we certainly have much to be proud of on the OE front; some of the most efficient and quality-conscious car building facilities are located here. So there is no doubt that Canadian auto workers take a lot of pride in the products they produce.

But, while some may say that it doesn’t really matter who owns the car plants or the nameplates on the vehicles, I’m not so sure. There are certainly many ways that companies take care of their facilities in their home markets differently from foreign branch plants, but even from the standpoint of putting Canada on the automotive map, there would be benefits.

There would certainly be the opportunity, for example, to have profits flow into Canada instead of out; and despite the globalization of the economy, value-added manufacturing and research dollars would have a better chance of being generated here than they do at present.

Call it pride, patriotism, or economic pragmatism, the fact is that Canada is as much a “hewers of wood and drawers of water”–okay and oil-producing–country today as it was yesteryear. And we’re selling off a lot of the control in those resource industries to foreign interests too.

When it comes to building cars, the situation is much the same: labour resources are mined and then abandoned when they no longer meet the greatest profit line available in the global market.

Having a Canadian-controlled automaker wouldn’t divorce us from the realities of economics and business, but at least they’d be in the context of Canadian realities and values. Frankly, considering the contributions Canadians have made, I think we’ve earned at least that.

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August brings the Light Truck Market into focus: Chassis, Brakes, Emissions, and more.

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