Faced with a menacing and rabid gorilla, most intelligent people would make certain not to further antagonize the beast. Canada’s Mark Carney, who holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who gets by on his considerable street smarts, believe that poking and threatening the gorilla is a more effective strategy.
Responding to President Trump’s punitive tariffs on Canada, Carney in January made a speech to his globalist friends at Davos describing a “rupture in the international order” and arguing that the era of relying on American-led multilateralism was over. He urged middle powers to unite and build a new geopolitical coalition, delivering his now-famous line: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Ford, who lacks Carney’s polish and elitist demeanor, preferred saltier language. In response to Trump’s latest round of Canadian tariffs, Ontario’s leader said Trump could “kiss my ass.”
Here’s a telling statistic courtesy of Chris George, among the declining number of Canadian commentators capable of independent critical thought. The U.S. is Canada’s largest trading partner, accounting for 72 percent of exports and 46 percent of imports. Yet U.S. exports to Canada represent barely one percent of total U.S. GDP. George calls the relationship “asymmetrical.”
You think?
Carney’s and Ford’s tough talk is extremely popular with Canadians, who take umbrage at Trump’s dismissive attitude regarding their sovereignty. Much of the Canadian media establishment has cheered them on. Ignorance is bliss, so perhaps it’s best that Canadians haven’t yet taken notice that General Motors just flipped the bird to Canada and handed Unifor, the country’s largest private-sector union with more than 320,000 members, what strikes me as a humiliating contract defeat.
For all the media coverage saying Canadians are angry and boycotting U.S. products, GM is having a banner year north of the border. The company finished the first half of 2026 as Canada’s best-selling automaker, capturing 15.4 percent of the market with 148,640 deliveries.
CEO Mary Barra repeatedly has referred to electric vehicle adoption as her “north star,” and many people, including me, thought she was referring to a fixed celestial anchor used to navigate through rough waters. But it’s possible she was referring to Canada, where GM’s EV sales soared 33.4 percent in the first half of this year. Nearly one in four electric vehicles sold in Canada are Chevrolet, Cadillac or GMC products.
Among the GM EVs Canadians are buying are the Equinox EV, Blazer EV and Cadillac Optiq, all manufactured at GM’s Ramos Arizpe complex in Mexico and exported north. Equinox EV sales increased 6.9 percent in Canada during the first half.
South of the border, it was a very different story. Equinox EV sales plunged 41 percent to 16,249 vehicles, leaving GM’s primary volume EV trailing Hyundai’s IONIQ 5, with 20,730 sales, and Toyota’s bZ, with 17,553.
That Canadians professing concern about their economic sovereignty would enthusiastically buy Mexican-built vehicles from America’s biggest automaker is a peculiar way of standing up for Canadian manufacturing. Detroit automakers have steadily expanded production in Mexico while Canada’s automotive manufacturing footprint has contracted.
Canadians’ enthusiasm for GM products is especially remarkable given the company’s history in Canada.
Canadian taxpayers significantly underwrote GM’s 2009 restructuring. When Ottawa finally unloaded its remaining GM shares in 2015, the federal government was estimated to have lost roughly C$800 million on its bailout investment.
One might expect Canada to occupy a very special place in Mary Barra’s heart.
Think again.
In 2019, GM ended vehicle assembly at its sprawling Oshawa complex outside Toronto. Some 2,600 workers lost their jobs as the final pickups rolled off the line, although GM retained about 300 jobs after investing C$170 million to convert part of the operation into a parts facility. During Oshawa’s glory days in the 1980s, more than 23,000 people worked there, producing upwards of 720,000 vehicles a year.
GM announced the return of pickup production the following year, but the reopened operation bore little resemblance to the Oshawa that generations of Canadian autoworkers had known. According to two Unifor Local 222 activists writing at the time, GM expected 90 percent of the eventual 1,400-to-1,700-person workforce to consist of new hires. Instead of the C$37.03 hourly wage then earned by top-tier workers, new hires started at C$23.67, without the traditional defined-benefit pension and with considerably less job security.
Canada’s relationship with GM plays out like Charlie Brown and Lucy. Just as Charlie Brown runs full speed toward the football convinced that this time Lucy won’t yank it away, the Canadian and Ontario governments on April 4, 2022, committed C$518 million in public subsidies—C$259 million apiece—to support GM’s more than C$2 billion Canadian transformation plan.
In exchange for public support, GM pledged to retool its CAMI plant in Ingersoll into Canada’s first full-scale commercial electric vehicle factory for its BrightDrop vans, while adding a third shift at Oshawa Assembly. Federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Premier Doug Ford hailed the investment as helping secure Canada’s automotive future.
When the CAMI’s plant opened later that year, GM President Mark Reuss declared: “And, as of today, I am proud to call the CAMI EV Assembly team the first full-scale all-electric manufacturing team in Canada.”
Then reality set in.
GM subsequently eliminated Oshawa’s third shift and moved the truck production to its Fort Wayne, Indiana, assembly plant, costing about 500 GM workers their jobs and threatening roughly 700 more jobs in the surrounding Canadian supply chain.
Unifor National President Lana Payne was furious. “It is misguided for General Motors to think it can get away with consistently diminishing their production footprint in Canada and still be the number one seller of vehicles in the Canadian marketplace,” she said.
As it turned out, GM could.
Things went even worse at CAMI. GM idled the plant in May 2025, leaving more than 1,000 Unifor members on layoff. Five months later, GM permanently killed BrightDrop production, leaving the plant without a replacement product.
Payne was livid: “After billions of dollars in public support to build an EV future, Canada cannot allow companies to simply walk away the moment there is pressure from Washington or turbulence in the market.”
Ottawa subsequently sought to claw back public funding from GM following the Canadian job cuts.
And that’s what makes GM’s newly ratified contract with Unifor so audacious.
In a deal trumpeted by union leadership as securing more than C$1 billion in investment, GM committed no new vehicle to CAMI. Instead, under the agreement ratified by Unifor members, GM agreed not to close or sell the idled plant while it studies alternative production. CAMI also gets first consideration for Canadian Armed Forces work if GM succeeds in securing such a contract.
Consider the arrangement: Canadian taxpayers helped subsidize GM’s transformation of CAMI into the country’s showcase commercial EV factory. GM idled it. Now Canadian taxpayers may ultimately have to become GM customers to help put Canadians back to work there.
Unifor did extract one significant new vehicle commitment from GM: the automaker will invest C$144 million to add production of the next-generation heavy-duty GMC Sierra at Oshawa.
That’s certainly welcome news for Oshawa workers, but it’s a curious trophy for a country whose prime minister wants Canada to become an electric vehicle manufacturing powerhouse. Canada’s first full-scale commercial EV factory sits idle while GM commits new money to build massive internal-combustion pickups in Oshawa.
The agreement also incorporates GM’s previously announced C$691 million investment at St. Catharines to support production of next-generation V8 engines. That’s an interesting vote of confidence in internal combustion given that U.S. safety regulators have expanded an investigation covering nearly one million GM trucks and SUVs following reports of continued failures involving the company’s current 6.2-liter V8.
Meanwhile, Canadians have made GM their country’s EV sales leader. Nearly one in four electric vehicles they buy carries a Chevrolet, GMC or Cadillac badge.
GM just doesn’t need Canadian workers to build them.
Unifor leadership patted itself on the back after ratifying its latest three-year master agreement, boasting that Canadian production wages will eventually reach C$50.20 an hour. It is an impressive-sounding number—until someone pulls out a currency calculator and checks what GM pays its UAW workers across the Detroit River.
At an exchange rate of roughly 73 U.S. cents to the Canadian dollar, C$50.20 works out to about US$36.65. Under the UAW’s current GM contract, top production wages are scheduled to exceed US$42 an hour by 2028 with estimated cost-of-living adjustments. On straight wages alone, currency conversion gives GM a considerable incentive to have Canadian hands bolt together its trucks, engines and transmissions.
Canada offers GM another advantage that has nothing to do with worker productivity: government-funded healthcare. Yet despite all the benefits GM has enjoyed in Canada — government subsidies, comparatively inexpensive labor, a publicly funded healthcare system that reduces employment costs, and consumers who have made GM the country’s best-selling automaker and EV market leader — Unifor couldn’t extract a firm commitment from GM to put another vehicle into CAMI.
Carney believes Canada’s answer to its overwhelming dependence on the United States is to forge alliances with other middle powers. His Davos speech was rapturously received by the globalist crowd and much of the corporate media, particularly his call for middle powers to band together against predatory superpowers.
There was only one problem with Carney’s grand vision: When Canada found itself staring down the American gorilla, Carney’s globalist friends were nowhere to be found.
That harsh truth was recently acknowledged in a Globe and Mail opinion piece headlined “Europe must stand with Canada against Trump.” Philippe Legrain, a former economic adviser to the president of the European Commission, noted that while Carney’s Davos speech remained “the talk of diplomats worldwide,” European leaders had been “conspicuously silent” as Canada’s confrontation with the United States escalated.
Apparently, talking was the extent of their commitment.
When I attended high school in Toronto more than half a century ago, Canadians were already being taught an uncomfortable lesson about the limits of their country’s economic sovereignty.
One of our required books was Robert L. Perry’s Galt, U.S.A.: The American Presence in a Canadian City. Published in 1971, the book used Galt as a microcosm of Canada’s economic relationship with the U.S. Local civic leaders, managers, and municipal politicians in Galt exercised considerable influence in their community, but consequential economic decisions were often made by mostly U.S. parent corporations. When American head offices restructured, laid off workers, or cut investment spending, Canadian communities had little leverage.
Perry’s book generated lots of discussion, but little has changed since he published it.
No doubt there will be legions of Trump haters who will read this post as a defense of the U.S. president’s distasteful and despicable treatment of Canada. It isn’t. I just thought it noteworthy that in all the coverage I’ve read about Canada’s trade dispute with the U.S., I found not one critical examination of General Motors’ Canadian record since Barra assumed command more than a decade ago.
Trump’s treatment of Canada has conveniently overshadowed Barra’s treatment of Canadian workers, which is remarkably similar to how GM treats taxpayers and workers back home in Michigan.
Canadians should know it’s nothing personal.