With the sector suffering under tariffs, there are two questions to ask about Canada’s auto manufacturing industry.
First, will it survive?
Second, if it survives, will it still provide as many jobs as it does now?
The answer to the first question is up in the air. The answer to the second question is definitely not.
According to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturing Association, auto and parts manufacturing directly employ 130,000 Canadians – out of a national population of about 41.5 million.
Compare that to 1986, when there were 152,000 Canadians employed in the sector, and Canada’s population was just 25.3 million.
This isn’t just about cars. Look at any industrial or resource-based industry. The B.C. forest industry in the early 1980s employed more than 80,000 people, in a population of 2.9 million; now there are 50,000 forestry workers and 5.5 million British Columbians.
The reason isn’t just fluctuations in trade, taxes, or tariffs. It’s about automation.
Starting in the 1970s, automation ramped up in manufacturing. Robots arrived on factory floors, and kept improving. There are now “dark factories,” with no lights – because there are few or no humans.
We’ll see this across multiple sectors of our economy. The AI boom has employers considering the replacement of white collar workers, from coding to customer service.
Home building could be hit hard, if modular factory-built homes take off, displacing construction workers.
Economists will tell you this is good, or at worst a necessary evil, a temporary problem. It’s creative destruction – yes, jobs are lost to technological change, but new jobs are created at (approximately) the same pace.
The problem is that the new jobs don’t go to the people who lost the old jobs. A 55-year-old ex-factory worker (or mill worker, coder, carpenter, paralegal, etc.) doesn’t have the time or resources to go back to school and retrain for a brand new career.
What we typically see is former workers going into lower-wage jobs, and a sudden jump in the rate of laid-off workers on permanent disability.
The government of Prime Minister Mark Carney is pushing trades training, resource projects, and manufacturing. New investment in those sectors will create jobs – but as the wheel of technological progress grinds on, many of them will vanish in turn, like auto factory and mill jobs.
If the Carney government is really going to drag us into the future, it should reckon, at last, with the people change leaves behind. We told people that trades, manufacturing, and many now-threatened office jobs were good, secure careers, the kind you could build a life around.
What do we owe the people who are about to be ground under the wheel of change?