![]() Auto Pact not been traded away by our leaders to get a free trade deal in the 1980s, GM would have been unable to close the plant because the Big Three automakers were required to produce as many vehicles as they sold in Canada. Had the provisions of the 1965 Canada–U.S. ![]() "Here is your 35-year pin."įrom a historical perspective, the Oshawa closure is completely unnecessary. You can picture a chain linked fence, he handed it to me through the fence. We'd like to give it to you." I said "OK." He said, "meet us at the front gate." You know, everything was closed so the fellow, our superintendent at the time, he gave me the 35-year pin. Then, a couple weeks later they phoned me up and said "you got a 35-year pin that we have here. I heard about the closure on television on the 6 o'clock news. They feel betrayed by their employers, their unions, their governments, sometimes even by their own communities. The sense of betrayal runs deep in working-class communities. And you still don't even believe it after its run over you and a hundred cars have run past. And then next thing you know you've been run over. "It's going to stop." "It's not coming." You hear the whistle and you feel the vibration. You see the train coming, you're on the track. One time he was even transferred into another assembly plant two weeks before it, too, closed. Gabriel Solano closed out three GM plants before his life was cut short by an early death. So, you end up with a blank in your life. Because it took all of those years to build this emotion and this feeling and then, it's not there. It's hard to explain because it's an emotion. You're looking at this baby, you're looking at this house and you're realizing "you know what? Something's missing and it's part of me." I don't so much feel that I was missing GM but I was missing a part of me. Me, as a person who said, "I have a goal and have a dream." To come home, I no longer have a job. Gabriel Solano, a GM worker in Detroit, explained what was lost the first time a plant closed under him: The human cost of job loss can be enormous, leading to depression, failing marriages or health, and even suicide. Long-term workers in particular lose a social structure in which they find validation. It shatters people's sense of belonging and identity. A plant closing is about much more than lost paychecks. I have been interviewing displaced industrial workers from Canada and the United States since the early 1990s. In my home region of Northern Ontario, for example, there are now more than 20 former mill towns with names like Iroquois Falls, Red Rock, Marathon, Elliot Lake, Fort Frances, Smooth Rock Falls, and Sturgeon Falls. Windsor, Ontario, was devastated in 1951 when Ford decided to relocate its auto-assembly plant to Oakville, located outside of Toronto.
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