Uniford president Lana Payne says 6,000 short-term layoffs were recently announced.
Stellantis has paused production at its Ontario production facility for two weeks.
Trade wars are back on the menu, and Canada’s automotive sector is already feeling the heat. While President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs for dozens of countries, Canada is not one of the countries getting a reprieve. Also excluded: the separate 25% tariff on automobiles unveiled weeks earlier.
As these duties continue to squeeze America’s northern neighbor, the head of Canada’s largest private-sector union, Unifor, is sounding the alarm about long-term damage to supply chains.
Shortly after President Trump announced his new ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on April 2, approximately 6,000 Unifor members were handed short-term layoff notices. Most of these came from a Stellantis facility in Windsor, Ontario. The automaker quickly announced a two-week shutdown after the tariffs were announced, providing it valuable time to assess what its next moves should be.
The bigger concern, however, isn’t the immediate impact, it’s what comes next. And Unifor president Lana Payne is clearly bracing for more.
“The industry will not be able to live under these kinds of tariffs. The longer this goes on, the bigger the fallout we’re going to see,” she told Bloomberg. “My concern is that we see temporary layoffs turn into much longer layoffs. We’ve already heard early signals from auto companies to their employees that, depending on how long this lasts, we could be facing broader layoffs across the parts sector.”
Tit For Tat Tariffs
In direct response to Trump’s tariffs, Canada rolled out its own 25% counter-tariffs on US-imported vehicles. These retaliatory measures specifically target cars that don’t meet the content requirements laid out in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — especially those using parts from outside North America.
According to Payne, some Canadian suppliers will be hit disproportionately by the new tariffs.
“Not all these suppliers are in the same economic boat; some are more fragile than others,” she told Bloomberg. “But there are so many parts of this sector where, if the supplier has to pay even a portion of these tariffs, it won’t be able to operate.”
The ripple effect could extend far beyond any single facility, threatening the stability of a tightly woven North American supply network that was already under pressure before the latest round of trade tension.
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