Caterpillar has picked up and left town.

Goodbye London, Ontario.

Hello Muncie, Indiana.

The lesson for the National Post's Andrew Coyne is that the Canadian Autoworkers, the union that represented the locomotive manufacturer's workers, did not play its cards right.

The draconian reduction in hourly pay rates that the employer offered may have been nasty medicine, Coyne wrote, but having rejected that, the workers now have nothing at all.

For the Toronto Star's Tom Walkom, the lesson is that there is an expanding war against unions in North America. It started in the U.S. south but is now spreading to places such as Indiana and Ontario.