Last week, Canadian union leaders met with the Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Intergovernmental Affairs and One Canadian Economy, Dominic LeBlanc. Labour leaders warned against trading away domestic production, good union jobs, and industrial capacity during the renegotiation of the trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
“Right now is the time when our government needs to really be thinking big and investing to create those jobs and to build the jobs of the future,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).
The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) will officially be up for review in July. Last week, U.S. president Donald Trump said it would not matter to him if CUSMA expires without a new deal to replace it.
For many Canadians, however, the status of trade between the U.S. and Canada determines their financial outlook. Recent data gathered by Nanos Research, showed that consumer confidence has been relatively neutral for six months. Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist at Nanos Research, said consumer confidence remains neutral as Canadians wait to see what Canada-U.S. trade talks might bring.
As the sweeping U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods impact the country’s industries, Bruske is calling for the Canadian government to safeguard jobs not only during the CUSMA renegotiation but at every trade negotiation.
On January 16, the government announced a deal with China intended to diversify trade partnerships. The CLC, however, has criticized this new partnership for reducing Canada’s surtax on Chinese-made electric vehicles.
“It worries me,” Bruske said, “though it seems like a small number of electric vehicles being let into Canada, that’s going to upend our automotive sector.”
Unifor, which represents more than 20,000 auto workers in Canada, said flooding the market with cheap Chinese electric vehicles could cost Canadian jobs, stall domestic investment, and drive more imports from low-cost jurisdictions.
“We need to make sure that we are safeguarding existing jobs and that we’re not trading off one sector of the economy or one part of Canada for another,” Bruske said in an interview with rabble.ca. “And I would argue that we’re already starting to see some of that without really good commitments to workers.”
She said workers have already faced major layoffs caused by trade upset with the U.S. About 1,000 workers at Algoma Steel are facing layoffs and hundreds of workers at a General Motors-owned Cami Assembly plant lost their jobs when the employer stopped the production of an electric delivery van.
“When we talk to workers in communities that are impacted by these giant layoffs, what we hear is that every single community member really gets impacted,” Bruske added. “We need to understand that when we lose these really good family and community sustaining jobs, entire communities suffer. So we need to have a plan to actually shore up these jobs, and we need to have a plan to shore up those communities.”
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