Oshawa wins hot competition for Camaro plant

GREG KEENAN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

The Camaro muscle car will roar out of Canada again, General Motors Corp. is set to announce on Monday.

The world's largest auto maker has chosen an assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont., as the site for the rebirth of one of the classic cars of the 1960s and 1970s, sources familiar with the announcement said yesterday.

The move is one of two major boosts for the auto maker's Oshawa operations. The other is that a plan to eliminate about 1,000 jobs at one of the company's car plants in that city is being reversed because of strong sales of the Chevrolet Impala mid-sized car, the sources said.

Both pieces of news will bring a major sigh of relief for more than 5,000 members of the Canadian Auto Workers union, who have been worried about their jobs since GM announced in November that it is cutting more than 30,000 jobs in North America and closing several assembly plants in a bid to bring production capacity closer to actual sales.

As a result, sources said, there will likely be no permanent layoffs at the Oshawa plants during the remaining two years of the CAW contract, with any jobs lost likely to be from attrition and productivity improvements.

GM will announce on Monday that it will redevelop its operations in Oshawa to create a flexible manufacturing facility capable of cranking out more than 500,000 vehicles off a rear-wheel-drive platform or basic chassis, industry sources said.

The Camaro will be based on GM's new rear-wheel-drive Zeta platform, which will also spawn the next version of the Chevrolet Impala, a new Cadillac DTS and the Buick Lucerne, sources in Detroit and elsewhere said yesterday.

Ontario Economic Development Minister Joe Cordiano said the announcement represents a major win for the province, which faced the prospect of losing 3,900 high-paying auto industry jobs after GM's announcement that it would close one of the car plants in Oshawa and eliminate one shift of production at the other plant.

But the reintroduction of the Camaro at an auto show in Detroit created a buzz for the car and jump-started North American politicians.

"They had governors knocking on their doors and literally breaking down the doors," Mr. Cordiano said.

Mr. Cordiano and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty vowed in November to do everything possible to make sure the plant stayed open and began lobbying GM officials the day after that announcement.

"It's not just the Camaro here that's important," Mr. Cordiano said yesterday.

"What we have there is a flex facility and there will be other product mandates with [rear-wheel-drive] as the main feature. It's an indicator of where the company is going to go in the future and how important that facility is now to GM."

Redeveloping Oshawa to transform it into a flexible manufacturing operation capable of producing several models was originally part of the company's $2.5-billion Beacon Project, which includes $435-million in financial assistance from the Ontario and federal governments.

GM expects to sell 100,000 Camaros annually, with the car going on sale in 2009, seven years after it pulled the plug on that car and the Pontiac Firebird, which were made in a plant in Ste-Thérèse, Que., that has been torn down.