Forecasting Ford’s future has always been a popular pastime in the southern Ontario town of Oakville.
The rumour mill started with the farmers in 1951, as Ford began scooping up land west of Toronto at above-market prices—including $150,000 for a 140-acre poultry farm. A few months later, Ford made its plans official for a 5,000-worker plant, a move The Globe and Mail then reported might more than triple the population of the suburb from 7,000 to 25,000, pouring $18 million into the economy and shocking Ford’s workforce in Windsor.
Seventy years and over 200,000 Oakvillians later, union leaders say a new rumour had emerged recently on the shop floors of the Ford plant—a worry that this massive local employer could be all but idle for years. Last week, that rumour was confirmed: Ford is delaying its plans to sell Oakville-made EVs from 2025 to 2027.
The auto business is volatile—and there isn’t yet any “normal” timeline for building an EV plant—but Unifor national president Lana Payne said in an interview that the two extra years of downtime that thousands of Ford Oakville workers face is long “by any stretch of the imagination.”
Where it leaves workers: Ford Oakville workers had expected to be out of work for about eight months while the plant got remodelled to make EVs, and the company agreed to pay them 70 per cent of their normal incomes for that period. They will now head back to the bargaining table to determine what will happen between 2025 and 2027.
Ford can’t close the Oakville plant permanently, per Unifor’s contract, which expires in September 2026, and Payne said she wants as many Unifor workers as possible tapped to work on the plant remodelling.
On top of the 3,200 Unifor workers at Ford Oakville, she estimates there are another 2,000 Unifor workers in its supply chain, and she says Unifor hopes to organize workers across more of the Canadian EV supply base. The uncertainty sparked by the Ford delay may help that cause. It’s already being felt by suppliers. South Korea’s EcoPro BM, for example, which was building a Quebec battery-materials plant with Ford, is now delaying its Canadian expansion until year’s end.
How we got here: Ford moved production of its Lincoln Nautilus from Canada to China last year. Production of the Ford Edge SUV is in its final weeks in Oakville amid tightening emissions rules, according to the plant manager, who also cited a “dramatic” decrease in global EV prices.
Canadian EV sales are still growing faster than overall vehicle sales, rising 48.9 per cent between the fourth quarters of 2023 and 2024. But it’s hard for automakers to keep the blistering pace that yielded a tenfold increase in EV sales between 2017 and fall 2023. Ford is now focusing more on hybrids, greenfield EV plants, and converting other assembly plants to give the EV market time to “develop.”
The automaker also aims to improve its batteries over the next three years. Its skunkworks tech project is trying to make EVs smaller and cheaper, after political opposition delayed a partnership with Chinese battery giant CATL for a battery plant in Michigan. Ford has struggled with EV manufacturing, releasing a poorly designed wiring harness for the Mustang Mach-E that added US$300 in battery costs.
The takeaway: Joe McCabe, CEO of the data firm AutoForecast Solutions, said most automakers have pushed back their EV plans, so the decision isn’t a black eye for Oakville or for Canada. Ford and other legacy automakers must tweak their portfolios more slowly because they have social responsibilities to dealers, unions, schools and even the local Tim Hortons frequented by plant workers, he said.
Larger EVs, like those planned for Oakville, are expensive and it’s “tough to move that metal.”
In the meantime, he said, hybrids may be an intermediate step that lets batteries improve, lets charging-station installations catch up, and helps car buyers realize that “a plug is not a disrupter in your life.”
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