In honour of ratifying their 2020 Agreement with Unifor, GM Canada President & Managing Director Scott Bell writes a letter for the GM Canada community:
“Today’s ratification of our 2020 Agreement with Unifor is amazing news for our employees, our community and for Canada. I want to thank Jerry Dias, National President, Unifor, Tim McKinnon, GM Master Bargaining Committee Chair and all our Unifor partners for working with us to reach this historic step forward for the auto sector in Canada.
“The GM investments we announced for our operations in St. Catharines, Woodstock and Oshawa are even more significant for Canada’s economy because they will happen fast and generate thousands of new jobs at our plants, and in our supplier base in Canada and beyond. We are in discussions with our government partners to see how we might do even more with the transformative investments we announced last Thursday.
“Bringing pickup production back to Oshawa is noteworthy for a few other reasons as well. Demand for pickups remains strong and has accelerated through COVID19, accounting for over 40 percent of GM Canada’s sales and GM’s new family of pickups is receiving a tremendous response from our customers and auto media all across North America. Our success in pickups helps us drive GM’s even larger transformation to new electric, autonomous and connected vehicle technologies for the future. And that’s happening fast as well. We saw that with the unveil of the ground-breaking new HUMMER EV, with our game-changing Ultium battery technology and with some 20 new electric GM vehicles coming across the portfolio.
“This is a time of historic transformation for our industry and GM Canada is playing a lead role in the R&D and engineering work that is redefining the future. Our Canadian Technology Centre (CTC) has grown to become the largest software engineering and development centre for GM outside the U.S. We continue to hire and expand this critical part of GM Canada with recent investments in Markham, Oshawa, our Kapuskasing Cold Weather Development Centre and with the innovative new CTC McLaughlin Advanced Technology Track we plan to officially open in the new year. GM is not only driving the industry’s move to new electric and self-driving vehicle technology; our team is helping to develop and test it right here in Canada.
“Today’s great news is building on top of truly ambitious and exciting change at GM Canada. We stepped up with our ongoing production of 10 million face masks for the Government of Canada, we worked with our dealers to help Sharon’s Kids and Durham Children’s Aid Foundation raise more than $400,000 last week with a Corvette auction and we support the United Way by donating over $200,000 in our local communities. Now there is, even more, to be excited about. There is little we cannot accomplish when we work together.”
Scott Bell, President & Managing Director, GM Canada
