There's little more than a weeded-over parking lot and shuttered doors now at the old Freightliner truck factory in St. Thomas, a small town about a 30-minute drive south of London, Ont. It wasn't that long ago that the site was a hive of activity and a centre for manufacturing in Canada.
But in 2008, German automaker Daimler closed the shop and moved production to greener pastures elsewhere, part of a $600-million cost-cutting plan that saw 1,400 people thrown out of work.
More often than not of late, the elsewhere in question is Monterrey, the third-largest city in Mexico. About an hour-and-a-half flight from Houston, it's fast becoming a hub of global car manufacturing.
New Freightliner transport trucks roll out of there three at a time nowadays, made by Mexican shop floor workers who work for as little as one-fifth of what a Canadian made doing the same work.
The fact is, Mexico now makes twice as many cars as it did a decade ago, and has leapfrogged Canada in the process.
Freightliner aren't the only ones to have moved to Monterrey. A stone's throw west of the Freightliner plant is a Chrysler facility. Just north of the city, ground has broken on a massive Kia plant, the biggest construction project in a part of Mexico that's already booming.
While Mexico was once a bottom feeder on the car industry food chain known mainly for cheap labour, the country is moving up in the world.
One company that sees that value is Magna. In many ways the face of Canada's component industry, Magna now has 30 plants in Mexico, employing some 24,000 people. That's a mere toehold for the company, but the shape of Magna's global footprint is changing — and fast.
Car manufacturing output is expected to rise another 50 per cent over the next five years, and all that activity is bringing jobs.
Employment is up 40 per cent in Mexico's auto sector in the past eight years, as international companies have poured $7 billion worth of investment into the country. Contrast that with Canada, which is struggling to find commitments to replace expiring assembly lines at GM, Toyota and others.
