General Motors stopped production of the BrightDrop electric vans on October 21.
This means the CAMI factory in Ingersoll, Ontario, has been sitting idle for a month.
Ottawa had requested the automaker come up with new plans for the facility within two weeks.
General Motors has now blown past the two-week deadline imposed by the Canadian government without coming up with new plans for the CAMI factory it recently closed in Ontario.
Amid ongoing trade tensions between Canada and the United States, the Canadian automotive industry has been hit quite hard.
Due to threats of tariffs in the short and long terms, automakers are reluctant to invest in their Canadian operations, preferring instead to spend their money in the United States to keep the Trump Administration happy and ensure a tariff-free access to the second-largest automotive market in the world.
Over the last month or two, Stellantis took the production of the upcoming Jeep Compass away from its Brampton plant, and General Motors ended production of the Brightdrop electric delivery vans in its CAMI plant in Ingersoll.
In both cases, the future of the facilities and their employees in uncertain, neither automaker having come up with new plans for them.
In GM’s case, Industry Minister Melanie Joly requested an update with concrete plans for the workers within 15 days of the plant’s closure on October 21.
This means that the company should have announced something at least two weeks ago, but nothing new has been heard on the subject.
Ontario’s CAMI Plant | Photo: GMGeneral Motors says it is still looking for ways to continue using the plant, which employs about 1,200, but no future product has been announced at the moment.
For her part, Joly, who was criticized by Opposition MPs for having failed to pressure GM into respecting her deadline, says the Government is still in talks with General Motors on the matter.
Unlike Stellantis, which pulled an upcoming product from its Canadian factory to have it built in the United States instead, General Motors says its decision was not the result of tariffs, but of slow Brightdrop sales.
Indeed, the automaker expected to shift more of the electric delivery vans, as just 4,751 of them found a buyer in North America through the third quarter of 2025.
While this represents a significant increase over the 1,267 units it had sold over the same period in 2024, it is apparently still too low to make the program profitable, and regulatory changes in the U.S. are making EVs less attractive for commercial buyers.
Unifor Local 88, which represents the workers previously employed at the CAMI plant, is also requesting answers from GM and the Canadian government, threatening to commandeer the factory if the automaker tries to remove tooling or equipment.
General Motors says it needs more time to deliver better solutions for its workers and the plant.
Source: Automotive News Canada
