Carney Calls Stellantis Sale of Idle Brampton Plant 'Unacceptable,' Vows to Enforce Taxpayer-Funding Obligations

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday that Stellantis' sale of its Brampton, Ont., assembly plant is "unacceptable" and promised to use every legal and policy lever available to protect the workers affected.

Stellantis announced Monday, Nov. 9, that it had agreed to sell the idle plant to Roshel, a Canadian armored-vehicle maker. Terms, including the price, were not disclosed.

"It violates the obligations that Stellantis has under several agreements," Carney said at a press conference in Montreal. "But to be more fundamental it is a betrayal of the workers as it is a betrayal of the obligations to Canada and by extension to all Canadians. We will fully enforce our rights in protection of those workers and in protection of Canadian funds."

The money and the plant

In May 2022, Ottawa agreed to provide Stellantis with $529 million to retool its Brampton and Windsor plants. Federal accounting records suggest more than C$220 million (about US$155 million) was forwarded for retooling at the two sites.

Brampton was retooled to build the Jeep Compass. Production stopped in December 2023, and more than 2,200 workers have been on layoff since. Stellantis moved Compass production to Illinois last year, as heavy U.S. tariffs on foreign-built vehicles took hold.

Stellantis says restarting auto manufacturing at Brampton was financially unfeasible. The company says it had been in talks with Roshel for months.

What Stellantis says

A company spokeswoman said Stellantis is prepared to pay back both the federal and Ontario governments. "We recognize that Canadians expect accountability for public funding," she said. In a separate statement, the company said it has "offered to voluntarily return the government support received for Brampton Assembly's original retooling plan." It said it cannot disclose the total.

Roshel CEO Roman Shimonov defended the deal. "There is a massive plant that has been idle, and this is what we're fixing," he told CTV News. He said Roshel will likely need thousands of employees and is willing to give priority to affected Stellantis workers.

The offer has limits. Shimonov said Roshel will prioritize Brampton residents but "is not going to even consider" taking responsibility for rehiring all of the Stellantis workers.

Ottawa and the union

Joly said Ottawa has spent more than a year working with Stellantis and Unifor on a solution. "Stellantis has decided to go ahead and violate its contract," she said, adding that the government will "use the full force of the law." She will meet Stellantis and Unifor officials in Toronto on Thursday.

Unifor President Lana Payne said the sale would be "a critical failure" of the government's industrial strategy and "breaks Ottawa's promise to protect autoworkers in the U.S. trade war." She said members "feel betrayed" and that governments "have let them down."

Payne also said the union has "a lot of questions" about whether the federal government gave some form of approval to the sale. Neither Carney nor Joly addressed that question in the remarks reported Tuesday.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stood outside the idled plant Tuesday and called for Carney to fire Joly. "The Liberal strategy has failed to save jobs from Stellantis to Stelco," he said. "In both cases the Liberals promised they would get the jobs back."

Stelco is owned by Cleveland-Cliffs. The U.S. company said in September it plans to lay off hundreds of Ontario steelworkers despite promising to keep unionized employment at 2024 levels for three more years.

China remarks

The plant fight lands as Carney prepares to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen, scheduled for Nov. 18-19. Canada and China opened military talks earlier this year for the first time in eight years.

Carney said he will stress to Xi that China and other countries should not interfere in Canada's internal affairs. In previewing the meeting, he also said the security risks of Canada's partnership with China are "much, much, much less than the security risks of the United States," according to Breitbart's account of his comments.

Breitbart also says Carney named China as Canada's biggest security threat during the 2025 campaign. Canada sends roughly three-quarters of its exports to the United States and takes in almost half of its imports from it.

What comes next

The money trail is the first test. Stellantis has offered to repay, but it has not said how much, and Ottawa has not said whether repayment would satisfy its claim or whether it will pursue the contract violations Carney and Joly describe.

Thursday's meeting in Toronto is the first scheduled step. The question Unifor has already put on the table is whether Ottawa signed off on the sale before it was announced.