With GM leaving, what is Oshawa’s new identity?
How a region built on auto looks to reinvent itself
This is the fourth and final article in a short series ‘Oshawa: The front line of changing work.’ Under the cloud of General Motors’ impending closure, SCP has spoken to people throughout the Durham region to understand what the changing landscape of work means at a local level.
There’s an old phrase you may hear in Oshawa: “getting into the motors.” Used for around a century, it encapsulates the community’s relationship with GM, where generations of auto workers followed their family members and friends onto the line. “There’s this sense of pride,” explained Alexander Gates, Director and Curator of the Canadian Automotive Museum. “You can show up to the family reunion and say: ‘yeah, I got a job at GM’.”
It is impossible to tell Oshawa’s story without the company. GM transformed Oshawa “from a sleepy little village into a thriving metropolitan powerhouse,” said John Gray, local city councillor and Mayor of Oshawa from 2003 to 2010. Once a factory supplying carriages around the British Empire, in 1918 Oshawa’s McLaughlin Motor Car Company became General Motors of Canada.
There may be few jobs left, but the company’s influence is still seen all over town. The family home of GM Canada’s founder, Colonel Samuel McLaughlin, stands proud in the heart of Oshawa, and the city’s downtown shuts down for “Autofest” every August. Even the local hockey team is called “the Generals”.
Auto has been an essential part of the region’s fabric for more than 100 years. The impending closure of GM’s Oshawa plant, therefore, is particularly difficult for the community. As the employment landscape continues to change, what will become the identity of Oshawa? And how can the community shape that identity for their benefit?
New neighbours
The region still has a blue-collar reputation for manufacturing, but this is actually already fairly outdated. Durham’s workforce has seen significant changes in the last few decades.
Most significantly, the number of workers in health care and education has doubled since 2000, to over 40,000 people — a similar number to how many workers GM employed at its peak. Durham College and Lakeridge Health have been steadily expanding, and in 2002 Ontario Tech University was founded in Oshawa.
Another huge shift in Durham has been where residents are working. According to 2016 census data obtained by the Durham Workforce Authority, 51% of the workforce commute out every day. With cheaper housing outside the Greater Toronto Area, commuters have looked to Oshawa as a more affordable place to settle down.
“We are essentially now a bedroom community of Toronto,” said John Gray. “I’m sure many of [the commuters] are pining for great jobs locally, where they don’t have to spend their life in their car,” he said. Lakeridge Health once ran adverts on major transport links, telling commuters they would be home by now if they worked at Lakeridge. For now, however, it’s difficult to compete with the biggest city in Canada for job opportunities and wages.
A tale of two cities
This influx of wealthier commuters, and higher-paid white-collar workers in sectors like health and education, has begun to create some degree of polarization.
The new workers have gradually started to change Oshawa, said Jennine Agnew-Kata, director of the Literacy Network of Durham Region. There are “a lot of highly-educated professionals living and working here now,” she said, which has begun to alter the town’s character. “They want what they’re accustomed to in other university towns,” said Agnew-Kata, such as coffee shops and wine bars. Others haven’t been so thrilled about the university taking over the downtown, she said.
These changes have also helped to create “a strong degree of ghettoization” in Oshawa, said Agnew-Kata, with a wealthy north and a much poorer south. In downtown south Oshawa, median after tax household income is just $32,500, compared to the city average of $56,000. “The city is bleeding northward, and those communities are eating up valuable resources,” she said.
While the causes of this split are complex, local community development consultant Ben Earle says that changes in the workforce have exacerbated it. Mapping wages and professions using local data, Earle saw a distinct rise in low-paid jobs like retail in Oshawa’s south, for example, which had once been dominated by well-paid manufacturing jobs.
“Simply put, not everyone in our community has access to the new economy that is being created,” Earle said. “Not everyone will work in high tech, education, research, or healthcare.” Without targeted economic development, especially in the downtown south region, Oshawa is in danger of becoming even more deeply divided.
From “lunchbucket” to what?
In spite of labour market shifts, Oshawa’s old-fashioned identity as a “lunchbucket” community — meaning predominantly blue collar — still persists to some degree.
“That’s gonna change with time,” said City Councillor John Gray. Whitby, just west of Oshawa, for example, had once been defined by its psychiatric hospital where many community members worked. “Somehow that stigma has disappeared, and so too will Oshawa ‘lunchbucket’ community,” he said.
“There’s a push and a pull between what we were and what we’re becoming”
A major part of making that happen is continuing to attract new businesses to the region, which will shape the workforce and identity of Oshawa in the future. This is a big priority for the Mayor of Oshawa, Dan Carter. “We need to change from a bureaucratic organization to a customer service organization,” he explained, treating businesses as customers to persuade them to settle in the city. “We’re competing against 444 other municipalities [in Ontario].”
As we’ve explored in previous articles in this series, a vital ingredient will be the community’s ability to connect and transition local workers to any new opportunities that arise — reacting to new employer demand. The question is, though, how to embrace these changes while staying true to Oshawa’s proud heritage, and ensuring that all areas of the city benefit.
“There’s a push and a pull between what we were and what we’re becoming, and I don’t know where we’ll end up,” said Jennine Agnew-Kata. “You can be very sure that people have strong feelings on both sides.”
