Federal budget 2015 lacks national auto strategy

The 2015 federal budget should have included a national auto strategy, says Unifor and the federal NDP.

Unifor is the largest private-sector union in Canada and represents hourly auto workers at Detroit 3 assembly plants and several parts suppliers in Ontario.

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Appearing on the CBC's The Exchange With Amanda Lang, Unifor national president Jerry Dias called it "a disastrous budget for working class people."

Dias claims Canada has lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs with Stephen Harper and the Conservatives as the governing parties.

"We really need some strategies as they related to manufacturing. We need to have a strategy for auto on how we bring these jobs back," Dias said.

Windsor West NDP MP Brian Masse isn't happy there wasn't more for the auto sector.

"Very disappointing and very frustrating coming from our area where we understand the skill level and the economic advantage of having economic assembly," said Masse. "We've just disappeared off the map, going from the No. 2 [auto manufacturer] in the world basically to number 10 or 12, depending on the numbers of any given year."

The budget included a $100 million investment "to support product development and technology demonstration by Canadian automotive parts suppliers" over the next five years.

The money is part of a new Automotive Supplier Innovation Program that "will support our auto parts industry as it meets theconstantly evolving demands of automakers and consumers."

Masse claims the problem is the government is taking money from the Auto Innovation Fund and allocating it to the new program.

"Unfortunately, with this budget they're cannibalising the innovation fund to fund the new parts fund," said Masse. "So we're taking money away from trying to get new auto manufacturing assembly plants and they've redirected that to the parts manufacturing, which is an admission that they should have done something in the first place because if we don't have those things we're really at a loss."

Masse described Canada as being in a defensive mode when it comes to its parts industry.

"We have some really good value added jobs in the parts manufacturing industry and it would have been fine if we were actually working on getting the actual engines and the actual development design and implementation of an assembly of vehicles, unfortunately we haven't."

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