Oshawa’s general motors autoplex—the largest facility of its kind in North America—sprawls across 650 acres beside Lake Ontario, turning out 2,154 vehicles a day, five days a week. Two plants make Impalas and Allures, and a stamping factory produces 265 tons of steel parts daily. The truck plant—scheduled to close next spring—makes the Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra. All told, more than 10,000 Oshawa residents are directly employed by the auto industry. A sign at the union hall states that parking is for Ford, General Motors and Chrysler vehicles only; traitors must schlep it from a distant lot.

The city runs on GM time. Employees get two 10-minute breaks and a 20-minute mealtime, which happen at the same scheduled times each day. If a worker takes one or two seconds longer than the time allotted for a particular task, it’s considered “overcycle,” and a light bulb flashes to alert super­visors. When a shift ends, they head directly across the street from the autoplex to the Park Place bar for a bottle of 50, wet T-shirt contests and a game of Texas hold ’em.

Oshawa’s fate has been tied to the car industry since 1907, when the horse carriage maker Robert McLaughlin moved into motorized vehicles. Eight years later, McLaughlin and his sons George and Sam began building Chevys, and three years after that they officially folded their business into General Motors. By 1938, GM of Canada had made more than a million cars. But that was only a small fraction of the North American output.

The Auto Pact—signed by Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson in 1965—changed everything. The Big Three American car companies wanted to eliminate the 17.5 per cent tariff on U.S.-made cars sold in Canada. In return, they promised to maintain a quota of Canadian-made cars, ensuring jobs for thousands. The effect was massive. Our manufacturers went from bitsy-piecey factories making nearly every car on the Canadian market to giant branch plants pumping out specific models for the entire continent.

For most of the 20th century, the Canadian Auto Workers union was merely a branch of the U.S.-based United Auto Workers, and largely let the Americans deal with the head honchos. Then, in the ’80s, came the rise of Japanese companies, whose smaller, more fuel-efficient cars gouged the Big Three’s market share. As belts tightened, American workers began to see the Auto Pact as favouring Canadians, while CAW execs (including president Bob White’s then-assistant, Buzz Hargrove) thought the UAW was too soft during collective bargaining. In 1985, the CAW became an independent union and earned a reputation both here and abroad as tenacious, bordering on militant.

In 2005, the Ontario government loaned General Motors $175 million (rumoured to be interest-free) in exchange for a guarantee of 16,000 jobs until 2013. Three years later, General Motors executives signed a three-year contract with the CAW, guaranteeing the Oshawa truck plant would stay open. The company also promised to retrofit the plant for a new hybrid pickup truck. In return, the CAW agreed to a wage freeze for one year, rather than the usual cost of living allowance increase. Truck plant workers also accepted a schedule of two weeks working followed by two weeks off—although they would lose wages, time continued to accrue for seniority and pensions. The CAW calculates this netted the auto giant $300 million in savings.

GM underestimated how the tanking American economy and a spike in gas prices would affect the company. Auto sales in the U.S. declined 15.5 per cent between August 2007 and August 2008, with trucks and SUVs taking the biggest hit. Nineteen days after the Oshawa agreement was signed, GM announced it would close the truck plant next spring and 2,600 workers will lose their jobs.

What’s happening in Oshawa is bad news for the rest of the province: auto parts and assembly plants are responsible for 121,000 jobs. Few Oshawans want to admit that the workers’ and the city’s futures are inextricably tied to an ailing industry that must quickly reinvent itself—or die. The next generation know they won’t have the guarantee of long-term jobs, a good wage or a comfortable pension. They’ll have to move on.