Stellantis's assembly plant in Brampton, Ont., that employs approximately 3,000 people, has been idled for years.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Stellantis N.V. STLA-N is strongly considering closing and selling its assembly plant in Brampton, Ont., according to Unifor, a move that would leave approximately 3,000 auto workers without a job.
Unifor national president Lana Payne told members of the media at a press conference in downtown Toronto on Friday that the multinational automaker informed the union this week about its plans to potentially sell the plant, calling it a “lose-lose scenario” for workers and the auto manufacturer.
“I’m relaying this information publicly because it is very important to do so, and I want to make sure there is no misunderstanding. None of this is acceptable to our members,” she said. The commitment Stellantis made to Unifor in 2023, that it would keep workers employed in Brampton, is now broken, she added.
In a statement, Stellantis spokesperson LouAnn Gosselin said the company is preparing to enter collective bargaining process and has “nothing to announce” at this time. “Our focus remains on finding a sustainable manufacturing solution for Brampton Assembly,” she said.
Ms. Payne made the announcement at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto where negotiations for a new collective agreement are taking place between the union and General Motors, another one of the Detroit Big Three automakers. The union had said, at the start of talks on Monday, that its focus would be securing a commitment from GM that they would reopen shuttered production facilities in Ontario.
From 2025: Laid off for years, Stellantis workers in Brampton confront a grim new reality
Unifor’s collective agreement with Stellantis expires in September. Roughly 3,000 workers at the Brampton plant have been without work since February, 2025, when the automaker paused production as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The plant had been idled in 2023 to retool for the production of electric vehicles, but not all workers were temporarily laid off at that time. Then in October, 2025, Stellantis announced it would move production of its Jeep Compass in Brampton, to Illinois, as part of a plan to boost U.S. output by 50 per cent over four years. Since then, Unifor had been trying to work with Stellantis to understand what the future of the Brampton plant was, and whether the automaker planned to shut it down altogether.
Vito Beato, president of Unifor Local 1285, the chapter representing Stellantis workers, said at the Friday press conference that the automaker had finally shared plans for the plant with the union this week, informing them that they were seriously considering shuttering Brampton. “Our members have provided big, huge profits for this company. They should not be collateral damage in a trade war,” he said.
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Stellantis received a $529-million grant from the federal government in 2022 to retool its operations at its Brampton and Windsor assembly plants, contingent upon keeping production at both facilities. Ottawa served Stellantis with a notice of default in December, 2025, two months after the company announced it would move production of the Jeep Compass from Brampton to Illinois. At the time, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said that the government funding came with a commitment.
“We can’t open that floodgate of basically our automakers leaving the country,” she had said back in December. “We’re all fighting for the 125,000 jobs in the auto sector.”
But on Friday, Ms. Payne took aim at Ottawa saying that the talks between Stellantis and the federal government on the company’s violation of the grant contract “clearly failed to deliver an adequate result and outcome” for auto workers. The union was not part of those discussions.
Ms. Payne also said that she was unclear whom Stellantis was in talks with about a potential sale of the factory.
Indeed, North American auto workers have faced whiplash over the last decade, the result of outsourcing and a government electric vehicle strategy that largely failed to deliver the results automakers were counting on.
Then the trade war happened, accelerating the slowdown of an industry that was already struggling. Auto production at Ontario plants in 2025, for example, was 1.2 million vehicles, down by about 2 per cent from 2024, but a steep drop from a decade ago, when it was 2.3 million.
Unifor kicked off bargaining with the Detroit Three automakers – Ford, GM and Stellantis – in July this year.
The priority for the union, given the climate of the trade war, is to secure guarantees from companies that they will restore operations in factories that were shut down last year. Unifor went toe-to-toe in bargaining with Ford last month, locking in annual wage increases of three per cent over a three year contract, and critically, getting the automaker to agree to a pathway to full employment at its Oakville Assembly plant by July, 2027. It is expected to push for the reopening of General Motors’ GM-N idle CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ont., and the restoration of the third shift at its Oshawa facility.
“Other companies have chosen a different path (than Stellantis),” Ms. Payne said at the press conference. “They have lived up to their commitments to the workers of Canada.”
But industry experts have long argued that reopening plants – and maintaining existing ones – depends on dropping the tariffs and renewing free trade, not labour agreements.
“We need to renew USMCA because it sets the framework and the rules for the automotive industry that’s totally integrated across North America, but you cannot renew the agreement without certainty from the Americans that the Section 232 tariffs will go away,” Brian Kingston, head of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, which represents GM, Stellantis and Ford Motor Co. F-N, told the Globe in June.
With files from Eric Atkins and Nathan VanderKlippe