Freshly baked bread is pulled from an oven and placed on cooling racks at KUB Bakery in Winnipeg. The bakery produces between 30,000 and 40,000 hand shaped loaves every week.Shannon VanRaes/Globe and Mail
Canada’s auto sector is feeling the brunt of U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to force companies to move their factories stateside, but motor vehicle manufacturing has been slumping for decades. The industry’s steady decline can be measured any number of ways, from falling output to dwindling exports to its shrinking workforce.
Another way to measure the long-term slide is in the energy consumed by automakers. Looking at that metric reveals a startling fact: Canadian manufacturers of bakery and tortilla products now consume more energy than automakers, a sharp reversal from 30 years ago.
Some of that decline is no doubt due to factories becoming more energy efficient over time, though the same process would be undertaken by operations churning out bread loaves and croissants. The bigger driver here is fewer factories and fewer vehicles rolling off shop floors. Last year, Canada produced 1.3 million cars and trucks, a 40% decline from 1995, the earliest year for which Statistics Canada provides stats around energy consumption.
While the ongoing challenges facing the auto sector are troubling, especially for the thousands of workers facing uncertainty about their jobs, the reversal of fortune between the two industries hides what is indisputably a good news story: the rise of the bakers. These aren’t your neighbourhood dough slingers. Canada has emerged as a major exporter of baked products. Bread, pastries and biscuits were Canada’s 17th largest export to the world last year, and the 11th largest to the U.S. Canada shipped $7.8 billion worth of baked products to the world in 2024, up nearly 1,000% from 1995.