On Monday, Stellantis announced it would sell its idled Brampton assembly plant to armoured vehicle maker Roshel. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it “a betrayal of the workers as it is a betrayal of the obligations to Canada,” CBC News reported.
The outrage didn’t last long. Within days it came out that his own office and his industry minister’s office had been briefed on the deal well before it was announced. By Thursday, Carney was calling the sale a “partial solution.”
That’s not a government protecting auto workers. It’s a government trying to manage the headlines.
Briefed, Then Shocked
A source with direct knowledge of the sale told CBC News that Ottawa had been “engaged regularly on the deal since August.” According to that source, both the Prime Minister’s Office and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s office had been briefed on the details of what was going to be announced.
The federal lobbying registry backs that up. As CTV News reported, senior aides in Joly’s office, including her then chief of staff and her director of policy, met with Roshel in August and September and again on Oct. 15. Carney’s own senior global affairs adviser met Roshel on Oct. 15, and two sources said Roshel’s CEO was at that meeting. The registry also shows 10 high-level government meetings with Stellantis in September alone. Carney’s deputy chief of staff joined the last of them, on Sept. 29.
CTV’s sources said the government was actively talking with both companies about the deal and “privately the government did not stand in the way of it.”
Joly’s office insists the minister “had no part in negotiating the deal” and never met Roshel. Maybe so. But her top staff did, and so did the Prime Minister’s adviser. And the “betrayal” language came only after the deal went public.
From “Betrayal” to “Partial Solution” in Two Days
Speaking in Dublin on Thursday, Carney admitted his government “was aware of some aspects” of the plan. He then described the sale as “a partial solution for the 1000s of workers there.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre summed it up: “In a matter of two days, Mark Carney has gone from saying that the sale was an outrageous betrayal to a quote ‘partial solution.’ So which is it?”
It’s a fair question. If the sale was a betrayal, why did the government spend months meeting the buyer without stopping it? If it was a partial solution, why stage the outrage?
The Default Notice That Took a Year
On Thursday, Joly finally served Stellantis with a notice of default under its 2022 federal funding agreement. The automaker now has 30 days to fix the breach or face a lawsuit. “Patience has its limits. To be frank, I’m fed up,” she said, according to CBC News.
Canadians might ask why it took this long. CBC notes that Joly “had promised nearly a year ago that the government would serve a default notice to Stellantis.” In the meantime, Stellantis signed a memorandum of understanding with Roshel in September and closed the deal this week.
Unifor national president Lana Payne didn’t hold back: “Why could not something have been done last week? Or the week before? Or the week before that?”
Now Joly admits Ottawa can’t block the sale. The Globe and Mail reported that she told reporters the government “does not have the legal authority” to stop it.
Taxpayers Still Don’t Know What They Paid
The 2022 agreement, signed under the Trudeau government, promised up to $529 million for Stellantis’s Brampton and Windsor plants. The details have never been made public. The Globe obtained only a heavily redacted copy.
Records show $222 million had been paid out as of March 2025, CTV reported. Joly now says the total is “more than that” but won’t give a number, per CBC. Stellantis has offered to repay $24 million. Joly says the company is “on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.” Asked for a figure, she replied only that “Stellantis knows how much it owes.”
Taxpayers footed the bill, and they’re the only ones not allowed to see it. Poilievre has asked the obvious question: “Why not release the deal, Mr. Carney?”
Throwing More Money at the Problem
The government’s next move is to offer more money. On Friday, Joly said Ottawa and Ontario had put an “aggressive package” to Stellantis to stop the sale, CBC News reported. Ontario’s economic development minister said part of the funding would come from the $2.5 billion set aside for the auto sector in October.
Even that came as news to the industry. Three industry sources told CBC they were “surprised” to hear a package was on the table. They said Stellantis had been “clear what it needed to keep the plant open” during a year of intense talks.
So this government is threatening to sue a company for not honouring one subsidy deal while offering it another. And none of it was put on the table until after the plant was sold.
The Workers Left Waiting
The people paying the price are on the plant floor. More than 2,000 Brampton workers have been out of work since Stellantis halted operations in 2023, according to CBC. The Globe reports that about 2,200 are on layoff benefits. Retooling stopped after the U.S. imposed 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian-made cars in early 2025, and the Jeep Compass went to Illinois instead.
Since then, Canada has had no trade deal, no product for the plant and no default notice until the plant was already sold. Then came a prime minister who was shocked by a deal his own advisers had been told about.
Brampton’s workers deserved a government that acted while it still could. What they got was a press release after the fact.
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