Ottawa’s $4.7-billion order for 313 new VIA Rail passenger cars, announced Sept. 3 at Alstom’s Thunder Bay plant, lands at a factory that laid off more than 200 workers last year and whose payroll sits near the lowest level in its modern history.
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the contract at the northwestern Ontario facility, describing it as the largest investment in VIA Rail’s history. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, the order covers 313 Adessia cars across nine configurations — coaches, sleepers, dome cars, dining cars, baggage cars and accessible berths among them — to replace a long-distance fleet that now averages 77 years old. It will be the first time in roughly four decades that VIA Rail passenger cars are built in Canada. Final assembly will take place in Thunder Bay, carbody manufacturing in La Pocatière, Que., and design and engineering work at Alstom’s facility in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Que. The government says the work will support roughly 700 jobs across Ontario and Quebec and generate more than $1.6 billion in economic benefits. Alstom’s own release puts the value of the cars at about $4 billion, with the remaining nearly $700 million covering a 15-year technical support and spare parts agreement.
What most of Thursday’s coverage did not set out is the baseline the 700-job figure is being measured against. The Thunder Bay plant, historically among the city’s largest private-sector employers, held between roughly 750 and 1,300 workers through most of the 2010s under Bombardier ownership. Bombardier announced roughly 550 layoffs in 2019 as its Toronto Transit Commission and Metrolinx contracts wound down. By the time Alstom completed its acquisition of Bombardier’s rail division in 2021, the workforce had fallen to between 350 and 400, and by late 2022 it was down to about 150 active workers. The most recent round began May 9, 2025, as a TTC streetcar contract closed out. Alstom confirmed to Northern Ontario Business at the time that up to 230 employees were affected, staggered through the end of that August. Justin Roberts, president of Unifor Local 1075, said he expected the local would be left with about 170 or 180 employed members once the cuts were complete.
“There’s a real doom and gloom when stuff like this happens, a lot of uncertainty,” Roberts told Northern Ontario Business in May 2025. “A lot of our members are worried when and if they’ll come back at all.”
That history matters because the VIA order is the third major contract announcement attached to the plant in roughly 20 months, and the previous two did not stop the layoffs. In January 2025, Ontario committed nearly $500 million to refurbish 181 GO Transit bi-level coaches at Thunder Bay, work officials said would run to 2031. In August 2025, the federal, provincial and Toronto governments confirmed a sole-source contract for Alstom to build 70 six-car subway trains — 55 to replace Line 2 stock and 15 for the Yonge North and Scarborough extensions. The mid-2025 layoffs proceeded through that same period, because contract announcements and production start dates are not the same thing.
The VIA timeline underlines the gap. Alstom says the first new cars are scheduled to enter service by 2031, with full deployment targeted for the mid-2030s — meaning design, engineering, tooling and supplier qualification consume years before assembly volumes ramp in Thunder Bay. The company has said it will invest $38 million upgrading the plant, according to Unifor. Neither the Prime Minister’s Office, Alstom nor Unifor has published a breakdown of how the roughly 700 positions split between Thunder Bay and the Quebec sites, or when hiring is expected to begin. Those two numbers — the Thunder Bay share, and the start date — are what determine whether this announcement reads differently on the shop floor than the last two did.
Unifor national president Lana Payne called the award “a tremendous victory for our members in Thunder Bay and for Canadian manufacturing,” adding that “it took a trade war to get us here.” The union has spent the past year pressing Ottawa on Canadian content in rail procurement, writing to Carney in March to argue the fleet renewal should not bypass Canadian workers. The test of that argument will not be the size of Thursday’s number. It will be whether the plant’s headcount, currently a fraction of what it was a decade ago, is climbing back toward its historic range by the time the first Adessia car rolls out.
via CBC News. Original reporting: Feds announce $4.7B for new Via Rail cars to be built in Ontario, Quebec
