Unifor sits down with Stellantis on Tuesday to start a new round of contract talks — but this negotiation opens from a different place than the two that just wrapped up. When the union reached deals with Ford and then General Motors this summer, both automakers came to the table with new investment and new products for their Canadian plants already on offer. Stellantis comes to its table having told Unifor, just over two weeks ago, that it is “seriously evaluating” selling or closing its idled Brampton Assembly Plant outright.
What Ford and GM Put on the Table
Unifor built its 2026 bargaining strategy around pattern agreements, using Ford as the template. Ford’s three-year deal, covering roughly 5,150 workers, delivered a cumulative wage increase of about 9 per cent (10 per cent in year one, then 2 and 3 per cent), a $10,000 productivity bonus, pension improvements, and roughly $900 million in new Canadian investment tied to the shift toward EV assembly. GM’s members ratified their own three-year agreement this past weekend — 80.5 per cent approval in Oshawa, St. Catharines and Woodstock, 96.5 per cent in Ingersoll — mirroring Ford’s 3 per cent annual wage pattern and raising full-rate production pay to $50.20 an hour. GM’s contract came bundled with more than $1 billion in commitments, including a new transmission line at the St. Catharines Propulsion Plant and the return of Heavy-Duty GMC Sierra production to Oshawa. In both cases, the union walked away with a specific, named product commitment attached to a specific plant.
Stellantis Enters From a Weaker Position
Brampton Assembly has been idled since December 2023, when Stellantis paused a retooling project meant to convert the plant to build Jeep models. That pause became permanent in October 2025, when the company confirmed the Jeep Compass planned for Brampton would instead be built in the United States. In April, Stellantis proposed a fallback: assembling Chinese-built Leapmotor EVs at the plant from imported knock-down kits. Unifor and both the federal and Ontario governments rejected that plan, arguing it would employ only 200 to 300 of the roughly 3,000 workers tied to the plant and add nothing to Canada’s parts-supply base. Then, on August 13, the union says Stellantis notified it that closing and selling the plant entirely is now under serious consideration — a message Unifor president Lana Payne has called “a gut punch” for the roughly 2,200 Local 1285 members who have been on layoff since the idling began.
The Clause That Sets the Real Timeline
One detail largely missing from Tuesday’s headlines is contractual, not political: Unifor’s existing collective agreement with Stellantis requires the company to give at least one year’s notice before any plant closure or sale. Stellantis has not yet issued that formal notice, which means the clock the union is actually negotiating against isn’t Tuesday’s bargaining table so much as whatever written notice eventually arrives. That gives Unifor a narrow but real point of leverage heading into talks — the same contract language it will be trying to preserve, or strengthen, in whatever new agreement comes out of this round.
Stellantis, for its part, has said only that it is “preparing to enter the collective bargaining process” and is “focused on finding a solution” for Brampton, against the backdrop of CEO Antonio Filosa’s broader US$70-billion turnaround plan and a second-quarter profit report in July that missed investor expectations. The company has also flagged 11 new North American Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram models planned through 2030 as a potential opening for idled plants like Brampton — though industry analysts have noted the timeline offers little certainty for workers waiting now.
That leaves the open question the pattern-bargaining framework doesn’t answer on its own: can Unifor use the wage and benefit template it locked in with Ford and GM to extract an actual product commitment for Brampton, the way it did at St. Catharines and Oshawa — or does a company already weighing a sale have far less reason to make that kind of promise than automakers that never put their Canadian plants on the table at all?
via BNN Bloomberg/The Canadian Press (bnnbloomberg.ca)
