Patti Thomas felt like she’d won the lottery when she landed a full-time job in the paint shop at Stellantis’s Brampton assembly plant in 2016, just two months after giving birth to her third daughter.
At the time, she was 36, had a university degree in social work, and was making $20 an hour as a director at a youth shelter, with no benefits or pension plan.
The Stellantis offer was her ticket to the kind of stability she’d grown up seeing in her own family. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had worked in the auto industry, as had her parents, who took pride in building cars at the very same Brampton plant, earning good union wages and a pension.
For seven years, Thomas followed in their footsteps, sealant gun in hand, bending and reaching over vehicles for eight to 12 hours a day, six days a week. The work was gruelling, but she took home a paycheque large enough to support her three daughters as a single mom.
That chapter came to an end in late 2023 when Stellantis announced plans to retool the Brampton plant to build the next-generation Jeep Compass electric SUV. After three years of waiting, she and some 2,000 fellow workers found their futures thrown into uncertainty when Stellantis confirmed this week that it planned to sell the idled plant to Canadian armoured-vehicle maker Roshel.
It’s unclear whether the assembly workers will soon face termination and where they will find their next jobs. On Thursday, Unifor national president Lana Payne said she feels the sale to Roshel was essentially final.
“We have a sale of a plant and everybody in the country says they didn’t want to have a sale of a plant, and yet here we are. The plant has been sold,” Payne said.
Roshel CEO Roman Shimonov told the Star Tuesday that the federal government supports his plans for the plant, and that his company does not consider itself bound by any of Stellantis’s obligations to its workers.
But on Thursday, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly formally notified Stellantis that the plant sale violates its funding agreement with Ottawa, giving the automaker 30 days to remedy the breaches or repay an unspecified amount of government funding. On Friday the minister said the government had ”put an aggressive package to Stellantis” to prevent the sale, and was still in “solution mode” to prevent it from taking place.
When the sale was announced Monday, Thomas said her heart nearly stopped. She felt angry and defeated, but more than anything, she wanted answers from the company that had long held promises of a bright future for Brampton.
“Where am I going to find a job like this? It’s not out there,” she said. “I guess I would have to go back to school to re-educate myself to get a better job that’s going to provide me with a pension, financial stability and benefits. But I’m 47 years old.”
“If this was your plan, Stellantis, why didn’t you tell us before this?” Thomas added. “We’ve been sitting here for three years putting our lives on hold for Stellantis.”
Right until December 2023, the Brampton assembly plant was churning out as many as 1,000 vehicles a day, including Dodge Chargers, Challengers and Chrysler 300 sedans.
In 2022, Stellantis drew up an ambitious $1.32-billion blueprint to retool the facility and secured federal and provincial funding for its Brampton and Windsor plants. The transformation envisioned as many as 2,370 jobs, with full three-shift operations expected to return by the end of this year.
While the plant sat idle, 2,200 employees continued to receive about 70 per cent of their regular earnings under their 2023 collective agreement. The contract set hourly wages at $44 for production workers with three years of experience, equivalent to about $91,500 a year based on a 40-hour workweek, compared with $116,400 for skilled trades workers.
Joshua Taylor, 34, who specialized in installing engine belts, had planned his family’s future around the promised timeline.
He and his wife, who also worked at the plant, decided to have a second child while they were laid off, seeing the time as a chance to make up for the moments he had missed with their first child, a daughter who was born in 2019, the same year he started working for Stellantis.
Taylor was drawn to the Brampton plant after seeing how his best friend’s parents built a comfortable middle-class life after three decades of hard labour at the Brampton assembly plant.
“I wanted to be where they were, where they could own their home, have two kids, have a driveway with two cars in it,” said Taylor. “That was my goal for this. The quote-unquote Canadian dream kind of thing.”
But what was supposed to be a yearlong retooling stretched on. First, Stellantis paused the retooling in February 2025, citing uncertainty over U.S. tariffs and changes to electric-vehicle policies.
Then, in October, Taylor and his co-workers received a robocall from the company informing them that the planned Jeep Compass production was being moved south.
Taylor said anxiety and fear were “understatements” for describing what he endured during nearly three years of waiting in limbo, not knowing when, or if, he would return to work. But he held on to hope, buoyed by repeated assurances from Stellantis and Unifor that they still had plans for Brampton and it was just a small “hiccup” that would be overcome.
“I feel betrayed by Roshel. I feel betrayed by Stellantis. I feel betrayed by the government,” said Taylor, his voice breaking.
“Hearing the news on Monday and looking at my kids afterwards was really hard because I feel like I failed them. I wanted the world for them.”
Asked to respond to workers’ comments, Stellantis referred the Star to a statement issued Thursday acknowledging the disappointment and uncertainty surrounding the plant’s future, while arguing the sale to Roshel would return the facility to industrial use and create new jobs, with “priority hiring considerations for Brampton workers.”
“Our priority is to work constructively with Unifor toward a fair, negotiated resolution that supports affected employees and recognizes their years of service,” the statement read.
Jason Watson, Skilled Trades Chairperson for Unifor Local 1285 at the Brampton assembly plant, said the sale of the plant cannot become an opportunity for Stellantis, which received public investment, to walk away from its responsibilities to its workers.
Such a precedent should not be set, Watson said. The government needs to take strong action to reverse the sale, he argued, because Roshel is no replacement for full-scale vehicle production in Brampton, and its arrival should not come at the expense of Canada’s auto manufacturing capacity.
“These are jobs that build communities and give people the ability to retire with dignity,” said Watson. “Our immediate priority is protecting their livelihoods … Our members have paid a tremendous price for the decisions, and they had no control over them.”
Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, said major plant closures come at an enormous human and economic cost, with many displaced workers ending up in lower-paying jobs or dropping out of the labour force.
“This is a very, very damaging scenario at a moment when Canada’s economy cannot withstand that,” said Stanford, who worked for more than 20 years as an economist and director of policy for Unifor.
But the deal with Roshel has yet to close, Stanford stressed. Simply returning government funding would not solve the problem, he said, and Ottawa still has tools at its disposal to stop the sale in its tracks.
As a foreign-owned automaker, Stellantis could face stricter scrutiny over the sale under the Investment Canada Act, Stanford said. Ottawa could force the company to honour its promises to produce vehicles in Brampton under previous funding agreements, and impose tariff penalties on automakers that export vehicles into Canada while shutting down plants, he said.
The federal government could also derail the deal by refusing to purchase Roshel’s military vehicles, he said.
Roshel CEO Shimonov said that while the company will do its best to hire some Stellantis workers, it is not part of the negotiations between the union and the automaker and is “not going to even consider” taking on any of the obligations.
This view “should be enough alone to cancel this sale,” said Stanford. “Why would we sell an industrial jewel to someone who has that kind of attitude?”
He also brushed aside Pearson Airport’s announcement of a $1-million investment in workforce development to support 200 workers, including those laid off from Stellantis, calling it “a drop in the bucket.”
Steven Tufts, a labour geographer at York University, said he also believes Ottawa could stop the sale, but is less convinced it will. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push to position Canada as open for investment may make him reluctant to punish a multinational corporation, he said.
Thomas’s father died of cancer in September, but prior to that, Stellantis’s employee benefits covered $12,000 of his treatment costs every month. Now, she fears losing such benefits if her job disappears.
“The ultimate question for me is what’s next for us?” she said. “Are we going to be provided with financial support? Is Stellantis going to support us with getting jobs?”
She recalled that she was working through the pandemic when other workplaces shut down because her work was deemed “essential,” but now it was expendable.
“This would be a good question that I would want to say,” said Thomas. “What responsibility would Stellantis have, except for the communities and families that help build the company over generations?”
