Time to Look at a NEW Industry

CAW to fight Oshawa closing

General Motors will halt production at its Oshawa truck plant next year and probably won't reopen it again because of the collapse of pickup sales in the U.S., chairman Rick Wagoner said today.

It's time for Ontario to begin investing in tomorrow's industries and help our workforce become less dependent on yesterday's industries. It would have been better to have started this a few years ago, but the next best time is to start today. Before anyone else loses a job without a new one to go to.

How about solar panels? How about scooters? How about subway cars and street cars? How about anything that recognizes that the cost of oil is only going to go up and that, thankfully, people are making different choices than they did 5 and 10 years ago. (That is, not Fiat! Same problem, different logo.)

Beyond a shift in what we make to sell to the world, we also need to be training our workforce to make a lot more of the stuff we need right here at home. The increasing cost of transporting goods means that the earth is a lot less flat than we thought cheap oil made it. A recent report from CIBC World Markets covered in the Toronto Star makes the point well.

We have two choices: we can plan now for where things are headed, or we can wait and be forced to change when it's too late. I prefer the first option.