For Immediate Release:
August 27, 2010
Simcoe – Workers at the St. Thomas Ford plant have received their official notices of closure as all of south-western Ontario braces for yet another blow to the manufacturing industry under Premier Dalton McGuinty. As of September 1st, 2011 the Ford plant will close its doors forever, thus eliminating a total of 1,500 jobs.
“This is terrible news for the area as London’s unemployment rate sits at 8.2 per cent which is higher than the national average and higher than the unemployment rates of Russia, South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru,” said Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett. “This only adds to the woeful record McGuinty has earned when it comes to the loss of manufacturing jobs in this province – he has overseen a staggering drop of 287,500 net manufacturing jobs since he took office.”
While government attempts to blame job losses on the recession, the majority of lost manufacturing jobs disappeared before the recession hit.
“The McGuinty government inherited over one million jobs from the previous Progressive Conservative government, and now we have less than what existed at the end of the Bob Rae era,” Barrett went on. “More than one out of every four manufacturing workers are unemployed in a province where manufacturing has traditionally been the economic driver.”
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For more information, please contact MPP Toby Barrett at
(519) 428-0446 or (905)-765-8413, 1-800-903-8629