Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Tuesday that Prime Minister Mark Carney should “fire” his industry minister, Mélanie Joly, after a Stellantis agreement to sell its Brampton plant threatened thousands of job losses.
Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep and other automotive brands, announced on Monday a deal to sell its Brampton vehicle assembly plant to Canadian defence and armoured vehicle manufacturer Roshel.
The financial terms of that agreement have not been made public, and although there have been questions about whether some Stellantis workers may be grandfathered into Roshel’s operations, no specifics have been provided.
That deal came as contract talks between Stellantis and the union representing more than 9,000 of its workers in Canada remain at an impasse.
“This Liberal industry minister, just like Champagne before her and the entire Liberal government, is costing Canadians money and jobs and driving our economy into the ditch,” said Poilievre Tuesday in Brampton.
“She’s been threatening lawsuits for years. She’s done nothing. That is why today the official opposition is calling for the Liberal prime minister to fire his failed, costly job-killing Liberal industry minister.”
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In 2023, Stellantis received a $15 billion joint commitment between the federal and Ontario provincial government over 10 years as a performance incentive to revive an electric vehicle battery facility in Windsor and prevent it from being moved to the U.S. That agreement also required Stellantis to maintain its footprint in the province through 2035, which includes the Brampton plant.
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Unifor has previously written to Joly urging the government to block the potential sale and clarify whether Stellantis’ intentions to offload the plant breached its commitments to Ottawa.
The Brampton facility had been slated to be retooled for Jeep production, a process that began early in 2024, before the company paused the plan in early 2025. It later announced it was moving production of the Jeep Compass to Illinois, leaving the plant idled indefinitely.
In October 2025, Joly launched a dispute process and claimed Stellantis breached the terms of its agreement by moving the plant’s production out of the province and to the U.S.
– with files from Global’s Alessia Simona Maratta & Karen Bartko
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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