Looking back, 2019 was a year of uncertainty for the automotive industry. Hurdles included plant closures, sales uncertainty, strife within the workforce, and production shifts. Yet, despite these challenges, DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. has released a report showing that employment within the Canadian automotive industry “remained stable with 693.7 thousand Canadians employed in the overall automotive industry on average by the end of 2019.” This is an employment figure which, according to DesRosiers, “has been steadily increasing since 2010.”
A breakdown of the numbers show that motor vehicle manufacturing employment remained stable between 2018 and 2019, but this stability is not expected to be long-lived. According to DesRosiers, “first quarter 2020 employment figures are expected to change this trend.”
Also of note is that while the overall employment remained stable during this time, “manufacturing employment staggered somewhat with motor vehicle body and trailer as well as parts and accessories manufacturing down 5.4% and 2.1% for the year respectively.”
The boosts in the industry that helped level off this drop came from the non-manufacturing sector. Both repair and maintenance, and dealer employment levels saw a small hike that brought the industry’s overall employment numbers up. These two subsections of the industry “added nearly five thousand new employees to the overall Canadian automotive industry.”
Comparatively, the difference in employment between the two subsections was only incrementally higher in “automotive repair and maintenance [where] employment increased 1.9% with an average of 113.7 thousand employees for the year,” DesRosiers reports, adding that “Automobile dealer employment—the single largest portion of overall automotive employment—increased 1.8% with an average of 161.9 thousand people employed for the year.”
Today’s extreme market uncertainties linked to the price of oil and the COVID-19 pandemic make it unlikely that employment figures in the Canadian automotive industry will continue the steady increase that has been enjoyed for the past ten years, but time will tell how significant the impact will be to employment within these sectors of the industry.
