Stellantis Just Confirmed Twenty Two Hundred Canadian Jobs Are Gone and America Has the Work
Stellantis parked its Brampton assembly line for good in December 2023 and never restarted it.
Company executives kept promising Unifor workers a restart that never came for almost two years.
The letter Stellantis sent employees on September 17 confirms the jobs are not just stalled, they already left the country.
The Work Brampton Lost Already Landed in an American Plant
Stellantis CEO Trevor Longley told workers directly that "shifting market and trade conditions, regulatory requirements, and affordability pressures" killed the original business case for restarting Brampton.
Longley did not have to explain where the work went, because Stellantis already sent it across the border.
Back in October 2025, the company redirected next-generation Jeep Compass production that Brampton was supposed to get, and sent it to a plant in Illinois instead.
Canadian workers stayed on layoff while an American plant picked up the assignment that was supposed to be theirs.
The company studied new vehicle allocations and temporary production runs for months and found "none of them produced a sustainable long-term business case."
Instead, Stellantis signed a memorandum of understanding on September 11 to sell the plant to Roshel, a Canadian defense manufacturer that builds armored vehicles out of Brampton already.
Nothing is final, but the writing is on the wall for a plant that once built the Dodge Charger, the Challenger, the Chrysler 300, and the 1,025-horsepower Demon 170.
American Motors built that plant in 1986.
Stellantis and its predecessor Chrysler ran it for nearly forty years before letting it go dark.
Unifor Says the Federal Government Promised This Would Not Happen
More than 2,200 members of Unifor Local 1285 have been on layoff since the final Demon rolled off the line.
Unifor is now telling Ottawa that a sale to Roshel would permanently erase Canada's vehicle assembly capacity at that site along with thousands of connected supplier jobs.
Union president Lana Payne is asking whether the federal government's own commitments to Canadian auto manufacturing mean anything at all.
Stellantis has not delivered the formal written closure notice the union says its collective agreement requires, and talks between the two sides hit a wall on September 11, the same day the Roshel memo was signed.
Local 1285's contract with Stellantis expires September 20.
Workers told for years to wait for a restart now have three days to find out if they have a contract left to negotiate.
Ottawa's Green Car Mandates Helped Empty a Plant That Once Ran Around the Clock
Stellantis did not walk away from North American production, it walked away from Brampton specifically.
Stellantis says it has poured more than eight billion dollars into other Canadian sites since 2022, including battery plants and retooling at Windsor, money that does nothing for the 2,200 workers who built Chargers and Challengers instead of batteries.
None of that helps the workers whose plant is now headed toward becoming an armored vehicle factory instead of an auto assembly line.
Ottawa sold Canadians for years on a green-mandated electric vehicle future that Brampton was supposed to be part of, complete with subsidies, retooling grants, and promises that the transition would protect jobs, not cost them.
The transition arrived, the subsidies got spent, and the plant went dark anyway.
Roshel's armored vehicles may end up saving the building.
They will not save the 2,200 paychecks that used to come out of it, and no amount of federal money changes the fact that the actual car-building work already has a new address south of the border.
Sources:
- Stellantis internal letter to Brampton Assembly Plant employees from CEO Trevor Longley, September 17, 2026.
- Unifor Local 1285/Unifor National letter to federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly regarding the Stellantis-Roshel memorandum of understanding, September 2026.
- Stellantis-Roshel memorandum of understanding announcement, September 11, 2026.
