Will the Trump Canada trade war turn the auto parts capital of Canada into a ghost city?

When asked what their city would be without car parts makers, Pauline Ridley and Colleen Barret, two trade union officials, soon answered: “A ghost city.”

President Trump’s tariff war against Canada has unleashed widespread fear in Windsor, Ontario, the cars of the country. Much of them has focused on the fate of large vehicle assembly plants.

But the care is just as high or higher, in the approximately 100 smaller automatic parts plants in Windsor and the surrounding province that employs around 9,000 employees. For comparison: about 5,400 people work for the three car factories in Windsor.

Many parts manufacturers are small companies without the financial pillow that authoritators can lean on to ease the blow of the 25 percent rates that Mr Trump applies to imported cars and some car parts.

At KB components, where Mrs. Ridley is the chairman of the Union, around 100 people have currently been fired, leaving nearly 400 employees in the three factories of the company in Windsor Plastic Parts for Toyota, Ford and the makers Rivian and Lucid for electric vehicles.

Other parts manufacturers and their employees have quickly felt the effect of rates. Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, estimates that employees have been fired more than 12,000 parts and, in some cases, recalled since the start of the American rates.

Although it is unlikely that car manufacturers leave their investments in millions of dollars in the Canadian assembly factories and move production to the United States, the often -mentioned objective of Mr Trump, there is a growing concern that rates will destroy parts makers.

“This is, like total chaos that Trump started,” said Mrs. Ridley. “Excessive chaos. I understand that you want to make product in your country, but you also have to exchange.”

While rates threaten the vital car industry of Canada, taxes once played a role in its creation. In 1904 Henry Ford crossed the Detroit River and formed a collaboration with a Wagon Works Maker in Windsor to set up the Ford Motor Motor Company of Canada. It was intended to avoid Canadian rates for American cars and to export them to other countries in the British Empire.

The vast Windsor engine factory was designed by Albert Kahn, Ford’s favorite architect, and opened in 1923. Originally an assembly factory, today it only produces engines. The foundry of the factory has disappeared and the test track is now used by walkers and cyclists.

Like many families in Windsor, Mrs. Ridley’s is deeply linked to car work. Her father made industrial patterns that were used to throw metal car parts. Her son had worked in a plastic plastic parts factory in Leamerton, Ontario, a city southeast of Windsor that invoices itself as the tomato capital of Canada. After the American rates have come into force, he was fired.

“He asks:” What will I do if this place closes? “Said Mrs. Ridley.

Ford is not the only family dynasty that Windsor helped in an automatic powerhouse. The Canadian parts sector in particular expanded quickly after the Second World War with the arrival of skilled immigrants from Europe who often started making parts in their home base or garages.

Magna International, a company in the car parts founded by Frank Stronach, a resident of Austria, became a global colossus, with a turnover of $ 43 billion.

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(Mr Stronach is currently confronted with 18 charges, including sexual abuse, arising from complaints by more than a dozen women. He has denied misconduct and is no longer involved in Magna.)

Many of the Windsor parts plants remain family -oriented, although their counts of the employee head are often in the dozens instead of the thousands, working in factories of vehicles.

Known as “Tier Two” suppliers, they do not handle car manufacturers directly, but produce parts, often parts of parts, for larger parts manufacturers such as Magna.

On the road of Ford’s Essex engine factory in Windsor, Colby Wu, co-owner of Stratus Plastics, a series of near-death experiences explained that the company threatened by his father, William Wu, who came with his family as refugees from Mao’s China in 1965.

Low points include the houses of mortgage relatives for cash, negotiating with utilities to maintain the factory lights, so that customers coincide their payments with Stratus’s payment day and a poorly timed expansion to Kentucky who roared before it started because of Covid-19-Pandemic disruption.

Makers of small parts are in a very competitive company with the thinnest profit margins and little security.

Stratus employs around 36 people, and Mr Wu, who owns the company with his father, said that the biggest challenge was the ever -changing nature of the rates and uncertainty of Mr Trump about their lifespan.

“The worst in today’s situation is the fact that we do not know which direction he is going,” said Mr. Wu. “If we know what indications they are going, we can at least plan and build it.”

The American trade rules have complicated rules on how rates are imposed, among other things, based on whether they meet the requirements of a North -American trade agreement that was negotiated during the first term of Mr Trump.

Mr Wu said he had a hard time buying some American companies from his because they were not sure what the costs could ultimately be because of the complex and still not completed rate system.

“That hurts us a lot.” he said.

A walk around Stratus refers to the Byzantine complexity of the car industry and the difficulty to determine the nationality of a certain part that goes through the integrated industry, which plays a role in determining the rate percentages.

On one plastic form machine, employees removed part of a backrest and installed a piece of fabric from another maker of parts. Those pieces then find their way to other parts companies that can be spread over the continent before they become a real chair.

Even the seemingly simple lids that cover the fuel caps were carefully inspected by two women with another plastic squirting founders, later with a hinge and possibly a lock in another parts plant before they were painted in a vehicle assembly plant.

Despite the uncertainty, Stefan Andersson, the Chief Executive of KB components, Mrs. Ridley’s employer, said that the company was still planning to continue upgrades to the formal machines of the factory.

While the optimism of the company has given Mrs. Ridley Solace that she will not lose her job quickly, such as her son, she and Mrs. Barrette, a former welder, see worries of worries about Windsor.

The two women were part of a trade union group that physically blocked a truck from moving machines from a local stamp factory in the family business across the bridge that connects Windsor with Detroit.

The company, Titan Tool & Die, was caught in the middle of the tariff piz. Just like other parts producers, it relies on molds or fungi owned by companies of larger parts or car manufacturers, some of which can cost millions of dollars, to stamp or mold parts.

In the case of Titan, the American owners of the machines wanted to pay back rates by making parts in the United States.

A court ordered the trade union to stop blocking the trucks and the machines is now in Michigan. (Titan, who was founded 69 years ago by a former Ford Toolmaker in his basement, refused to comment.)

Mrs. Ridley and Mrs. Barrette said they expected more machines and more work to eventually find the border to the United States, the longer the rates remain in place.

“It’s a bad situation for everyone,” said Mrs. Barret.