From the McLaughlin Motor Car Company of 1907 to GM in 2019: End of an era as Oshawa Assembly winds down to close

End of an era for my hometown.

On Nov. 26, 2018, General Motors announced plans to “unallocate production” by December 2019 to Oshawa Assembly, which made the Chevrolet Impala; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio, which made the Chevrolet Cruze compact; Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland; and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.

And now, December has truly arrived.

Unifor Local 222 is set to lose roughly two thirds of its membership due to the end of 112 years of auto assembly in Oshawa sometime next week. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, incorporated on Nov. 20, 1907, began automobile manufacturing the following month in December 1907 – 112 years ago this month – in Oshawa, producing 154 McLaughlin-Buick Model F cars – called McLaughlins – with Buick engines that first year.

The last truck will roll of the assembly line the week before Christmas, as GM stops production in Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size, light-duty trucks, the last of which were being shipped from Indiana for final assembly in Oshawa. The end of production will leave about 2,300 workers unemployed. Unifor Local 222 president Colin James says the local is re-evaluating its future and potentially downsizing from its union hall on Phillip Murray Avenue in Oshawa.

GM will continue to manufacture parts and employ about 300 workers people at its sprawling soon-to-be-very-underused Oshawa plant, stamping parts for GM and, potentially, suppliers. The automaker has made a 10-year commitment to build parts, such as quarter panels, trunks, doors and hoods at the plant. The company is also building a 55-acre (22-hectare) autonomous-and-connected-vehicle and smart technology test track on the Oshawa site.

I arrived to work at General Motors in Oshawa shortly before the halcyon days of the early 1980s when employment at GM in Oshawa would top out at more than 23,000 workers.

I spent the first of five summers, beginning in July 1976 as a Trent University-bound first year student, fresh out of Grade 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School, working in the very same GM Oshawa West Plant high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department that my dad, Bill Barker, had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My dad worked as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the second-longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties. I remember it because I was 13 and in Grade 8 at St. Christopher in Oshawa at the time. He also walked the picket line 15 years earlier in 1955 in the five-month UAW strike against General Motors of Canada, the longest strike against the company.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

I well remember my dad’s General Motors’ ring, presented to him in 1967 for 25 years of “Loyal Service.” In fact, I have it now. My dad and mom, along with his co-workers getting their rings, took a GM-provided train trip from Oshawa to Toronto to the Royal York Hotel for dinner and the presentation by the company. After another five years of seniority in 1972, GM added a diamond to it for 30 years of service.

My first hourly-rated job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the “Rad Room” of the old North Plant across the street. My last summer job at GM was many years later in the Summer of 1992, working on the acid side of the Battery Plant.

The Canadian Automotive Museum was created in Oshawa in 1961. The city at various times has been known by mottoes that include “The City that Motovates Canada” and “The City in Motion” and, most recently, the “Automotive Capital of Canada.”

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, Manitoba where I live now, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to INCO or Vale, as the company is now, and down into a mine, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in.

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Spare change and anonymous generosity: Red Salvation Army Christmas Kettles sometimes see gold, as in South African Krugerrand and Saint Gaudens double eagle gold U.S. $20 Liberty coins that is, along with diamond and sapphire rings

While the Salvation Army has been without a pastor in Thompson, Manitoba since last June when Major Betty-Lou Topping,  who had arrived in town in July 2012, was transferred back to Newfoundland after less than two years here, that hasn’t stopped ministry directors Roy and Rose Bladen, also originally from Newfoundland, and who arrived last July, from mounting an ambitious Salvation Army Thompson Corps Christmas Red Kettle charitable campaign with a goal of $40,000 in donations. That’s  less than the more than $50,000 collected last year but well above the less than $12,000 donated in 2011 in Thompson.

The Bladens are maintaining a Salvation Army presence in Thompson (the Salvation Army has  been here for 51 years.) The Thompson Corps belongs to the Prairie Division of The Salvation Army’s Canada and Bermuda Territory. Traditionally, The Salvation Army announces new appointments on an annual basis in April to take effect in late June, although there are exceptions.

Salvation Army pastors, who are known by their officer rank, such as captain or major, etc., among their other duties, conduct the Sunday morning service, which is known as the “holiness meeting,” where they preach and teach on holiness. The Sunday evening service, which they lead, is known as the “salvation meeting.”

William Booth founded The Salvation Army in London, England in 1865 on the concept of “soup, soap and salvation.” Booth’s vision was to share the gospel of Jesus Christ while affecting social change to improve life for England’s poor. “A heart for God, a hand to man,” said Booth.

The Salvation Army’s war cry is “Blood and Fire.” Anyone who has ever spent time sitting in a criminal court, or walked through the doors of a Salvation Army Harbour Light residential dependency treatment facility to attend a Narcotics Anonymous 12-step meeting, knows the Army – unabashedly and unreservedly evangelical Christian – walk the walk, as well as talk the talk. If you doubt that, ask the guys at any Harbour Light. You can’t “con a con,” as the saying goes.

Today, The Salvation Army, which came to Canada in 1882 and to Winnipeg on Dec. 12, 1886, is the largest non-governmental, non-profit provider of social services in Canada.

The Salvation Army red kettles have been used for more than a century to collect donations since being started by Capt. Joseph McFee in San Francisco in December 1891. According to The Salvation Army records, the first kettle usage recorded in Canada was in St. John’s in 1906.

Kettles are located in City Centre Mall, outside Canada Safeway and Wal-Mart,entrances, inside  the MLCC Liquor Mart on Selkirk Avenue, at Thompson Family Foods in the Thompson Plaza  and at Shopper’s Drug Mart on Selkirk Avenue in the Burntwood Plaza through Christmas Eve.

While most of what is dropped into the kettles is paper money and loose coin change, Mexican pesos, Canadian Tire money and gift certificates have also been dropped in the kettles in Canada over the years. The Salvation Army kettles in the United States and Canada have also famously had unusually valuable and sentimental donations deposited over Christmas seasons past. Two Spokane, Washington-area Red Kettle drives received such surprise donations in 2011.

Inside one kettle, volunteers found a note wrapped around a coin. The note said, “I’ve saved this ounce of silver for twenty years, I’m unemployed for 13 months, my house is in foreclosure, I’m filing for bankruptcy and at 61 my retirement is shot but I still know there are families in worse shape.” The coin had an estimated value of$30 but The Salvation Army said it believed the message it shared is worth much more. They also received a diamond ring wrapped in a dollar bill from an anonymous donor in the Spokane area. The ring was valued at $5,000.

The Salvation Army of Aurora, Illinois, near Chicago, has been receiving anonymous South African Krugerrand gold coin donations for at least the past five or six  years. The coins are usually wrapped in a dollar bill and go unnoticed until the kettles are counted at the end of the evening. The gold coins Krugerrands were valued at about $1,800 a piece in 2012. With the fluctuating price of gold, they would be worth about $1,254 each today.

Similar extraordinary donations have happened in Alberta. The Salvation Army bell-ringers in Brooks, a community of 13,000 people east of Calgary, discovered a solid gold coin wrapped in a $5 bill, with a note explaining the coin was worth $1,700, in December 2011. Two years earlier, in December 2009, someone dropped a gold coin worth about $1,200 into a kettle at Crossiron Mills, just north of Calgary.

Last year marked the ninth consecutive year  a $20 Saint Gaudens double eagle gold U.S. Liberty coin, the one donated last year minted in 1925, has been anonymously donated in a Salvation Army kettle in or around Fort Myers, Florida. The coin is always accompanied by a note, “In loving memory of Mimi.” The value of the donation fluctuate with the price of gold but the coin was worth $1,300 last year.

A diamond and sapphire ring, worth $2,000 U.S., was dropped into a Salvation Army kettle in a Miami suburb in 2011, along with a note saying: “They need more than I. Do good! A Friend.” The ring was tucked inside a $50 U.S. bill.

Another anonymous donor dropped a 3/4-carat diamond ring, also valued at $2,000 U.S., in a kettle outside a Wal-Mart store in a suburb of Kansas City in December 2011.

Scrutiny is the price religious –­ or indeed any type of charity must be prepared to pay –  for the privilege of soliciting our dollars. On average, 87 cents of every dollar donated to the Salvation Army is used directly in charitable activities – exceeding the Canada Revenue Agency guideline of 80 per cent donation efficiency. The Salvation Army says they “strive to meet the needs of vulnerable groups and those overlooked or ignored in our communities. We make no distinction based on ethnicity or sexual orientation.”

Those of us who are adherents of any of the world’s three largest monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism or Islam  are charged with the injunction to feed the poor.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton got it right in his first inaugural address Jan. 20, 1993 when he said, ” we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another.” He went on to say, we are “tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”

As you warm up to that idea, you might want to take a look at this 2:22 YouTube trailer for the Pure Flix Entertainment movie Silver Bells, released in October 2013, directed by Harold Cronk, and starring Bruce Boxleitner as an ambitious, gung-ho father and local TV sports anchor who approaches the holidays much like he approaches life – competitively.

At Christmas, he wants his interior designing wife Piper (Bridgett Newton) to win the neighborhood’s annual holiday house decorating contest.  He wants his son Jason (Kenton Duty) to be the winning basketball player on his high school team.  And of course, he wants everyone in the family – including daughter Kasey (Laura Spencer), who is in her first year of law school – to win by securing the biggest Black Friday shopping deals before dawn.

But when Bruce gets into a scuffle with a ref (Kevin Downes) at Jason’s basketball game, the holidays take a turn for the worse.  In no time, the video goes viral.  Bruce is sued and then suspended from the anchor desk, and sentenced to community service with … you guessed it, The Salvation Army.

You can see the official trailer for Silver Bells here it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ook8i7H7250

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