A car a minute, at peak production
Durham Region & Oshawa
East of Toronto, Durham Region's largest city built its entire identity around one company — the McLaughlin carriage works that became General Motors of Canada, earning Oshawa the nickname "Canada's Motor City."
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East of Toronto, Durham Region — Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa and Clarington — is the GTA's eastern counterpart to Mississauga and Brampton in the west, and its largest city, Oshawa, built an entire identity around a single industry.
From carriages to cars
Robert McLaughlin moved his horse-carriage business to Oshawa in the late 1870s. His son R.S. McLaughlin founded the McLaughlin Motor Car Co. in 1907 after a trip to the United States convinced him automobiles were the future — and in 1918, McLaughlin's company merged with Chevrolet to form General Motors of Canada, with the McLaughlin brothers staying on to run it.
Canada's Motor City
By 1928, Oshawa's GM plant was producing a car a minute. During the Second World War it retooled for the Allied war effort, building military vehicles, aircraft fuselages and machine guns alongside its usual output — production at a scale that earned Oshawa its lasting nickname, "Canada's Motor City."
Decline, closure and a partial comeback
Automotive employment in Oshawa shrank steadily from the 1990s onward — from roughly 6,000 plant workers in 2005 down to about 3,000 by 2018 — and the assembly plant closed entirely for about two years before reopening in 2021, producing Canadian-made Chevrolet Silverados, a modest but real revival of the industry that built the city.
The rest of Durham Region
Pickering, Ajax and Whitby have grown largely as commuter suburbs along the same GO Transit Lakeshore East line that's connected the region to Toronto since GO's founding in 1967, giving Durham a more residential, lower-density character than the high-rise growth further west in York and Peel regions.
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Sources
- TVO Today — How Oshawa Became Canada's Motor City
- Global News — A Look Back at General Motors in Oshawa
- Wikipedia — Oshawa