Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
Yup, the industrial belt of Southern Ontario was well underway. The most advanced industries were there, close to the US market. Toronto benefitted from that.
Montreal meanwhile was kind of sitting on its own and though it obviously had a diversity of industries it was weighted toward more low-wage, less dynamic industries like textiles.
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In a way Toronto and Southwestern Ontario are lucky that they were close to what would be the industrial heartland of the United States for at least 60 years - from about 1910 - 1970 - and that the main industry in that region was automobiles.
Cars are exactly what you want to build a robust and diversified manufacturing base around. They have thousands of parts, but they're built in large volumes unlike, say, aircraft, and need a just-in-time supply chain where parts suppliers need to be nearby. Auto workers are also a politically important bloc and governments still pull out all the stops to protect these jobs, compared to other manufacturing industries, and that protection cascades to the hundreds of parts suppliers in the region. A Milwaukee drill is not assembled anywhere near Milwaukee nor does the parent company source its parts from surrounding Wisconsin, for example.
Montreal was a little closer to the older heart of American manufacturing in New York State and New England, but those were dominated by company towns of small-to-medium-sized manufacturers of things that didn't have the logistical needs or political base to resist outsourcing. A glove manufacturing plant in upstate NY or a maker of alarm clocks, or things like that. These are the kinds of industries that would have first moved to the Deep South, then Mexico, then China.
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