Originally Posted by JHZR2
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
I'd much rather stuff come from Mexico than China. Employing Mexicans, improving prospects there, which will reduce illegal immigration and improve quality of living for the people there is good. This is preferable over economic suicide, shifting IP, resources and technology to the world's largest emerging economy and arguably the largest threat to the west. Mexico isn't the world's largest consumer of coal nor are they building islands in international waters trying to expand their influence. Mexico isn't building aircraft carriers and dumping rip-offs of products produced with blatantly pirated IP on our shores.
This is a good point, but it's still disappointing that manufacturing is offshored to the third world, taking job opportunities away from folks in the US (yeah, I know you're not in the USA, but for simplicity...).
And people who barely have a pot don't care until it's their job next.
Good thing we need nail salons and fast food everywhere...
I agree, and we've discussed this before. GM has now shuttered Oshawa here, which has sent ripples through the community. GE Peterborough closed, those jobs went to Mexico, and that's been a slow drain for decades at a plant that used to employ thousands and before it closed only a couple hundred at most. But in the big picture if we are unable to stem the flow of manufacture from our economies to those sources of cheap labour, I'd much rather that be Mexico than China, that's really all I was driving at. Ideally, nothing gets outsourced, but we know that's not the way things are headed. I look at all the partnering with the various nuke companies and how China has basically just ripped them all off via those agreements and just shake my head. An industry so desperate for a receptive audience (and I don't blame them for that, Fiends of the Earth, GreenPeace and the Sierra Club have wreaked havoc on the nuclear industry in the west) that they would willingly partner with a nation knowing full well that they'd get ripped off, and of course they have. The Hualong One is essentially just a French EPR (IIRC) and of course this isn't the first time, as when Canada partnered with India they ripped off the CANDU.
Little story:
My great grandfather was a significant presence in the field of hydro-electric turbine design, specifically cooling, ducting and the like. He worked at GE Peterborough as an Engineer there, doing just that and GE benefited greatly from the extensive list of patents that he developed. After the war, my grandfather worked there in hydro-electric, much of it on what his father designed. GE Peterborough was a significant brain trust on the development and Engineering side, but was not a great place to work in terms of worker health if you spent any time on the factory floor. The buildings and grounds were toxic, but the folks there did excellent work. My grandfather retired in the 80's and it was around that time when Free Trade was established that things looked like they were going to change. First to go, from what I recall, was small motors. I can't recollect whether it went stateside first, but it eventually ended up in Mexico. They tried to send large motors there back about a decade ago, which was pretty much the only thing keeping the place open. Nuclear had gone from GE Nuclear to GE-Hitachi Nuclear to BWXT and no longer affiliated. They gave a few million dollar motor job to their Mexican operations, who screwed it up and it ended up going back to Peterborough. Those results are what kept large motors here. Until it didn't. I had many friends who worked there and who all had to find jobs elsewhere, many of them commuting. GE offered some of them placements at another GE facility but GE's presence here in Canada is a small shadow of its former self where we used to be THE plant for large motors, turbines and small motors. The only building still active on that site is BWXT, which makes CANDU fuel assemblies for our nukes, the closest which is only an hour away from it. It's pretty secure and is actually looking to expand, given the rest of the site is now vacant.
People were incredibly loyal to GE, just like folks that worked at Oshawa were to GM. Oshawa, Peterborough, Ajax, Whitby, Clarington...etc these are all cities that were connected to GM intimately. Ventra plastics here, a large portion of their operations was for GM Oshawa. People that lived in Peterborough, most of which had friends of family that worked at GE, those folks bought GE appliances; GE everything, because that's what loyal people do, they support the companies that employ them, but that loyalty only seems to work one way. GE pulled out not because they had to, but because they could. Building it cheaper in Mexico, and everybody knew that the writing was on the wall for large motors. We had this happen before that with Outboard Marine (OMC) who used to produce Lawn Boy lawn mowers, Pioneer Chainsaws and of course Johnson and Evinrude outboards here. So of course EVERYBODY had OMC everything. I think my dad's dad had a least 5x Lawn Boy mowers and easily as many saws as well as several of their outboards. But OMC packed up and left too. Lots of folks at GM believed that the their union was going to save them, but of course that never happened. The Japanese marques don't employ CAW workers from what I recall, they want to keep the unions out.
The nuclear industry is probably the largest industry we have left. Rolls-Royce and BWXT are both local, AECON employs a ton of people, particularly in the trades. There's a laundry list of companies involved in the nuclear refurbishment projects that will be going on for the next decade and hopefully somewhere in there we start building Darlington B.
