When asked what their city would be without auto-parts makers, Pauline Ridley and Colleen Barrette, two union officials, quickly replied, “A ghost town.”
President Trump’s tariff war against Canada has unleashed widespread anxiety in Windsor, Ontario, the country’s auto-making capital. Much of it has focused on the fate of large vehicle assembly plants.
But the concern is just as high, or higher, throughout the roughly 100 smaller auto-parts plants in Windsor and the surrounding county that employ some 9,000 workers. By comparison, about 5,400 people work for the three auto factories in Windsor.
Many parts makers are small businesses without the financial cushion that auto giants can lean on to soften the blow from the 25 percent tariffs Mr. Trump applied to imported autos and some auto parts.
At KB components, where Ms. Ridley is the union chairwoman, about 100 people are currently laid off, leaving nearly 400 workers at the company’s three plants in Windsor molding plastic parts for Toyota, Ford and the electric vehicle makers Rivian and Lucid.
Other parts makers and their workers have swiftly felt the effect of tariffs. Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, estimates that upward of 12,000 parts workers have been laid off and, in some cases, recalled since the start of U.S. tariffs.
While automakers are unlikely to abandon their multibillion-dollar investments in Canadian assembly plants and move production to the United States, Mr. Trump’s often-stated objective, there is growing concern that tariffs will devastate parts makers.
“This is, like, utter chaos that Trump started,” Ms. Ridley said. “Utter chaos. I understand that you want to make product in your country, but you also need to trade.”
While tariffs are threatening Canada’s vital auto industry, levies once played a role in its creation. In 1904, Henry Ford crossed the Detroit River and formed a partnership with a wagon works maker in Windsor to establish the Ford Motor Motor Company of Canada. It was intended to avoid Canadian tariffs on U.S. autos and to export to other countries in the British Empire.
The sprawling Windsor Engine plant was designed by Albert Kahn, Ford’s favorite architect, and opened in 1923. Originally an assembly plant, today it produces only engines. The factory’s foundry is gone, and its test track is now used by walkers and cyclists.
Like many families in Windsor, Ms. Ridley’s is deeply linked to auto work. Her father made industrial patterns that were used to cast metal auto parts. Her son had worked at a German-owned plastic parts plant in Leamington, Ontario, a town southeast of Windsor that bills itself as Canada’s tomato capital. After the U.S. tariffs went into effect, he was laid off.
“He asks, ‘What am I going to do if this place closes?’” Ms. Ridley said.
Ford is not the only family dynasty that helped turn Windsor into an auto-making powerhouse. The Canadian parts sector, in particular, expanded rapidly after World War II with the arrival of skilled immigrants from Europe who often started out making parts in their home basements or garages.
Magna International, an automotive parts company founded by Frank Stronach, a native of Austria, became a global behemoth, with $43 billion in sales.
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(Mr. Stronach is currently facing 18 charges, including sexual assault, stemming from complaints by more than a dozen women. He has denied any wrongdoing and is no longer involved with Magna.)
Many of Windsor’s parts plants remain family controlled, though their employee head counts are often in the dozens rather than the thousands, working in vehicle assembly factories.
Known as “tier two” suppliers, they don’t deal directly with automakers but produce parts, often portions of parts, for larger parts makers like Magna.
Down the road from Ford’s Essex Engine Plant in Windsor, Colby Wu, co-owner of Stratus Plastics, laid out a series of near-death experiences that have menaced the company founded by his father, William Wu, who came with his family as refugees from Mao’s China in 1965.
Low points have included mortgaging relatives’ homes for cash, haggling with utilities to keep the factory lights on, arranging for customers to make their payments coincide with Stratus’s payday and an ill-timed expansion into Kentucky that fizzled before it started because of Covid-19 pandemic disruptions.
Small-parts makers find themselves in a highly competitive business with the thinnest of profit margins and little security.
Stratus employs about 36 people, and Mr. Wu, who owns the business with his father, said the biggest challenge was the ever-shifting nature of Mr. Trump’s tariffs and uncertainty over their longevity.
“The worst thing in today’s situation is the fact that we don’t know what direction he’s going to go,” Mr. Wu said. “If we know what directions they’re going to go, at least we could plan and build toward it.”
The U.S. trade rules come with complicated regulations on how tariffs are imposed, based, among other things, on whether they meet the requirements of a North American trade agreement negotiated during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Mr. Wu said he had a hard time getting some U.S. firms to buy from him because they were unsure what the cost might ultimately be because of the complex and still not finalized tariff system.
“That’s hurting us quite a bit.” he said.
A walk around Stratus hints at the auto industry’s byzantine complexity and the difficulty in determining the nationality of any given part passing through the integrated industry, which plays a role in determining tariff rates.
At one plastic molding machine, workers were removing part of a seat back and installing a piece of fabric from another parts maker. Those pieces then make their way to other parts companies that may be spread throughout the continent before becoming an actual seat.
Even the seemingly simple lids that cover fuel caps were being carefully inspected by two women at another plastic injection molding press, later to be fitted with a hinge and possibly a latch at another parts plant before being painted at a vehicle assembly plant.
Despite the uncertainty, Stefan Andersson, the chief executive of KB Components, Ms. Ridley’s employer, said the firm was still planning to proceed with upgrades to the factory’s molding machines.
While the company’s optimism has given Ms. Ridley solace that she will not soon lose her job, like her son, she and Ms. Barrette, a former welder, see worrying signs throughout Windsor.
The two women were part of a union group that physically blocked a truck from moving machinery from a local family-owned stamping plant across the bridge that connects Windsor to Detroit.
The company, Titan Tool & Die, was caught in the middle of the tariff standoff. Like other parts producers, it relies on dies or molds owned by larger parts companies or automakers, some of which can cost millions of dollars, to stamp or mold parts.
In Titan’s case, the U.S.-based owners of the machinery wanted it back to avoid paying tariffs by making parts in the United States.
A court ordered the union to stop blocking the trucks, and the machinery is now in Michigan. (Titan, which was founded by a former Ford toolmaker in his basement 69 years ago, declined to comment.)
Ms. Ridley and Ms. Barrette said they expected more machines and more work to eventually make their way across the border to the United States the longer the tariffs remain in place.
“It’s a bad situation all the way around for everybody,” Ms. Barrette said.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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