Messed up title, ain’t it? Just as messed up as them folk who berate Canadians for buying “foreign vehicles” like Toyota and Honda.

Reality Check #1: The American Big Three may have had plants in Canada much longer than any other automaker, but the money still flows down south of the border. Domestic (Canadian) labour, foreign (American) profits. And yes; American is considered “foreign.”

Reality Check #2: Toyota and Honda both have plants in Canada. And guess what? The Honda Civic, Canada’s best-selling (and most-stolen) car is built right here in Alliston, Ontario. I don’t recall ever hearing a Big Three employee ever admitting that out loud.

For most of you who follow the news are aware (especially Ontarians), General Motors is planning to cut 1,000 (but actually 2,600) jobs at its Oshawa, Ontario plant. Tempers have flared, not that GM really cares. And do you know I think?

IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME.

Don’t blame the “foreigners;” no, the finger-pointers should look closer to home (no pun intended). We live in a capitalist society, which essentially means that the free markets dictate what sells and what doesn’t. Toyota coming over to North American shores 40 years ago shook up domestic automakers not only because they were new competition from halfway across the world, but also because they introduced unrivaled quality for the money. GM, Ford, and Chrysler never really bothered to heed the tides of change, though, save for a few forced improvements here and there. After all, why should they? They were still the biggest and had the biggest wallets.

Then came the 90’s and the new millennium…safety recalls, bankruptcies, lost profits, combined with Toyota nudging out Ford and Chrysler and giving GM a serious run for its money, whatever was left. And eventually, even GM was beat out from the Number One position of automakers.

Fast forward to 2008, and we have GM (whose CEO makes eight-digits) announcing more labour cuts and the CAW holding strikes. Unfortunately, it’s already too late; millions of fed-up Canadians such as myself have flocked to the “foreigners” and don’t look back for a second.

Full disclosure: my family owned “domestic” vehicles for over a decade and have had to fork out thousands and thousands for transmissions and this and that. Now we own an “import” that we’ve cruised to well over 200,000kms with no serious problems whatsoever. Despite what the pro-”domestic” would like to have you believe, why should we buy supposed Canadian if it’s just going to bite us in the ass right where our wallet is, when we can buy supposed non-Canadian that lasts three times as long? Besides, like I said before “Canadian domestic” can a) apply to any automaker anywhere in the world now and b) still mean that the profits are given back to headquarters in the U.S., so that whole argument crumbles. (For you die-hards who still believe supporting American is better than Jap or German or whatever…well I guess you help a lot to keep mechanics employed.) If anything, I’d like to see American vehicles wiped out completely so the “average quality” automakers would have to work twice as hard to survive, boosting production quality standard even higher.

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Unions = workers^screwed. The Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW), in particular. Actually, they should be called the American Automakers’ Canadian Workers Union (AACWU), and I’m going to refer them as such from now on. For decades, the AACWU has given its workers everything on a silver platter, undermining work motivation and success. Hefty pay and benefits from the company in return for building crap vehicles suitable only for rental and taxi companies. Well, the far-prolonged honeymoon is finally over, and workers only have their several-hundred-thousand-dollar earning union bosses to blame for the loss of “job security.” Toyota and Honda don’t have unions, and no one hears any complaints. To be fair, unions ARE important…in theory. Or during the Industrial Revolution. But, like Communism, humans are humans and manage to corrupt any shred of decency — if any — in the idea.

Frankly, I have always been of the opinion that Canada, once the world’s best and still a solid first-world country, should improve from blue-collared to white-collared industries. It’s a natural process proven by history: when a country develops, it upgrades from agriculture to manufacturing to information industries. We can’t, and shouldn’t, compete with the likes of fast-developing China, India, and Brazil. Instead, we should foster closer trade with them and provide them with the management and technological/economic expertise we’d have developed while they give us the goods we need. Obviously, I’m not saying that trades should be completely ignored, especially since Canada is so abundant in various forms of natural resources, but rather we should focus more on a more advanced economy. Prime example: “greenism.” We totally have the capacity and ability to lead the rest of the world in creating a sustainable environmentally-conscious economy that works. Especially with inevitable energy crises to come, our country can truly promote innovative solutions that minimize negative impacts to the environment while maximizing wealth from the environment (through green jobs, green industries, etc.). Maybe I’m talking too much like a politician, but the fact is that we need to go green (and make green) or go home losers.

And if that means taking a step in the winning direction by slashing jobs that produce gas-guzzling vehicles, so be it. But hey, the lamplighters were never content with revolutionary changes resulting in the electric light bulb, right?