Disused capacity. What to do with it?

An automaker closes an assembly plant and four thousand people lose their jobs. The site sits behind a fence while governments work out what to do with an industrial complex built for somebody else's production system.

Then another manufacturer shows up.

That is Camaçari, in Bahia, where Ford stopped production in 2021.

BYD bought the former Ford property from the state for roughly US$55 million, committed R$5.5 billion to the complex, and started building cars there in 2025. Initial capacity is 150,000 vehicles a year.

Canada is on course for the first half of that story.

On July 1, Washington declined to renew USMCA in its current form, and auto tariff numbers have moved all over the place since. Those numbers can change again, but capital allocation decisions are much harder to reverse.

If a US-headquartered parent sends its next line to Michigan or Mexico, no Canadian tariff schedule puts it back in Ontario.

What Canada is left holding is the site, and the site is worth more than we behave like it is.

Body and paint capacity, stamping, rail and highway access, electrical infrastructure, suppliers already down the road, and towns that have been building vehicles for generations.

A closed plant is not automatically a ready factory. Tooling, platform choice, labour agreements and the condition of the equipment can be the difference between an eighteen-month conversion and a site nobody touches.

One model is contract manufacturing: a Canadian operator running one plant for several foreign brands, roughly what Magna does in Graz.

Another is a joint venture where public money buys binding production commitments rather than a press release.

Demand is the constraint. Canada alone cannot fill every converted plant.

The version that works is an Ontario plant in 2031 building electric buses and delivery vans for government and utility fleets, with the same line shipping qualifying vehicles into Europe under CETA.

Any future deal should go further than the ones we have signed:

• Canadian value added measured and published

• Jobs per subsidy dollar disclosed before signing • Minimum operating periods with clawbacks that bite

• Battery and pack production onshore

• Cybersecurity certification for connected vehicles

Canada committed up to $15 billion in subsidies for the Windsor battery plant and $13.2 billion for St. Thomas. The Parliamentary Budget Officer put the combined break-even at about twenty years.

Bahia is not a clean comparison, and BYD received public incentives of its own, but the plant is running.

We are going to lose some auto production as the rules change. The argument worth having is what we do with the assets that remain.

I work on the part after the announcement, where a decision has to become a running operation.

If a plant near you went dark next year, who do you think would actually come look at it?