Over the past half century, Windsor, Ont., has been a consistent bellwether for trouble in Canada’s economy. “First in, last out” is the recessionary refrain sometimes heard here. It’s a reputation that was painfully reinforced during the mid-2000s when the manufacturing hub began to shrink two years before the Great Recession pulled Canada under. Windsor didn’t claw its way back until 2011, well after the broader economy had fully recovered.
Now, once again, the spectre of recession haunts Canada. But this time there are hopeful signs Windsor will be able to flip the script. Even though the city still bears the scars of recessions past, it’s undergoing major reconstructive surgery, courtesy of an unprecedented wave of investment that’s visible everywhere you look.
Construction of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will connect Windsor to Detroit and serve as an alternative to the congested Ambassador Bridge nearby.
There’s the $5-billion NextStar Energy electric-vehicle battery plant, a joint venture between Stellantis NV and LG Energy Solution Ltd. that will employ 2,500 people full-time when it begins operations. For now, its scores of steel support columns sprout from former farmland on the edge of the city.
The two spans of the towering Gordie Howe International Bridge – an alternative to the congested Ambassador Bridge a couple of kilometres up the Detroit River – will join some time next year. Add to that a planned megahospital, road upgrades, and a flurry of other industrial and residential projects.
A conservative back-of-napkin tally for all that activity shows more than $16-billion will flow into the region over just the next few years – most of it into the City of Windsor itself, a compact area roughly 147 square km in size that’s home to about 230,000 people. That works out to an astonishing $110-million per square km.
No other part of the country is experiencing such concentrated megaspending in such a tight time frame.
Project cost
Lake
St. Clair
Stellantis Windsor
Assembly Plant
retooling
Estimated start: 2024
NextStar Energy
electric battery plant
Estimated completion:
Early 2025
Detroit
$1.89-
billion
$5-
billion
$5.7-
billion
ROW EXPY.
$2-
billion
Windsor
Windsor-Essex
acute care hospital
Estimated start:
Spring 2027
Gordie Howe
International Bridge
Estimated completion:
Late 2024
HWY. 8
3 km
john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCe: OPENSTREETMAP
Project cost
Lake
St. Clair
Stellantis Windsor
Assembly Plant
retooling
Estimated start: 2024
NextStar Energy
electric battery plant
Estimated completion:
Early 2025
Detroit
$1.89-
billion
$5-
billion
$5.7-
billion
ROW EXPY.
$2-
billion
Windsor
Windsor-Essex
acute care hospital
Estimated start:
Spring 2027
Gordie Howe
International Bridge
Estimated completion:
Late 2024
HWY. 8
3 km
john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCe: OPENSTREETMAP
Project cost
Lake
St. Clair
Stellantis Windsor
Assembly Plant
retooling
Estimated start: 2024
NextStar Energy
electric battery plant
Estimated completion:
Early 2025
Detroit
$1.89-
billion
$5-
billion
$5.7-
billion
ROW EXPY.
$2-
billion
Windsor
Windsor-Essex
acute care hospital
Estimated start:
Spring 2027
Gordie Howe
International Bridge
Estimated completion:
Late 2024
HWY. 8
3 km
john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCe: OPENSTREETMAP
Economists believe the explosion of economic activity in and around the city will buttress it against the unfolding nationwide slowdown. The Conference Board of Canada said this week it expects Windsor’s economy to grow 2.4 per cent this year and then grow at an average annual compound rate of 2.9 per cent from 2024 to 2027, giving it the strongest growth outlook of Canada’s 24 largest cities.
Yet that growth comes with strains and has sparked debate over how to accommodate the influx of new residents; how to revive a downtown plagued by drug use, homelessness and vacant buildings; and how to ensure the region can take full advantage of its windfall of government and private-sector investment to escape the cycle of booms and busts that has defined the city’s past.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: Bringing you the news from Windsor
To capture the full sweep of what’s going on in Windsor, The Globe and Mail met with people from across the economic spectrum: small business owners, housing advocates, property developers, union leadership, corporate executives in the manufacturing sector, entrepreneurs and newcomers.
As their stories show, the opportunities and challenges Windsor faces make this one of the most critical moments in the city’s history.
Diane Reko, CEO of Reko International Group, stands among robotics from Japan which will be incorporated into assembly equipment on the Reko automation floor.
Reordering the manufacturing landscape
Diane Reko, the chief executive officer of Reko International Group Inc., has watched Windsor’s automotive sector deliver waves of prosperity followed by crushing drought time and again. Reko is an automation and machining company started by her father, Steve, in the 1970s that today employs 200 people.
Though Reko doesn’t disclose the industry breakdown of its business, Ms. Reko said automotive companies are its biggest customers. “Automotive is a very cyclical industry where the ups and downs are pretty violently opposed to each other.”
The auto sector and related industries have always dominated Windsor’s economy, but that dominance has waned. Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) is still the largest employer, but the Caesars Windsor casino downtown now holds the No. 2 spot, while General Motors Co. pulled the last remnants of its operations out of Windsor after the Great Recession.
And so, in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with memories of the last automotive downturn still fresh, Ms. Reko launched a diversification push at the company’s plants in the Windsor suburb of Lakeshore. In addition to designing, engineering and installing automation equipment for automotive factories, it expanded into everything from the automated handling of brownies and tomatoes to consumer goods and aerospace parts. “It gives us more stability both for our revenues and for the lives of our employees,” she said.
Now a new shakeup is under way, brought on by the EV transition. It’s just not yet clear how much of that new business existing Windsor manufacturers will get.
NextStar has said it expects 15 suppliers will follow it into Windsor to create a battery hub. At least two South Korea EV supply chain companies have already announced plans to open shop in Windsor, and last month the city rezoned a large swath of land near its airport for industrial use in anticipation of more.
“I’m not naive enough to think that they’re going to come here and not bring some of their existing supply base,” said Ms. Reko, noting an executive with a battery company warned her South Korean firms have a three-year head start over her company. “It will take time and supporting some of that business before we can also be considered a competitive supplier.”
With the NextStar battery plant and Stellantis investing $1.89-billion in its Windsor assembly plant to ramp up EV production, there’s a “rising market perception about Windsor’s role in this space for the next 10 to 15 years,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA). That, it’s hoped, should draw even more EV companies.
Large Canadian parts suppliers such as Magna International Inc., Martinrea International Inc. and Linamar Corp. are already well-positioned to win EV business, he said, while smaller manufacturers that focus exclusively on the relic parts of gasoline-fuelled vehicles will have to change.
To that end, one of Ms. Reko’s customers works in the fuel tank business, but it is developing a new electric product to bring to market. “They’re a long-time customer and we’re pivoting together,” she said.
Meanwhile, as part of its diversification push, Reko is in talks with a critical minerals company about developing automation tools for that sector, to ensure that Canada can actually provide the raw materials needed for all those EV batteries.
Many analysts have questioned the billions in incentives and production subsidies the Ontario and federal governments have rolled out to lure foreign companies to the EV sector. Ms. Reko understands the frustration “when there are questions about the payback to the economy.” But said she is also a realist. “I get the calls from other jurisdictions saying, ‘Come locate here. We’ve got all sorts of incentives for you,’” she said. “It’s a fine line to walk for governments.”
The NextStar Energy EV battery manufacturing plant will employ 2,500 people in Windsor when it begins operations.
The return of the ‘premium’ factory job
Last month, Stellantis auto workers accepted a three-year deal that included a base salary increase of 25 per cent for skilled trades over the life of the agreement, not to mention bonus payments, pension improvements and two additional paid holidays per year, among other benefits. It was the “best deal in 30 years,” said Dave Cassidy, president of Unifor Local 444. And yet against a backdrop of high inflation and wage erosion, only 60 per cent of union members voted in favour of the deal.
The agreement and vote results were stark reminders of how much has changed in the industry since the Great Recession, when workers at failing Chrysler reluctantly agreed to a $19-an-hour cut in total compensation after company executives hinted Chrysler might pull out of Canada.
“The once ‘auto lotto’ jobs that went away, now those jobs are starting to be seen as premium jobs again,” Mr. Cassidy said while taking a break from a skilled trades conference at the Windsor casino. (His union also represents workers at the casino.)
Demographics is part of the story. Labour shortages abound, and more than half of the skilled trades workers at the Stellantis assembly plant are eligible to retire right now, even as the company prepares to reinstate a third shift it dropped in 2020.
But more than that, the jobs windfall is a direct result of the muscular industrial policy programs adopted by the Ontario and federal governments that have committed tens of billions of dollars to try to make Canada a leader in EV batteries.
That’s frequently put NextStar in the line of political fire, most recently last month after the Windsor police suggested 1,600 foreign workers would be brought in to set up the plant. NextStar later said the actual number will be 900, but the lower number didn’t slow federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s attacks.
OPINION: In Windsor, a chance to think big
Mr. Cassidy was quick to defend NextStar and its parent Stellantis, calling Mr. Poilievre’s attacks “political hay.” He said it’s common for machinery manufacturers to temporarily send their own crews to install proprietary equipment, noting that workers from Windsor tool and die shops often travel to Mexico to install equipment. Besides, he added, the union already has 1,000 skilled trades workers at the NextStar site, a number that will grow to close to 2,000 as construction proceeds.
Still, the political fights over the plant worry Mr. Cassidy about what might happen if the federal Liberals lose power. “Pierre Poilievre being the prime minister of Canada would be disastrous,” he said. “We would not have this battery plant here today because he calls it corporate welfare.”
Mr. Volpe at the APMA noted that opposition parties often pledge not to partner with the auto sector, then change their minds once in office because of the importance of the industry to the economy. But he shares Mr. Cassidy’s concerns that the rhetoric around the battery plant could scare other potential EV companies away from setting up in Canada.
For now, Mr. Cassidy has made it explicitly clear to Stellantis that when the battery plant begins operations in 2025, he expects all 2,500 full-time workers will be part of Local 444.
Entrepreneurs incoming
While the national spotlight on Windsor has overwhelmingly focused on the NextStar plant since it was first announced, Ash Guglani likes to think of his company, Nexe Innovations Inc., as a “first mover” when it comes to the city’s revival, though with coffee pods instead of battery cells.
In 2021, the Surrey, B.C., startup was on the hunt for a location to ramp up its production of compostable coffee pods. Nexe had a 10,000 square-foot facility there, but felt it needed a larger footprint that was closer to U.S. customers and a labour pool familiar with automation and manufacturing.
Windsor checked those boxes. So, Nexe snapped up a factory here that was six times larger after the site’s previous owner, an auto parts supplier, went bankrupt, at a price that was 25 per cent less than the current list price for its Surrey building. After a major renovation, the sprawling, pristine white interior in Windsor houses rows of equipment capable of churning out half a billion coffee cups annually for a company looking to shift away from plastic. Nexe’s first shift of 15 employees started its first coffee pod production runs this fall, and other plant-based products, such as packaging for cosmetics and yogurt cups, are in the offing.
“I don’t want to knock B.C., but there’s a much more hungry work force here that is looking for the rebirth of Windsor and it seems like it’s happening,” Mr. Guglani said.
Days later, Statistics Canada jobs numbers for November reinforced that view. Though the labour market here has tightened considerably from a few years ago, Windsor still has the highest unemployment rate of any city in the country.
Nexe is part of an influx of new businesses drawn to Windsor’s proximity to the United States and lower operating costs. A short drive away, in the offices of the Downtown Windsor Business Accelerator program, Vipul Patel shows off the hardware his company, CloudExt, is developing for the hotel industry, including virtual kiosks, smart door locks and cloud-based phone systems.
An immigrant from India’s Gujarat state, he moved to Windsor two years ago through the federal startup visa program, and he has since bought an apartment and applied for permanent residency. CloudExt now has eight employees in Canada, and dozens more in the U.S., Britain, Philippines and India. By next year, the company will have 24 employees in Canada, reflecting an expansion of the tech sector here. A report earlier this year by Technology Councils of North America found Windsor’s tech work force grew by 16 per cent from the year before, the fastest pace of any Canadian city, equal to roughly 560 new tech jobs.
Mr. Patel said he initially chose Windsor because of ease of access to the U.S. market; just that week he’d flown to Atlanta and South Carolina via Detroit, where the airport is closer to downtown Windsor than Pearson International is to many parts of Toronto. And through a WhatsApp group he shares with 300 other immigrant entrepreneurs who arrived on startup visas, he regularly hears tales of woe from other parts of the country. “It’s been easy for me compared to people who moved to Toronto,” he said. “They face basic survival issues because the cost of living is so high.”
Rino Bortolin, a former Windsor councillor, stands at the intersection of Juliet Crescent and Ducharme St.
From one housing crisis to another
In 2014, when Rino Bortolin won election to Windsor city council for the first time, the city faced a housing crisis. It wasn’t a problem of too few homes, but a plague of vacant, abandoned houses blighting the landscape and contributing to crime and vandalism.
“In six short years we went from having probably the lowest real estate in North America, where you could still buy a house downtown for $60,000, to now when the cheapest house in the same neighbourhood is around $275,000,” he said.
That’s still a bargain for anyone accustomed to the housing markets in Vancouver or Toronto. The composite price of a home in Windsor is $593,000, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, roughly half that of Toronto.
Likewise, according to the latest monthly survey on rental rates by Rentals.ca, the going rate for a one-bedroom space in Windsor was $1,545 in November, up 42 per cent since the same month in 2020, but still the lowest of any city in Ontario, explaining why Windsor continues to draw residents from pricier parts of the province.
Yet the cost-of-living surge here has hit a city where the median household income adjusted for inflation had fallen 7.1 per cent from 2005 to 2019, according to a Fraser Institute report earlier this year.
While historic Walkerville, with its restaurants, shops and breweries, houses some of the city’s most affluent citizens, the equally-historic but struggling community of Sandwich, located near the Gordie Howe bridge project site, has been undergoing a slow revival while still contending with some of the lowest incomes in the region.
After serving two terms on council as chair of the planning and development committee, Mr. Bortolin now heads up the housing innovation lab at the Windsor Law Centre for Cities. He’s also an outspoken critic of Windsor’s prioritization of suburban sprawl over the densification of downtown neighbourhoods, and the failure of the city to invest in low-income housing.
A 145-unit public housing development that opened in September was Windsor’s first affordable housing project in more than three decades, despite a waiting list for units more than 6,000 long, he said.
Boarded up and abandoned homes in the Sandwich neighbourhood of Windsor in Nov. 2023.
Mr. Bortolin traces the start of Windsor’s housing woes to the sudden influx of international students in the years right before the pandemic hit. At St. Clair College, for instance, the number of international students jumped from 500 to 6,900 in three years, a massive increase in such a small city.
The college had signed a memorandum of understanding with an Ohio developer to build a $142-million mixed-use “Global Village” that would house 400 students, but this week Windsor’s city council scrapped those plans, citing the slow pace of the project. The city is now looking for other residential developers it can partner with to build on the site.
Meanwhile, the city’s population surge shows no sign of letting up. In each of the past five months, the working-age population in the Windsor census metropolitan area has grown by more than 1,000, based on Statscan’s labour force survey. (The Windsor CMA also includes the towns of Lakeshore, Tecumseh, LaSalle and Amherstburg, and had 422,600 people in 2021.) That works out to a population growth rate four times faster than Windsor’s historical average before this year.
Under new home construction targets set out by the Ontario government, the City of Windsor has pledged to build an average of 1,300 new homes a year for a decade. “We’re going to be hard-pressed next year to have one-third of that met, and that 1,300 is still probably only half of what we really need when you think of all the new jobs we have coming,” Mr. Bortolin said.
Amor Hernandez left her job as an accountant in Toronto to move to Windsor where she and her partner opened up Café Amor & Art.
The new faces of Windsor
On a recent Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m., all the tables at Café Amor & Art, a coffee shop in Windsor’s trendy Walkerville neighbourhood, are packed. Latin music fills the air, and as new customers steadily file in, owner Amor Hernandez welcomes them by name.
If a recession is coming, there are no signs of a slowdown here.
Born in Mexico, Ms. Hernandez moved to Canada in 2001, settling in Toronto. But by late 2019, she’d grown tired of her daily bus-to-subway-to-streetcar commute downtown to her accounting job, and the punishing cost of living in the city. So she moved with her husband and two children to Windsor, where a niece already lived.
She had two choices: pursue another accounting job, or follow a dream of opening her own coffee shop. By March, 2020, she’d found a location to rent and bought all the equipment, drawing down the couple’s life savings and borrowing from relatives to do so. A job offer did arrive for a plum accounting job at a firm that needed her English and Spanish language skills, but she turned it down to focus on her new business. Two days later, COVID-19 lockdowns began.
Café Amor and Ms. Hernandez battled through, eventually outgrowing the original space and taking over a larger storefront that has become a cultural hub for the community. Each month, she donates her walls to a different artist to sell their work, while hosting book clubs, painting classes, language lessons and other workshops.
And her time in Windsor has given her a front row to the changing demographics of the city around her.
“When we moved here before the pandemic, you could drive as if the roads were to ourselves, it all felt empty and quiet,” she said, a stark contrast to the bustle of now. “I’ve fallen in love with Windsor.”
Ms. Hernandez's Café Amor & Art has become a cultural hub for the Windsor community.
Sitting at a table in Cucina 360, a high-end Italian restaurant in downtown Windsor that opened its doors earlier this year, Brian Schwab points to a spot in the corner where he and his wife Lisa had their first date nearly four decades ago when it was a steakhouse. In the decades after that business failed, the building sat abandoned like many others in the area and was the sight of frequent break-ins and a fire. “It was an unmitigated disaster,” he said.
Mr. Schwab, part owner of the Windsor Spitfires junior hockey team, originally made his millions as a tech entrepreneur starting in the 1980s. These days, he’s part of a push to redevelop and revive Windsor’s beleaguered downtown, one building at a time.
All told, his investment group has bought and redeveloped more than 80,000 square feet of abandoned properties along a block in the city’s core into commercial space, and another 270,000 square feet citywide. An abandoned fish market nearby is now home to Rocket Innovation Studio, a fintech and subsidiary of Detroit-based financial services giant Rocket Cos. Inc. Likewise, another abandoned structure across the road is now offices. And, of course, the building that now houses Cucina 360.
“Our philosophy is we do a block at a time, like the strategy in Monopoly where you buy up all the blue spaces,” he said. “We’re like Dan Gilbert on a wee tiny scale.”
That would be Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder and chairman of Rocket Cos. His massive investments in downtown Detroit since 2010 helped spark that city’s rejuvenation, which many across Windsor’s political spectrum point to as an inspiration for their city.
Windsor’s downtown shares the same problems that have befallen many other Canadian urban cores in recent years, all hit hard by the opioid crisis and chronic homelessness. But Windsor was already starting from a back-foot stance. Where Windsor in the 1990s boasted a thriving core of restaurants and shops, fuelled by American visitors, the U.S. border restrictions brought on by 9/11 crushed that activity, and whatever businesses managed to survive were largely decimated by the Great Recession.
The downtown Windsor Caesars hotel and casino, which attracts millions of visitors each year.
The downtown Caesars Windsor hotel and casino continues to attract millions of visitors each year, but it’s a mixed blessing. When a befuddled hotel guest asked a floor staff member how to get out to the street, she replied with winding directions and a joke: “This is the Hotel California, you can never leave.”
Renaldo Agostino, the city councillor responsible for the area and one of its biggest boosters, joins the table at Cucina 360 and lists off some of the steps being taken get downtown Windsor back on its feet. Borrowing from Detroit’s Project Green Light, a public-private partnership in which 3,000 high-definition cameras have been installed across Motor City as crime deterrents, six Windsor businesses have installed such cameras as part of a pilot project.
A vacant urban lot that had been strewn with garbage and used needles was converted into a beach volleyball court this fall. And Mr. Agostino is part of a push to create a provincial bill that would give municipalities powers to compel owners of vacant commercial properties to improve their appearance. “I’m not saying sell your property, I’m saying keep it nice or give us the option to turn it into a gallery and make it something beneficial to the downtown core and not something that makes the core less safe and less attractive,” he said.
Change is happening. The University of Windsor and St. Clair College have both set up campuses downtown, bringing staff and students to the area. And last month The Hive, a condo and commercial project, opened on the site of an abandoned nightclub, reportedly the first new downtown residential project in nearly 50 years.
But the revival will take time, Mr. Schwab said. “We have to get people working downtown. Then they’ll eat and shop downtown. And then ultimately they may decide to live downtown. That’s the order of development.”
As the office towers across the river in Detroit reflect the glow of sunset, visitors to the riverfront in Windsor take photos of each other on Nov. 24.
Each week seems to bring an announcement of yet another new plant or project getting under way in Windsor, and the expectation is for much more to come. As it is, industry watchers are waiting on a decision by one international company in the EV space about whether it will invest $3-billion on a new plant here or in Mexico.
And so the talk of recession that dominates so many other parts of the country at the moment feels far off from here. If all goes well, the investments made in Windsor will pay dividends to the rest of Canada in the coming years. When completed, the Gordie Howe bridge will boost the country’s trade capacity, while the modernization the manufacturing sector in Windsor, as well as other hubs across Ontario and Quebec, will deliver the potential for higher productivity and help reverse the slump in Canadian living standards.
Plenty can still go wrong. It is by no means certain the transition to EVs will unfold as quickly as the industry hopes, and the inability of Canada to secure access to critical minerals may hobble its electric-battery ambitions, raising further questions about the vast sums governments are spending on the industry. But it all makes Windsor an important city to watch in the months and years to come. It’s been a long time since that’s been the case.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated that Rino Bortolin was director of the planning and development committee during his time on city council. He was the chair. A previous version of this article stated that Nexe's coffee pod technology came out of the University of British Columbia. The technology was developed in house. This version has been updated.