As a city sheds its identity…

Today is a rare day where I will make a radical departure from the normal theme of this blog, which is basically ‘life in Copenhagen’. I’m not sure why, but what the hell, I’m going to write a bit about the city where I come from, which in many ways is the polar opposite of Copenhagen. Oshawa. If you think you’ve heard that name before, I know why. Oshawa, you see, has the dubious identity one of the renowned Canadian home-bases of General Motors. And with the pending bankruptcy of General Motors, Oshawa is the international news again, that is, if you are looking out for it.

To give you an idea of the impact General Motors has had on the political psyche of the city, just consider that Oshawa (population 150,000) used to have a slogan, “the city that moto-vates Canada” written on the ‘Welcome to Oshawa’ signboards as you entered the city. I’m not making that up.

Oshawa does make a momentarily interesting parallel with Copenhagen. You could say the bicycle in Copenhagen is analogous to the car (or truck) in Oshawa. Well, sort of. You could also say that style is to Copenhagen what precisely to Oshawa it is not. But let’s not push these stretched analogies too far. Actually, it would be interesting to measure just how many people are employed in bicycle shops across the Copenhagen. Oshawa is by in large a flat city, one that could have easily had a network of bustling bicycle lanes hugging every street-side. But there’s not and probably never will be, which is hardly surprising given the city’s historic dependency on the automobile. Anyway, when you live by the sword, you can have a pretty good idea of how you are likely to go, when you do.

Yesterday, the last Chevy truck rolled off the assembly line of GM Oshawa truck plant. The factory is closing after 40+ years of production, taking with 2500+ jobs. I must admit a feel a certain passing sentimentality hearing this. But before you think I’ve lost my marbles, allow me to explain. It’s not sentimentality for what is now lost, rather it’s a sentimentality for what never was. If General Motors had acknowledged the writing that has been on the wall for so many years now, well, there was plenty of time - and shitloads of cash available - to make the necessary reinventions that could turn the company into one that was actually useful in a ‘making a positive long-term contribution to society’ kind of way – that is, one that produced high quality, environmentally-friendly transportation products and thereby made a positive contribution to the world. Instead, the company chose to hang its fortune and its future on an unrelenting dedication to contributing in every possible way to the enormous sucking-sound of as many combustible, highly polluting resources burning, burning, burning.

No, like so many formerly great companies before them, General Motors didn’t even seriously try to do things differently when it became abundantly obvious it was living on borrowed time. What’s more, they’ve made a pretty good go of not trying – milking hoodwinked governments and taxpayers for countless hundreds of millions of dollars along the way. And it continues, with the talk being that a muscle-car, the Oshawa-built Chevrolet Camaro, is experiencing through-the-roof demand. Is that a huge collective (and anguished-sounding) groan I'm hearing, as the company that stubbornly never learns continues on its merry way?

Camaro or not, it's coming. Oshawa’s day of reckoning has always been tied to that of General Motors, and it creeps ever closer (there's still a decent sized footprint of GM left in the city). Although the city is not unprepared for what is now happening, given that a decent sized university has been built up over the last few years, giving the city an additional (and highly improbable) identity as student town (much to my astonishment - I mean, I couldn’t wait for the moment university days were upon me following high school and I was outta there), not to mention the thousands upon thousands working in Toronto who have created another Oshawa-persona, namely the city-as-commuter-holding-tank. Still, undoubtedly dulling the nonetheless traumatic blow that is the closing of the General Motors truck factory will require a certain political ingenuity, and it seems doubtful to me, admittedly from this great and largely ignorant distance, that Oshawa politicians are up to the task. They’ll just muddle along, as always. But who knows.

No, Oshawa is not a place I’ve ever been terribly fond of, though I have the greatest respect for my friends and family who have chosen to make it there home. It’s just never been for me. Attempting to passively co-exist there alongside such a singularly dominant company as General Motors, one so content to naval gaze at its own belly-button with nary a concern for the world around it, probably meant my relationship with Oshawa destined to end poorly from the start. But then the same can also perhaps be said of Oshawa’s relationship to General Motors.