“That’s a fact,” barks Jerry Dias, national president of Unifor, which represents workers in Canada’s automotive assembly sector.

Dias doesn’t drive an electric vehicle but is quick to add, “I will get one when my members build one.”

That day is approaching.

This past fall, Dias and his team finalized agreements to bring EV production to Oakville and Windsor, Ontario. In a wide-ranging interview, the head of the country’s largest private-sector union tells me how he lobbied key players to secure deals worth $1.95 billion at Ford and up to $1.58 billion at Fiat Chrysler.

Dias relishes telling the story. He stresses that the investments were the product of a remarkable alignment. “You had the federal government looking at major infrastructure spending, you had a pandemic, [and] the whole discussion of what does ‘build back better’ really look like.”

Unifor had long supported electric cars, but not all decision-makers were receptive. “[In 2018] you had Trudeau talking about greening the economy and you had Doug Ford saying the total opposite.” But in spring 2020, word leaked that Ford Oakville was planning to discontinue the Edge SUV. “So I contacted Dearborn [Ford’s headquarters in Michigan] and said, ‘What’s going on?’” Dias discovered the Edge would indeed be phased out in Canada.

“So then we really started to push the narrative,” he recalls. “I spoke with the Prime Minister’s Office, with [Infrastructure Minister] Catherine McKenna, with [Industry Minister] Nav Bains.” Dias told them EVs are the future. “About 3% of the world market is electric vehicles, but by 2040 it will be 50%.”

He believes Ford had little choice. “They weren’t going to close the only assembly plant in Canada. There would have been a war!” he says. “I got a call from Jim Hackett, who was the outgoing CEO from Ford, and then I got a call from Jim Farley, the incoming CEO, telling me [that] we’ll find a solution.”

While the Ford and Fiat Chrysler deals are seen as environmental victories, Unifor’s agreement with the third of the Big Three is problematic. In November, GM announced it will invest up to $1 billion in its Canadian operations to build traditional pickup trucks. I ask Dias how this squares with his climate commitments.

“We needed to get people back to work. If it’s 50% EV by 2040, it’s still 50% [internal combustion] … the key thing is to have your hands in both pots. This was about a short-term solution with a vision to the long-term.”

Dias is a bridge between conflicting worlds. He calls himself an environmentalist but represents oil workers. He acknowledges the planet is moving away from fossil fuel but thinks a complete transformation in 20 years is “too aggressive.” He sees values in nuclear power as a climate solution but feels the technology gets a free pass while wind is unfairly criticized.

“We have a wind turbine on our education centre [property],” he says. “There is not an issue that creates more dissent with our union in the community than that wind turbine. You’ve got a nuclear power station 10 miles down the road that if it went sideways would blow up the entire community. But there’s no debate on that; the debate is about my one turbine.”

Dias was born into a union family in 1958. His father worked at De Havilland Aircraft, becoming president of the local in 1967. Dias began his own career at De Havilland, spent a year at York University (“I hated it”), then returned to the company in 1978 and became shop steward. “My parents come from Guyana,” he explains. “In Canada they say, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ In Guyana they say, ‘Goats don’t make sheep.’”

Perhaps Dias’s leadership is best demonstrated by his participation in a January 2020 picket line at Regina’s Co-op oil refinery. There to support locked-out workers fighting for pensions, he was arrested for mischief and sent to jail – a situation no Canadian labour leader had faced since postal workers’ president Jean-Claude Parrot rejected back-to-work legislation and went to prison in 1980. “I would never expect our members to stand up to the police on a picket line without doing it myself,” Dias says. “You have to lead from the front.”

Dias’s worldview is, finally, pragmatic. In 2024, Fiat Chrysler’s Windsor plant will indeed produce electric vehicles – but also internal-combustion vehicles. “This is all about options,” he argues. “You can fly two kites at the same time.”

None of this detracts from his role in launching Canada’s entry into the major leagues of EV manufacturing.

Dias doesn’t drive a Tesla. He’s driving something greater.

Gideon Forman is a transportation policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation.

The post Jerry on the job appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It turns out he’s also a sailor.

Sitting in the book-lined boardroom of his Queen West office, we’re meeting to discuss his recent environmental ventures. The conversation turns to teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and her crossing of the Atlantic, on her return to Europe from North America in November. It’s hard not to be impressed by his nautical knowledge.

“I’m following her day by day,” he explains with gusto. “She’s on a 48-foot catamaran. She just passed north of Bermuda. The winds look great. If anything, too much wind. She’s running 20 knots.”

Iler has steered many activist campaigns himself, dating back to the mid-1970s when he became counsel — and later joined the board — at Greenpeace Canada, just a few years after the group’s founding. “I acted for them in all the arrests that happened out of Darlington [nuclear power station, near Toronto], the big 1980 demonstration,” where an activist parachuted from an airplane into the plant site.

The protest movements of 1968 had inspired Iler to leave the engineering program at the University of Waterloo and enroll at York University’s Osgoode Hall. “I went to law school thinking there’s a way to make more of a difference in the world as a lawyer. And that turned out to be true.”

Around 1990, after more than a decade of acting as the go-to counsel for Ontario’s cooperative sector, Iler received a call from an engineer who wanted to erect wind turbines in Toronto. This was the genesis of TREC Renewable Energy Co-op, which birthed WindShare – whose turbine still spins at Exhibition Place.

Iler recalls the difficulty – bordering on the absurd – of finding a location for the windmill.  Two sites near the waterfront were suggested, but local opposition shot them down. Then a naturalists’ group proposed Exhibition Place, but the zoning didn’t work. Eventually a helpful city official offered a creative solution: “‘Call it an amusement device.’ That’s what appeared on the building permit.”

Jumpstarting the revolution

Today, Iler is applying that spirited resourcefulness to efforts to retool General Motors’ Oshawa plant to produce electric vehicles for Canada Post. After the 2018 announcement of the facility’s closure, he chatted with the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation (CWCF) and wondered whether employees could buy the factory. “Kind of a long shot,” he admits. “But you never know once you put the idea out there what can happen.”

In spring 2019, CWCF commissioned a pre-feasibility study to look at the possibility of running the plant under workers’ control. “It became clear that . . . it really had to have huge government support to make it work,” Iler explains. “I think the figure was $1.9 billion. But [the study] was able to find examples of this having been done very successfully in other countries. The German post office went out to buy electric vehicles, found there wasn’t anything out there and bought a company to produce their own vehicles . . . And you can certainly have a worker ownership component.”

Iler is an expert on innovative funding models. Thanks in part to his efforts, Ontario has become a hotspot for renewable-energy-based community bonds, including SolarShare (a co-op that floats bonds to finance sun-powered arrays throughout Ontario) and ZooShare (a biogas co-operative). The Centre for Social Innovation – an incubator for more than 1,000 non-profits and social ventures in Toronto alone – credits Iler’s legal chops with securing funding for its hubs, now in New York as well.

If there’s a way to “access capital that sidesteps the traditional Bay Street model and goes directly to people who care about the issue,” as Iler puts it, he will sniff it out.

In GM’s case, he suggests it’s easier for government to mandate sustainability for its own trucks than for privately operated ones. Canada Post can simply say, “We’re going to convert our fleet to electric vehicles within X years, and we’re going to do it through an entity we create.”

CWCF believes Oshawa could produce and sell 150,000 electric vehicles over five years — about 1.4% of Canadian light-duty vehicle sales. Modest, to be sure, but potentially the start of a multibillion-dollar industry. The modelling also predicts significant employment growth — more than 13,000 jobs — and, by the fifth year, CO2 reduction of 400,000 tonnes.

Despite the plant’s scheduled closure in December 2019, Iler is optimistic. “With favourable government policy, we can do it here and get ahead of the curve. We know that GM sold a plant in the U.S. to Tesla. And the price was remarkably low. There’s such potential.”

Among the cars formerly produced in Oshawa was the Cadillac, one of the great symbols of worldly success. Today, with the climate crisis, the very meaning of success has changed. Now vehicles that tackle the emergency are the ones that confer status. Embrace of EVs would only enhance Canada Post’s reputation.

As I prepare to leave, the conversation turns again to sailing.

It’s “not for everyone,” Iler warns. “I’ve certainly been terrified on occasion. [But] the more you sail the more you realize that, as long as you avoid the really nasty stuff, the hurricanes, the boat will cope.” It’s similar to his faith in the ultimate soundness of the progressive enterprise.

“A lot of people get cynical,” he tells me. “I don’t.”

The post The man of wind, water and sun appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As our truck bumped along a gravel path above the former powerhouse, I spotted what looked like a derelict car tire. We stopped the vehicle and got out. It was an adult snapping turtle. Perhaps 30 centimetres in diameter, this was no wee pet shop critter. It snapped open its eagle beak, hissing at us. We were travelling with staffers from Ontario Power Generation, the solar project’s largest equity partner. One of them grabbed the back of the reptile’s oval shell, gently lifted it, and carried it to the side of the road.

Continuing along the crackling gravel, I saw something thrust itself through tall grasses ahead of us. A deer galloped up the hillside, tail erect. Then a second one emerged. In the distance rose a buck’s five-point rack.

Nanticoke stopped burning coal in 2013. Three years later, OPG and its Indigenous partners — Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — gained permission to construct a 44-megawatt solar array of 192,000 panels. It’s OPG’s first ever solar facility.

To visit Nanticoke on this summer day in 2019 is to encounter the age of coal at the very moment of its unravelling. The building that contained the aging powerhouse was so stripped down, I could look through it and observe the lake. It felt like I was witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, which signaled the end of communism in the late 1980s.

The last remaining buildings of the old Nanticoke coal plant (right) will be dismantled by September.

The abundance of wildlife returning to the site — rare ribbon snakes and Jefferson salamanders also live here — reflects a broader societal transformation. On this patch of Lake Erie shore south of Hamilton, industry and nature are making peace. The shining panels resembled the undulating surface of a lake.

As executive director of Physicians for the Environment from 2004 to 2015, I worked many years for coal power’s elimination. In conjunction with other advocates, I organized face-to-face meetings so physicians could tell Ontario’s environment minister what smog does to human lungs. One of our doctors said there were days the air was so toxic her patients couldn’t leave home.

Nanticoke once generated 15% of Ontario’s electricity. The last section of the old plant — which resembles an amusement park closed for the season — will be dismantled by September. All that remains is maintenance of the grass that grows beneath the panels. Who could have foreseen that animals would make homes in the vegetation between solar panels on the former coal-plant site? Staff tell me it needs to be tamed so birds don’t nest in it, which could cause the solar array to be obscured and fouled. It’s marvelous problems such as these that give me hope. OPG is looking to solve it through ecological means; the weeding may be done by sheep.

The transition is also an act of economic reconciliation. About a third of the workers who built the solar array are from Six Nations, just a 30-minute drive from the site. The project creates emissions-free power as it employs local Indigenous people.

Matt Jamieson, CEO/president of Six Nations’ Development Corporation, tells me they invested here for several reasons. “First and foremost, it aligns with our core values, which is ensuring we do the right thing for Mother Earth,” he says. As well, projects like Nanticoke Solar support autonomy. “One reason we created the Six Nations Development Corporation was to become experts in partnerships, meet our own needs and get economic clout to determine our future — so we wouldn’t be reliant on government.”

Six Nations’ 15 % equity stake in the project also makes financial sense. “It’s a 20-year project, which is attractive. We have a high degree of confidence that we’ll get a good return, and the risks are pretty low,” Jamieson explains. The contract promises the Six Nations people at least $10 million.

Most of that will go into Six Nations’ Economic Development Trust, helping to purchase such things as fire trucks and to provide housing and elder care. Renewable energy is a long-term solution so it supports residents’ long-term needs. Everyone can see its virtue: The sun produces electricity, which generates revenue, which funds public services.

Tabitha Curley, Six Nations Development Corporations’ communications manager, summarizes the process beautifully. She sees a spiritual dimension: “Ultimately our interests are to harness our Creator’s capital to benefit the community.”

The snapping turtle is a kind of fossil. It struts across the road with the claws and spiked tail of a dinosaur. So, some fossils are magnificent. But here at Nanticoke the noxious ones have been phased out.

Gideon Forman is a climate change policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation.

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