Canada’s automotive industry plays an important role in the economy of the country. The industry has a complex supply chain and changes quickly.

Understanding links between various sectors that produce for the automotive industry means relying on data that may be a few years old. As a result, we are still working on how to define the sector and measure the size of the workforce. However, in building our forecasting model of the sector, we are including the jobs in NAICS other than 3361 and 3363 that are dependent on the automotive sector and our preliminary research indicates that between 177,000 jobs and 188,000 jobs are dependent on the sector.

This is slightly more than what was reported earlier this year by Statistics Canada (Statistics Canada, 2019). Our preliminary work also indicates that included in those job numbers are approximately 20,000 skilled trades and over 28,000 senior management, engineering and other jobs with a technical orientation. Our preliminary estimate of the economic output of automotive assembly and exported automotive parts is well over $83 billion per year. This paper looks at the postsecondary education programs that can provide a labour supply for the automotive sector in Canada.