This paper takes a close look at the labour force of landed immigrants in the automotive production sector (parts + assembly), and immigrant labour force participation in 49 key occupations in the general labour force.

Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) are not included in this analysis, as they are not extensively employed in automotive production. This analysis provides insights that can inform government policy and support implementation of concrete actions by the industry and its stakeholders to utilize immigrants as an increased source of labour. We make several observations based on this analysis.

Immigrant labour has traditionally been important to the automotive production sector in both assembly and parts production. In 2019, immigrants in Canada made up 23% of the labour force in assembly and 39% in parts production; the latter is higher than the overall share of immigrants in the Canadian labour force which was 26%.

The immigrant labour force share is particularly high in the GTHA1 in parts production where 60% are immigrants, while 34% of GTHA assembly employees are immigrants.

In metropolitan areas, immigrants predominantly occupy engineering/technical/managerial occupations but have a more even distribution in other regions within the three groups of occupations (total 49 NOCs) used in our FOCAL labour forecast.