Oshawa’s Automotive Community

What is life like in a city defined by the automotive industry? How do ordinary people make their way through a society dominated by a single industrial corporation? What do they do when that corporation begins to fail?

From its first tentative forays into the world of motorized vehicles in the first decade of the twentieth century through its boom years in the 1940s and 1950s; from decades of labour unrest and organization in the 1970s and 1980s to economic crisis and collapse in the 1990s and 2000s: for more than a century Oshawa has been a city defined by the automotive industry.

Discover the history of the McLaughlin Motor Car Company, the millions of Oshawa-built vehicles sold around the world, and the personal stories of generations of local residents who defined their identities through the automotive industry – and had to find a way of coping when it started falling apart.