Canada’s automotive manufacturing sector has historically presented employment opportunities for immigrants that provide family sustaining wages. While immigration is critical to the skill needs of many industry sectors, few are as important as automotive manufacturing.

Given its importance in addressing skills shortages, this paper takes a closer look at labour utilisation of landed immigrants in the automotive production sector and the automotive supply chain for electric vehicles (EVs) and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). The paper also looks at developments in immigration policies that can be helpful for recruitment of workers and provides some policy directions that support automotive manufacturing in meeting hiring needs. We make several observations based on this analysis.