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“Starting next Wednesday, I will be able to start nagging the Liberals to cough it up,” he said.

Burton’s comments come amid new, year-to-date figures showing that Canada’s share of North American light vehicle production fell to 12.6 per cent — the lowest level since statistics began being compiled.

Photo by Tyler Brownbridge / Windsor Star

Once the top-producing jurisdiction in North America, Canada’s share of vehicle assembly peaked at about 18 per cent around 1999, but now trails Mexico and the U.S., said Dennis DesRosiers of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants.

“While the U.S. retains the majority claim to light vehicle production at 67.9 per cent, Mexico has quickly overtaken Canada in recent years, and at 19.5 per cent, is close to producing one fifth of all the light vehicles produced in the continent,” said DesRosiers.

“Some of Canada’s weakness in 2015 is due to the 14-week shutdown of the FCA Windsor facility in the spring for retooling with production from the facility down close to 120,000 units in 2015 from previous year levels,” he said. “However, broader structural concerns obviously remain with regard to the future of the Canadian light vehicle assembly sector.”

DesRosiers also painted a doomsday scenario unless the federal and Ontario governments act quickly to reverse the auto sector’s decline.

“We have closed nine plants in Canada. There’s 10 still open with the Oshawa consolidated line scheduled to close in 2017 ,” he said. “When it closes, we will have lost half of our vehicle manufacturing capacity, and our ability to get greenfield is near zero. And we’re doing little to hang on to what we have. Sometime between 2020 and 2030 we lose another three to four plants, and some time between 2030 and 2050 we have none.”