Chris Wattie / Reuters A car advertises an 84-month (seven-year) loan term at a Mitsubishi dealership in Ottawa, Ont., July 18, 2017. Hot on the heels of GM Canada's announcement it is shutting its long-running Oshawa assembly plant comes the news that Canadian auto sales have hit the skids.

November was a bad month for Canada's auto industry. Hot on the heels of GM Canada's announcement it is shutting its long-running Oshawa assembly plant comes the news that Canadian auto sales have hit the skids. November light vehicle sales dropped by 9.4 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier, according to data from Global Automakers of Canada (GAC). Watch: Canada's auto industry could be gone within a few decades, but a turnaround is possible (story continues below)

In what GAC calls a "worrisome trend," this marks the eighth month in a row that sales have declined, dropping for much of the past year from record highs in 2017. November's decline drops sales back to where they were in 2014, and it's the largest decrease since the financial crisis a decade ago, Bank of Montreal senior economist Alex Koustas noted. "While sales are still solid on a historical basis, the recent softening has certainly been more rapid than anticipated," he wrote in a client note.

BMO Economics Canadian auto sales turned negative in 2018, with the declines accelerating in recent months.