While some lament the aging of the skilled trades populace in Ontario, new education and training projects under way may change that. St. Clair College in Wallaceburg is stretching its training capabilities with a $2.9 million, 11,000-sq.-ft. (1,022-sq.-m.) expansion that's expected to boost the local skilled labor supply by 20 percent. And in Durham, the new Ontario Institute of Technology will open in 2003, backed by $38 million in provincial funding and a lot of demand by area auto firms. Meanwhile, the Toronto area is second only to Boston in its number of science and engineering graduates.
      Companies are doing their share of work-force development too, with GM recently opening its Canadian Regional Engineering Center in Oshawa, where 230 professionals will work not only with the nearby plant's personnel, but collaborate on innovations with similar centers around the world through real-time hookups.
      The relatively affordable costs of labor, especially in terms of benefits over and above wages, make Ontario an attractive choice, as does the province's relatively high unemployment rate of around 6 percent -- a number many would call a "labor availability index."
      Sisko says it's not just the existence of qualified labor, but their longevity that matters.
      "The job tenure for an average full-time employee is approximately nine years," says Sisko, "and for a part-time employee, just over five years. This reduces the amount of training necessary, and it maintains product quality, which is essential to the automotive industry." Her most persuasive argument: For three vehicles made in both the U.S. and in Ontario, the time spent per vehicle is significantly less up north.
      To illustrate how far the industry has come in Ontario, one need only look at the DaimlerChrysler plant in Windsor, which rolled its ten-millionth vehicle off the line last December. While it took the plant 54 years to make its first 5 million vehicles, it only took 17 years to make the next 5 million.

JIT and 3PL Driving Growth       Automotive firms looking to locate a facility had best move as quickly as their JIT systems, especially in the Greater Toronto area (GTA). Not only is the land for development relatively scarce, but the coming huge expansion of Toronto's Pearson Airport will paradoxically strain construction resources in the area at the same time it will encourage more companies to set up shop near an expanding hub of logistics and distribution.       That growth in distribution continues unabated, driven by the "3PL" sector (Third Party Logistics). As the 2001 annual market report from Toronto-based real estate firm J.J. Barnicke notes, logistics space grew by 35 percent in the province between 1998 and 1999, and it's estimated that some 30 million sq. ft. (2.8 million sq. m.) of distribution space has been added in the GTA alone. What's more, "Vacancy rates declined for the eighth straight year while rental rates have stabilized at replacement cost levels" in 2000 in the western portion of the GTA, which naturally dovetails into the continuing clusters of auto-related firms all the way to Windsor at the border. The report notes that many projects are going forward as design-build projects with one tenant, or as "semi-spec" buildings that aren't completed to custom specs until a tenant has been signed.