‘Asleep at the wheel’: Michigan city braces for impact of Trump’s tariffs

Factory One, the birthplace of General Motors, is seen in Flint, Mich., Saturday, April 5, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone

FLINT — Just north of downtown Flint, Mich., a two-story red brick building known as Factory One sits as just one reminder of the rich history here of the American automobile industry.

The factory, the birthplace of General Motors, still stands as a beacon of innovation in the Michigan city where the number of autoworkers has been declining for decades.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s automobile tariffs are meant to bring back those jobs, but some experts say the levies hitting Canada and Mexico make the whole North American industry less competitive as vehicles become too expensive to buy.

“Someone fell asleep at the wheel,” Maurice Pope said last Sunday at the Flint Farmer’s Market.

Michiganders are concerned their state could become Ground Zero in Trump’s global trade war. Nearly 20 per cent of the state’s economy is tied to the automobile sector — and it’s facing tariff assaults on all fronts.

On top of the auto tariffs on America’s closest neighbours, vehicles require steel and aluminum. Much of it is imported from Canada, which Trump slapped with 25 per cent tariffs.

Michigan will also not escape fallout from the president’s 10 per cent universal tariffs and 145 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports.

Pope doesn’t understand the strategy that could crush the deeply integrated North American automobile market and questions if there even is one.

“People not doing what they need to do as far as research and understanding the impact,” he said.

Flint is known as “Vehicle City,” starting with its late 1800s dominance of carriage production for horse-drawn buggies. That expertise and industry made Flint a natural location for the burgeoning automobile sector of the early 1900s.

In the following decades, Flint and the Detroit area saw booming economies from the automobile industry. Chris Douglas, a professor of economics at University of Michigan-Flint, said by the 1960s, the Big Three — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, now part of Stellantis — controlled about 90 per cent of the U.S auto market.

“You could graduate high school, get your diploma, walk out the high school stage, walk right into the local auto factory and get a pretty high paying job you could work for the rest of your life,” Douglas said.

“It was hard work, it was dirty work, but it paid enough to buy a house, send your kids to college, maybe buy a boat, a cottage up north.”

For a time, General Motors employed around half of the population of Flint.

Across the international border, Canada’s automobile sector was already working in tandem with Michigan. Integration was deepened with the 1965 Auto Pact trade deal between Canada and the U.S.

Douglas said the “Golden Age” of automobiles was hit hard by the oil market shocks of the 1970s. As oil prices increased the gas-guzzling vehicles that the U.S. built weren’t popular.

Douglas described it as a “perfect storm” hitting the Big Three: Americans started to buy Japanese cars, which had better quality measures and fuel efficiency. By the 1980s there were massive layoffs and plant closures.

Then-president Ronald Reagan’s administration negotiated voluntary export restraints with the Japanese carmakers and it helped save the U.S. industry.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has blamed the North American Free Trade Agreement for undermining the U.S. auto industry. Douglas said the decline was happening before that trade agreement came into effect in 1994, but there was a flow of some jobs to Mexico. Michigan also saw factories move to cheaper U.S. states like Kentucky and Tennessee.

The continental trade pact was renegotiated under the first Trump administration and was replaced by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement. It included boosts to protections for the automobile industry.

Alan Deardorff, professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, said Trump’s tariffs mean that deal is essentially “dead.”

On Thursday, Fain remained supportive of automobile tariffs but expressed concern about “reckless and chaotic” activity on trade from the Trump administration. In a video on social media, Fain said he didn’t support the use of tariffs for political gains around immigration or fentanyl.

Douglas said even if the tariffs bring some factories back to the U.S. “manufacturing is just never going to be the source of employment that it once was 50 years ago.”

Car production has become more automated. Douglas said “you just don’t need as many people working in a factory to produce a car now compared to say 1970.”

Douglas said if the levies against Canada and Mexico stay in place, it will become more expensive to make a vehicle in the U.S.

Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan consulting firm, estimated earlier this month, an extra USD $5,000 could be added to the lowest-tariffed American cars and up to USD $12,000 for full-sized SUVs. Trump’s tariffs have since rapidly changed.

“The American consumer at some point will just be tapped out,” Douglas said.

Canada also buys a lot of vehicles from the U.S. Ottawa’s retaliatory duties, in response to Trump’s auto tariffs, target that sector. Deardoff said American automobile companies may have to find different customers within the U.S. but that also comes with a cost.

Thousands of people still work at Flint Assembly, General Motor’s longest running assembly plant in North America. Many in the community are holding out hope that tariffs could bring additional employment to the city of around 79,000. Others are worried if plants close, or companies reduce the workforce, people will leave.

“I have not done enough research to see how it would affect me, if it does,” said Megan Heuninck, who doesn’t work in the automobile industry.

“I’m sure there’s some level of it affecting everything.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 12, 2025.

Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press