Windsor Essex

Quick Facts
Province: Ontario
Population: 307,877

Windsor is the southernmost city in Canada, located directly across the river from Detroit. The Windsor-Essex region has built on its strategic location to become Canada’s automotive capital and a North American powerhouse in the automotive and advanced manufacturing sectors. Yet despite the high volume of business moving through this industrial/transportation hub, Windsor-Essex remains a very people-friendly region: parks and gardens stretch along its waterfront, and a vast greenbelt of highly productive farmland defines the surrounding countryside.

Key Advantages

• Research, technology and manufacturing have grown into a $30 billion industry with 300 automotive and automotive-related companies employing over 24,000 people
• Home to the Chrysler Canada headquarters as well as large GM and Ford plants, all within a day’s drive of 90% of vehicle assembly plants
• Excels in other manufacturing areas such as dimensional vision gauging systems, robotics intensive automation machines, laproscopic surgical instruments, turnkey gelatine capsule manufacturing plants and super light aluminum engines
• Successful agri-business industry that benefits from the longest growing season in Canada and contributing to 14% of the region’s GDP and shipping $1.3 billion worth of products annually
• Region is able to reach 25 million people located within 250 miles via the Ambassador Bridge—North America’s busiest international cargo crossing as well as the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, Canadian Pacific Railway Tunnel and the Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry—27% of all Canada-U.S. trade moves across this border every year
• Region was named North America’s Best Small City for Investment by fDi Magazine in 2008
• 1,500 acres of vegetable and flower greenhouses as well as environmental technology R&D in emissions control, monitoring & measurement and waste recycling
• Leading transportation hub for rail, truck, air, and deepwater shipping, with over 50 trucking companies, 5 air cargo carriers, and 16 major docking facilities on the Great Lakes which greatly facilitate the import/export of goods
• Several advanced manufacturing research centres are located at the University of Windsor

Sector Strengths

For More Information

• Windsor and Essex County Development Commission