Amazon said Wednesday it will close all of its warehouse and logistics operations in Quebec, the Canadian province where unions have gained a foothold in one of its facilities, and lay off 1,700 workers.
The closures represent a reversal of Amazon’s recent investments in the province. The company opened three delivery stations in 2021 and one last year. It also had a small logistics center in Quebec and two warehouses that sorted packages.
Overall, the investments amount to about 2 million square feet of assets, according to an estimate by Marc Wulfraat, a Montreal-based warehouse industry consultant who has long studied Amazon’s logistics network.
Amazon said it will close the seven facilities to “provide the same great service and even more savings to our customers in the long term,” according to a statement from Barbara Agrait, a spokeswoman for the company. The company would not say whether unionization was a factor.
Amazon will continue to serve customers in Quebec by returning to its pre-2020 operating model, when facilities in nearby provinces prepared packages that were then transported by third-party delivery companies in Quebec.
Amazon’s first union in Canada included about 230 warehouse workers in Laval, north of Montreal, after unionizing in May. But the company challenged the unionization effort in a provincial labor court. He argued that union certification should be revoked because workers signed union cards to signal their support, instead of voting by secret ballot. The court ruled against Amazon in October, just before the peak holiday shopping season.
Amazon said litigation over the issue continues.
With Quebec’s lockdown, “they’ve made it very clear that we don’t want this to spread,” Wulfraat said, referring to the union effort. The company has more than 46,000 corporate and operational employees in Canada.
François-Philippe Champagne, the federal innovation minister, said in a post on X that he had expressed his disappointment to the head of Amazon in Canada.
“This is not the way business is done in Canada,” he said.
The Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, a union representing workers, said it was informed of the closures in an email from one of Amazon’s lawyers early this morning. Caroline Senneville, president of the confederation, said in a statement that the company had stifled the union drive since its inception three years ago through actions that included what she called “disguised layoffs.”
“It’s a slap in the face for all workers in Quebec,” he said.
The Montreal metropolitan area has approximately 4.5 million residents, making it larger than the greater Seattle region. Pulling operations from a large population center runs counter to what Amazon has touted in recent years as a central driver of its operations’ success: bringing more products closer to customers, to enable faster deliveries. This, as Amazon has repeatedly said, reduces delivery costs and causes customers to order more frequently.
Amazon hasn’t abandoned direct operations from a major North American population center in years, even though more than a dozen years ago it routinely played hardball with states trying to collect taxes for online sales.
Walmart and other retailers have in the past struggled to establish a logistical foothold in Quebec, where about two in five workers are unionized. That’s the highest rate among Canadian provinces, according to government data, and about four times higher than in the United States.
François Legault, the premier of Quebec, said Amazon’s move was “a private decision by a private company.”
“I can understand that it must be tough for the 1,700 families involved,” Legault told reporters at a news conference Wednesday, focusing most of his remarks on the need for Quebecers to mobilize and buy local products in response to the tariffs President Trump. threat.
Jean Boulet, the province’s labor minister, said workers affected by the warehouse closures would receive assistance from the government in finding new jobs.