E-commerce giant Amazon Canada will shutter seven operation facilities in Quebec over the next two months.
The online retailer said 1,700 regular employees in Quebec and 250 temporary-seasonal workers will be affected.
Amazon Canada will close one fulfillment centre, two sorting centres, three delivery stations and one AMXL (extra large) delivery station that is co-located with a sorting centre.
Here are the locations:
YUL2 -Amazon Warehouse at 3000 Rue Louis A Amos, Lachine.
YUL5 - Amazon Centre de Tri, 5799 Rte de l’Aéroport, Saint-Hubert
DXT4 Amazon, 5555 Rue Ernest-Cormier, Laval
DXT5 Amazon, 3399 Av Francis-Hughes, Laval
DXT6 - Amazon, 1100 Norman St, Lachine
YT4 Amazon D2600 Av Francis-Hughes, Laval
HYU1 Amazon 5799 Rte de l’Aéroport, Saint-Hubert
Amazon Canada opened its first Quebec warehouse in Lachine in 2020. In the spring of 2024, more than 200 employees unionized at a warehouse in Laval.
A spokesperson with Amazon said Wednesday the decision to shutter its Quebec warehouses “was not made lightly,” and denied it was related to the unionization of employees.
Amazon says it plans to return to its third-party model, “supported by small local businesses.”
“This is something we already had in Quebec, we had it in place until 2020,” said Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait. “We believe it’s going to allow us to provide the same great business to our customers.”
Speaking with CTV News, Caroline Senneville, president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), the union representing Quebec Amazon workers, said she wasn’t notified about the closures until early Wednesday morning.
“It’s outrageous,” Senneville told CTV News Channel. “I have no other words for it.”
The president went on the blast Amazon’s “anti-union” ways, saying the decision wasn’t a surprise to her.
“My message to Amazon is always the same; if our money here in Canada is good enough for you, then our labour laws should be good enough for you, too,” Senneville said. “The right to form a union, the right to negotiate a collective working contract. It’s protected by the Charter rights in Canada.”
As of January, there only two unionized warehouses at Amazon, the other is the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, New York City.
--with files from CTV News Montreal’s Rachel Lau
