Last month, US automaker Stellantis announced it would be making a big move. Literally. The company intends to shift production of a Jeep model from Brampton to Illinois. About 3000 workers were employed at the Brampton plant before it shut down last year to get ready for the Jeep Compass. Ottawa is not pleased, to put it mildly, and it's now launching a formal dispute resolution process.

First up on the show, what are the government's chances here? What will this mean for Ontario's workers and for the province's auto sector?

Then cars are big business. They're also show business. They've powered the success of Universal's biggest franchise, "The Fast and the Furious." How did a film many assumed would be a clunker drive, the creation of a fleet of sequels that have racked up more than $7 billion and changed the movie business along the way? Welcome to "The Rundown."

The federal government is challenging Stellantis decision to shift production of the Jeep Compass down south. Is it time for Canada to look beyond the Big Three automakers? Should we embrace China's ascendant auto industry instead? I asked Greig Mordue, associate professor in the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology at McMaster University and former general manager at Toyota motor Manufacturing Canada. Greg, welcome to the program. How are you doing today?

>> Good. Glad to be here.

>> I want to start with Ottawa and Stellantis. Ottawa is launching a dispute resolution process against Stellantis for moving a planned vehicle production from Brampton to the US. Does this have any teeth? Does does this move anything substantial to hold them accountable?

>> Well, every one of those agreements are different, and I'm sure that Stellantis signed agreements for their for their work in Windsor and their extension of what we're talking specifically about in Brampton, as well as their joint venture with LG to to build batteries in Windsor. So all of those will be different. They may have some connections between the two of them. I don't know the details of that. They haven't shared them. They it's considered proprietary,

but I've looked at those in the past and they typically are they they are funded in such a way that if you know, there's an agreement, you're going to bring this technology, you're going to build this product. And if you meet your requirements and you spend the money, the Government of Canada and the province of Ontario will send the funds in kind. And when and if you don't do that, you'll have some kind of a discussion about what to do going forward or change plans. Change and plans do change as they go through.

The issue is at this point, from what I understand, insofar as the Brampton is concerned, is that they funded $110 million. Sounds like a lot. It's more than walking around change. But if, frankly, if Stellantis comes through this and someone says for you to get out of Brampton, it's going to cost you $110 million. I think they'll probably say we're out of there. So you got to be careful what you ask for.

Having said that, I don't think it's a terrible thing, frankly, for the government of Canada to put the put pressure on Stellantis. I mean, the first and perhaps most satisfying aspect of that is it holds their feet to the fire. But by holding their feet to the fire, frankly, it it may cause them to say, listen, we don't have anything for Brampton. Admit that they don't have anything for Brampton. And frankly, they'll be doing those employees, their existing employees that are hanging on with those $45 an hour jobs, or the promise of the hope of those $45 an hour jobs, they'll be able to cut their ties and get and, frankly, get on with their lives. And and the sooner they can do that, it'll be tough. It's difficult for everyone. Frankly, it's easy for me to sit here and and make that pronouncement, but it allows them to do to go forward because nobody in Brampton wants to hire anybody that makes $45 an hour because they know, understandably, that they're gone the very next day when they get called back. So it's a it's a it's a tough pill, but in, in in but perhaps it's a positive attribute of what the industry minister has added to the conversation.

>> Well, speaking of tough pills to swallow. Is there a conversation right now that we should be having about how much faith we should Canadians should have in the big three US automakers right now?

>> Well, it's common to say that in the year 2000, which or 1999, which was the the high water mark for the Canadian auto industry, we made 3 million vehicles in this country. The vast majority of those were made by the D3. Last year we made 1.3 million vehicles in Canada. The big the big manufacturers were Toyota at number one. And number two was was Honda. They were responsible. Excuse me for about three-quarters of the production in this country.

So we've had a steady diet of promises and pronouncements by the D3 and, and corresponding with that is a steady decline in their production. Frankly. You know, Stellantis is still hanging in there in Windsor. That's basically their foot, their manufacturing footprint. And that's the largest D3 manufacturing outlet in Canada. But General Motors has gone from well over a million, including a million in production in Oshawa in the early parts of this century, to a rump of about 100,000 today. They they used to be the largest automaker in Canada. Now they're the fourth largest. Frankly, they'd be the fifth largest. In other words, the smallest. If it weren't for the fact that Ford isn't making anything right now.

>> I want us to stay on this page. I'm hoping you can give us a bit of a history lesson here. This isn't the first time that Canada's auto industry has faced challenges. Take us back to the '50s and '60s and how that how we've sort of come through that and what we can learn from theirs.

>> So there are a lot of good lessons to be learned from the industrial policy measures that the governments of Canada, primarily alongside the government of Ontario, have have taken us back in the late '50s, early '60s there, the industry was starting to suffer. It had we had 17.5, I believe, percent tariffs on vehicles coming in from from the US, which essentially made for an environment where if you wanted to sell a car in Canada, you had to make that car in Canada. So Canadians were understandably a little, a little flummoxed because they were paying more for essentially the same vehicles.

Because when you can't achieve economies of scale, you can't you can't offer products at a competitive price. Meanwhile, we had the devaluation of of of currencies in Europe at that time, and we had a had a influx of European vehicles. And then and then the economy was suffering. And so all that meant was that the that employment started to crater in the Canadian auto industry. So there was pressure placed upon the industry.

So what Canada did was what Canada does is set up a royal commission and kick it down the road a little bit. And Vincent Bladen, I'm going to tell you lots of stories. Vincent Bladen was appointed the the royal commissioner and he heard lots of interesting things, including the a presentation from United Auto Workers of Canada that we should have a Canadian-owned automobile company which which will probably resonate in local times and current times as well. But ultimately from out of all of that came something called the Auto Pact in 1965.

And the way it was implemented is you needed to to make a vehicle in Canada for everyone you sold didn't need to be the vehicle. But if you if you were a company selling 100,000 vehicles a year in Canada, you had to commit to make 100,000 vehicles a year in Canada and to make sure that you weren't just bringing in vehicles from the US, for example, and putting some hubcaps on them, for example, and saying, there we made it, here it we had a 60% Canadian value added for every for, for the vehicles.

>> In your research, you have probably seen that China looks like a very attractive partner for Canada in the auto industry. Tell us why we may, should or why we should be looking in that direction.

>> Well, if you look at it purely from the perspective of of automotive industrial policy, there's no question China is the is the is the avenue we should pursue. And there will be all kinds of people that disagree with me about that. And we need but we need to have that debate. I understand that China is difficult for lots of other reasons as well, and we don't need to, and I won't get into those.

But China, if we follow the lessons that you and I have gone through between attaching ourselves to the strongest or ascendant auto makers first in the '60s with the US, second in the '80s with Japan, and now clearly the ascendant auto maker, particularly as we move into the electrification of mobility. We're not moving as quickly in in North America as the rest of the world. But if we move in that direction, China is clearly the leader.

My own research, for example, shows that China generates automotive patents and have had and have for the past decade at a rate of about 5 to 1 over the US. So you can get away with, with, with not innovating for to the same degree as your competitors for a while and and be okay. But over the long term, there's nothing about the US auto industry that suggests that it is going to be a global leader going forward.

And there's nothing about the US industrial policy measures or the energy policy measures that suggest that the that tethering continuing to try to tether our industry to the US industry is the best bet. So I know China is challenging for lots of different reasons, but if we're looking at it pure, from where do we want to be in? So do we want an auto industry in Canada? We need to have that conversation.

>> Greg, we are going to leave it there. Really appreciate your insights and we appreciate the history lesson as well.

>> Thank you.

>> How did a scrappy movie about street racers give rise to one of the most popular franchises ever? "The Rundown" producer Colin Ellis talked to journalist and author Barry Hertz about his book "Welcome To the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast and Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World" about how the series made Hollywood change gears.

>> Barry Hertz. Welcome to "The Rundown."

>> Thank you for having me.

>> When did you become interested in "The Fast and the Furious"?

>> I think the first flicker of interest was when I was a teenage movie theatre worker back in 2001. Over the course of that summer, I probably saw the first one 1520 times cumulatively in little chunks stitched together. And I just really kind of dug it. I was always a big tent kind of moviegoer. Even as a kid, I like blockbusters, I like arthouse, I like foreign language, I like indie. And something about, you know, fast cars, cool guys, hot women, heists, it all kind of clicked, and I just kind of kept going with the series.

>> So why did you want to write a book about it?

>> Well, I was thinking I always wanted to kind of write some kind of book about the film industry being eventually becoming a critic and a writer and a journalist, and I was struggling to think it was like all the kind of movies the big movies had books about, you know, you can find a million books about "The Godfather," a million books about Spielberg. But then I started thinking I was like, well, you know what? No one's ever written about "Fast" before. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised there's quite an interesting arc to it.

It's not only how the series evolved itself from this, like little piddly street racing movie with threesome jokes until, like, this world conquering, spy action filled blockbuster. But the off screen drama of it all was fascinating too.

>> Who actually authored "The Fast and the Furious"?

>> Well, I feel like with any success, you find there's like a million different authors who want to take credit for it. I mean, it all starts with a very forgotten piece of intellectual property, which is a 1998 Vibe Magazine article by a New York writer called Kenneth Lee. And Ken Lee was a tabloid journalist at the time, writing about crime in the city, and he happened upon this subculture of street racers out in Queens, basically, and he wrote an article about it for Vibe, and that article made its way to Universal executives who optioned it. And then you get really tricky in terms of what the screenwriter credits are, because it's that idea. And pitch went through upwards of dozens of people.

>> How important is "The Fast and the Furious" franchise to, say, the last 20-plus years of Hollywood?

>> I think if you were really to think about it deeply, it will be a quarter century old next year, which is kind of remarkable and preposterous at the same time. Really do mirror the past 25 years of Hollywood in general. We've seen filmmakers increasingly rely on these kind of connected cinematic universes, where one film leads to another and characters from a different kind of almost timeline pop in so that it boosts audience interest and makes you tag along for the adventure. I mean, "Fast" was really at the forefront of that.

We've seen a lot of efforts to reach wider, more diverse audiences, and fast was doing that organically, naturally, before even the word diverse was kind of like a studio watchword. And we've seen a lot of expansion into international markets. You know, a lot of appealing to the Chinese market, appealing to South America, making sure that these films get more money outside of the North American circuit that they were typically locked into. And "Fast" was doing that before really anybody.

>> When you watch the movie, they are incredibly diverse. Was that was that by accident or was that by design?

>> It kind of depends on who you talk to. When you get into the origins of the first film, I feel most people are of the mind that it was by Happy Design. They were talking about they were trying to recreate this subculture in which, you know, the writer David Ayer and the director, Rob Cohen did some heavy research into into Southern California, and they found that it was very much Latinos. It was Asian kids, it was black kids, it was mixed kids. It was everybody was kind of it didn't matter the colour of your skin so much as the size of your engine.

And so they cast that first film very deliberately to reflect that culture and to try to stay as authentic as they could. And then as the films got bigger, it wasn't necessarily so much about appealing to crassly targeting different demographics as more so like, okay, here's the people we have and here's who we think work well together on screen, and let's just build up this kind of United Colours of Benetton super team that happened to just, you know, naturally appeal to different marketplaces.

>> I think you've said and said in the book that the films have mostly stayed clean of some of the toxicity that other movie franchises like Star Wars or DC seem to have. What did you mean by that?

>> I feel like the online fandoms, particularly over the past five, six years or so, when you have like a beloved property like Star Wars that engenders such rabid passion, when you switch things up a little bit to maybe be a little more diverse, a little bit more contemporary, a little bit more progressive, you engender you, you really engender a lot of toxicity among a certain community that can feel so attached to, attached to a property.

So when you know the Star Wars stuff, did Rey as a as a female Jedi, that was apparently the worst thing in the world you could possibly do. But the "Fast" fans, because it's kind of baked-in with like that more diverse community everybody can join so long as you can drive that. It was never really a problem necessarily. They just wanted to see the franchise grow and expand. And for that family. And again, family is such a key element of these films in that both the organic family and the found family, that everybody was welcome. It was a big kind of open family party. And if you could drive, you can come along.

>> But unlike other film series like the "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter," there's not like a law, right? Like there's no mythology for these movies to really draw from. So I've always wondered, like, how do they keep coming up with stories? I mean, if they're just basically street racing and heists.

>> I mean, that's the that's the great thing, though. They're not beholden to any kind of mythology or lore. There's there's not like this Star Wars universe you have to abide by in terms of timelines, like the Battle of Yavin is there. So they can't be doing that at that time, right? Yeah. There's really all you want to do is see these guys drive and pull off these crazy stunts. So a lot of the films really are. They construct these big set pieces first, and then they kind of reverse engineer the story around it.

And for the fifth film, which is where the franchise really kind of levelled up, they recognised that, okay, the first for a lot of street racing in there, there's only so much we can do from having a guy drive from point A to point B faster than the other. So let's up the ante. Let's turn it into a heist film. Let's make these guys actually have a mission. An impossible mission, one might say, in the Ethan Hunt mould. And that's really where they kind of started levelling up.

>> I want to ask you about women in these movies, notably, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster have been from the very beginning. Later you get Charlize Theron and my favourite, Helen Mirren. Oh of course, yeah, but they're not necessarily at the centre at the of these films the way that the men have. And I'm just wondering if you think the "Fast and Furious" movies has done a disservice to its female characters and by extension, their fans?

>> I mean, 100%, certainly. And I think this was something that Michelle Rodriguez, who was very vocal about anything and everything in the press, has publicly taken the franchise to task over. And there was at one point, I believe it was between film seven and eight where she went out there and said, like, listen, if you're not going to start giving us more to do and adding more women to the picture who are not just, you know, romantic objects, I'm out. And to their credit, they did start to work in a little bit more and give especially the characters played by Jordana and Michelle, a little bit more dialogue between them and interactions that didn't just involve talking about the men in their lives, but it is a it is a big problem. It has been since the beginning, but it was going to be even worse if Michelle hadn't spoken up during the production of the first film and said, like, well, I'm really just being characterised here as this sex object, give me something to sink my teeth into a little bit. And as light as it was in the final film, it could have been much worse.

>> Well, let's talk about more about the stars, because obviously these movies kind of rest on the shoulders of Vin Diesel. How did he come to be cast?

>> It's kind of an interesting story. Originally, the studio Universal had their eyes on Timothy Olyphant, who they were very hot on at the time, coming off of Doug Liman's "Go!" He also had the very similarly themed "Gone In 60 Seconds" coming out a little bit later. Kind of a interesting choice, let's say. And I'm a big Timothy Olyphant fan.

>> Yeah. Me too.

>> But they needed somebody who was a little bit more mysterious, had a little bit more allure to him. And along comes Vin Diesel. But he also had something of a problematic reputation around the industry at the time of the first film, butted heads with directors. Had a little bit of an ego problem. And I mean, we're talking about a guy who had not led a film. Like he was supporting roles at best. Like he got a big break with "Saving Private Ryan." He was just had finished "Pitch Black," which was, I guess you could call it, his first lead role, but a relatively small movie. And yet there was something about him, the magnetism, and especially one that bounced off the energy of Paul Walker, who was cast first, and who this was really the person who the vehicle was built around. It was never intended as a Vin Diesel star project. Paul was there from day one.

>> I mentioned Paul Walker, and one of the tragedies of this series is that he passed in the middle of making "Furious 7." How did they finish the movie without him?

>> I mean, that was kind of a horrible and unprecedented situation for the industry at large. Not only was there just the tragedy of losing him so young, there was the horrible irony of it happening in a car crash in a movie about car crashes. Right? So when that happened and it was around Thanksgiving break, they were about halfway through finishing "Furious 7" and there was still a lot of scenes that he needed to shoot, so they had to make a decision. Are we going to scrap the movie? Are we going to try to recreate it? Or how are we going to do this?

So a lot of very smart people came together, figured out they could do it with a mix of practical and visual effects. Will get his two younger brothers onto the set, Caleb and Cody. One was a good match for his face, one was a better match for his body. Kind of smushed them together. We'll have another actor who was also kind of a good fit for Paul. Kind of helped them adjust to the acting styles. We're going to take every single archival minute or second of Paul Walker that's ever been captured on film, and we're going to take that, and we're going to extract all that footage and digitally manipulate it. And that's kind of what they did. They kind of, for lack of a better term, zombified Paul Walker as a being cinematically and finish the film.

>> Did this sort of set Hollywood on a path of digitally resurrecting actors in some way, because, I mean, we've seen this with with the Star Wars movies. Carrie Fisher obviously died before "Rise of Skywalker" came out. Ian Holm was resurrected for "Alien: Romulus." Is "Fast"-- Could they be given credit for also starting Hollywood on this path, too?

>> I mean, to the degree that they were doing it, yes, it had been done before in very limited fashion, but they were really inventing technology and practices on the fly as they were doing this. And, you know, one of the people I spoke to for the book, who was very heavily involved in the visual effects there, you know, of course, didn't think that they were, you know, at the forefront of this AI deep fake train. But they were and that's where we are today.

And that's why you have some troubling, you know, emotions in the fan community when someone like Vin Diesel goes out to a crowd and says, for the next one, I'm we're bringing back Brian O'Conner, we're bringing back Paul Walker's character. Okay. How are you doing that? Probably in a way that is going to be disturbing to a lot of people.

>> Well, we haven't seen a "Fast" movie since 2023. Fast. What's the status of the series?

>> It's not great. Partially it's been in a kind of deep freeze because they've been trying to figure out the economics of it. These movies have become so expensive to make because the cast demands so much money. By this point they shoot it in dozens of locations around the world. The stunt work, the effects work, it all adds up. And that's before you even get to marketing costs. And the math just isn't mathing, as the kids So it's been on a little bit of a freeze for that.

And also because Vin Diesel is facing a civil lawsuit for sexual assaults, which has been kind of underreported. It was, you know, he has contested all those allegations. It has not been tested in court. It will go to courts in February of 2026, I imagine. And the people that I have talked with have, have said this, that once that is resolved, one way or the other, we will have a better idea of what the future of "The Fast and the Furious" is.

>> Creatively, though, has the franchise run out of gas?

>> I think you could probably have used that argument after each one of the films has come out. Like, okay, we've kind of hit the peak here. There's nowhere to go. And yet they always kind of seem to find a way to surprise you. So I think the way to go and the sentiment inside Universal seems to be this way as well, is we can't really go bigger. We've gone as big as we possibly can. We've gone to outer space. We're not going to necessarily introduce some fantastical element like time travel. Maybe.

So we got to take it back to the streets a little bit, do a little bit more hard scrabble, a little bit more grit. I do not think that creatively it's exhausted itself. I think it will always, at least for the time being, find ways to surprise us.

>> Listen, Barry, this has been amazing. "Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast and Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World." Thank you so much for joining us today.

>> Oh, thank you for having me.

>> And that's it for us on "The Rundown." What do you want to see on our show? We want this to be yours. So email us at therundown@tvo.org or reach out to me on Instagram @jeyanjeganathan and tell us about the topics that matter to you and what you think is working or not working so far. See you next week.