On January 22, 2025, Amazon announced it was shutting down all seven of its Quebec warehouses. Over 1,700 permanent staff and 250 temporary employees were being let go (The Globe and Mail) — with the real number of affected workers, including subcontractors and delivery drivers, estimated at over 4,500 people who lost their livelihoods overnight.
One of the largest mass layoffs in recent Quebec history. A $2 trillion corporation walking out the door. Thousands of working-class families, many of them immigrants, suddenly without income or job security. A reporter asked Premier François Legault about it. His response: “The Habs won last night, and I did not drink any orange juice this morning.”
Read that again. Not a plan. Not outrage. Not even a prepared statement. A hockey score and a joke about juice. From the Premier of a province that was hemorrhaging thousands of jobs in real time. This is not a man who was caught off guard and stumbled. This is a man who made a calculated choice — in front of cameras, at a press scrum, on the most economically significant news day Quebec had seen in years — to deflect with a punchline. The orange juice comment was itself a reference to his own “buy local” campaign against American tariffs, which means he was aware of the geopolitical context and still decided that a quip was the appropriate leadership response to mass unemployment. The word for that is not incompetence. It is contempt.
What Actually Happened In May 2024, staff at an Amazon warehouse in Laval became the first Amazon workers in Canada to successfully unionize. In October, Quebec’s labour tribunal ruled against Amazon after it challenged the process. (The Globe and Mail) Two days later, Amazon abruptly announced the closure of all Quebec warehouses — shutting down all sites rather than just the unionized one, specifically to circumvent Quebec labor laws that prohibit retaliatory closures targeting unionized facilities. (Tempest)
Amazon’s own spokespeople claimed it had nothing to do with unionization. Neither Legault nor any of his ministers made that link publicly. (The Globe and Mail) The Globe and Mail quoted a labor relations expert who said it would “really stretch the imagination” to think the tribunal loss was not informing Amazon’s decision to leave. (The Globe and Mail) So the Premier of Quebec watched the world’s second-largest private employer punish his province’s workers for exercising their legal right to organize — and his public response was to protect Amazon from criticism while cracking jokes. After being criticized, Legault later pretended to apologize while declaring that Amazon’s elimination of nearly 4,500 jobs was simply “a business decision by a private company.” (World Socialist Web Site) That is not leadership. That is a man covering for a corporation that just broke his province’s labor laws in broad daylight.
The Hypocrisy That Makes It Worse In 2020, Legault’s own government launched Le Panier Bleu, an online directory meant to promote Quebec-made products — spending $22 million in public funding on a platform that ultimately captured only 7% of Quebec’s online transactions while Amazon dominated the rest. (Internationalsocialist) So Legault spent $22 million of public money trying to compete with Amazon, failed, then watched Amazon sign $170 million worth of Quebec government contracts (The Logic) — including cloud services for the province’s public security and elections systems — while simultaneously closing its warehouses and leaving workers without severance. And his response to all of it was to talk about hockey. Despite Legault saying he wanted to cancel the government’s contracts with Amazon, AWS continued expanding in Quebec, actively petitioning the government regarding its future expansion throughout the province. (The Logic) Amazon left the workers. It kept the government money. And the government let it. Legault’s party even voted down a motion from opposition party Québec solidaire that would have committed the government to provide no further funds to Amazon. (Policy Alternatives) So: joke about hockey, protect Amazon, vote down accountability measures, watch 4,500 workers lose their jobs. That is the full record.
What This Means for Anyone Thinking of Doing Business in Quebec It means this: when a major employer leaves your province under circumstances that involve the violation of labor law and the destruction of thousands of jobs, the government’s first instinct is to deflect with a sports reference and then describe the carnage as a “business decision by a private company.” That tells you everything about what protection you can expect. When Amazon announced the closure, Legault initially dodged the issue before later stating that he could not manage the company — positioning his government at the mercy of Amazon’s decisions. (Internationalsocialist) That sentence should be printed on every economic development brochure Quebec sends to international investors. We cannot manage the companies that come here. We have no leverage. We have no plan. We have hockey scores. If you are a business leader in Ontario, Alberta, China, or anywhere else weighing whether Quebec is a stable jurisdiction for investment — this incident is your answer. Not because Amazon left. Corporations make decisions. That happens everywhere. But because of what happened after. Because the government’s response to a mass layoff event was a punchline. Because the same Premier who failed to protect workers from retaliation also failed to cancel government contracts with the company that did it. Because Legault eventually resigned, saying he was stepping down “for the good of his party and the good of Quebec” (CTVNews) — after leaving behind a $9.9 billion deficit, a credit downgrade, Amazon walking out, and thousands of workers with no severance. That is the legacy. Not the orange juice joke. The joke was just the moment the mask came off. Quebec does not have a business problem. It has a governance problem. And until the people running this province start treating workers, investors, and basic economic reality with the seriousness they deserve, the Amazon story will not be the last one of its kind. It will just be the one people remember first.
SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com