Madeline Mazak/The Windsor Star
Editor’s note: This is Part 1 in the Windsor Star’s contribution to Postmedia’s national series “How Canada Wins.” Over the next five weeks we’ll chronicle our community’s place in the country, the promise of greater prosperity, and the blueprint to get there. See the series intro here.
As large-scale projects recast the region’s economic landscape and attract new industries, Windsor and Essex County see the urgency to work collaboratively in lockstep to prepare for future investment headed our way.
At the forefront of this transformation is the $5-billion NextStar battery plant — the first of its kind in Canada when announced in early 2022 — which not only helps position Windsor and Essex County at the forefront of automobile sector electrification, but is bolstering the region’s reputation as an attractive place for development.
“When we landed Canada’s first electric vehicle battery factory, that really had people looking at Windsor in a different way,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told the Star.
“The order of magnitude of that investment was so large that everyone was saying, ‘Wow, what’s happening in Windsor?’ That’s earned media you cannot buy.”
The battery plant is just one of several large-scale projects promising to reshape the region, including other multibillion-dollar investments in a new Windsor-Detroit crossing and a new acute-care mega-hospital.
Historic population growth over the past few years is driving demand for, and investment in, new housing developments and infrastructure projects. In 2023 alone, Windsor-Essex County welcomed 31,958 new residents — nearly as many as in the previous two decades combined, ballooning the population to 468,019.
The Gordie Howe International Bridge is scheduled to open this fall, further strengthening what is already North America’s busiest trade crossing and shining a brighter spotlight on the region’s economic importance.
The Trump administration’s U.S. tariff threats may put at risk the region’s important automotive and manufacturing sectors — both heavily tied to cross-border trade — but local leaders, perhaps surprisingly to some, view them as a short-term hurdle rather than a lasting setback when it comes to our immediate neighbour and largest trading partner.
The current focus for Windsor and Essex County is making sure land is zoned and shovel-ready as investors and developers continue to come knocking. Both local governments see collaboration as the key to making that happen.
“I think it’s really important that we get a lot tighter as a city and a county,” said Dilkens. “We need to be lockstep on economic development, and we all need to be funding it now.
“There’s no business that I’ve met who is looking five years down the road for a potential spot that you might have ready. One hundred per cent of them want to see what land you have available now. So that means you have to spend money up-front to make it serviced and to make it ready.”
These investments and the region’s rapid growth are also prodding Essex County — made up of the municipalities of Lakeshore, Tecumseh, LaSalle, Amherstburg, Essex, Kingsville and Leamington — to find new ways to grow. That strategy includes land acquisition for development and adopting ideas that were not on the table until now.
“We never had those conversations before, but now we want to be that regional powerhouse,” said county Warden Hilda MacDonald, who is also Leamington’s mayor.
“In order to do that, we have to be a player. We have to get land. We have to service land so we can provide along with the City of Windsor.
“Just because it doesn’t fall within the City of Windsor’s boundary doesn’t mean it can’t be built. So, we need to be there. We need to stand equals, shoulder-to-shoulder with the city, to provide land to do that.”
The region is leveraged for continued growth in the years ahead. The Conference Board of Canada, an independent research organization, projected Windsor-Essex’s GDP growth this year would be the second-highest in Canada — more than doubling its 2024 rate of 1.1 per cent.
According to Invest WindsorEssex, the manufacturing sector already generates $3.8 billion in economic activity annually, or 25 per cent of the region’s total GDP, making it the largest economic driver for Windsor-Essex County, home to Canada’s largest auto sector manufacturing cluster.
While its manufacturing and automotive sectors will remain economic anchors, Dilkens sees opportunity to diversify and build a larger supply chain cushioning these industries.
“The future will definitely be in electrification,” said Dilkens.
“That’s why you’re seeing a plant like NextStar and LG talk about other batteries they can produce in the plant if they’re not electric vehicles, if there’s a pause in the electric vehicle battery space, that there’s other things that they can produce there that the world needs, which is really great.”
MacDonald anticipates major automation advancements in Essex County’s agricultural sector — the region’s second-largest industry.
With more than 3,500 acres of greenhouse agri-food operations, Invest WindsorEssex reports the sector generates $3 billion annually and employs more than 12,000 workers.
Despite that success, MacDonald said there is an urgency to further diversify Essex County’s economy.
“Think of the new hospital coming, that’s going to bring state-of-the-art equipment here. There will be a need to service that and to hold that sector up as well,” she said.
“With the health care piece, I think there may certainly be industries that are looking to locate here for that.”
Next for Windsor, said Dilkens, is unlocking the economic potential of the Sandwich South lands — a nearly 1,000-acre parcel of undeveloped but strategically located lands near the planned mega-hospital and battery plant.
“It’s employment land we would then create into an industrial park,” said Dilkens.
“The industrial park that we’re looking to create will be the closest industrial park to the U.S./Canada border on the Canadian side. It will give us a selling feature.
“We know what the potential is. I’ve always said the only luck we’re going to have is the luck we create.”
The city’s 2025 capital budget includes multimillion-dollar projects to connect Lauzon Parkway to Highway 401 and a new interchange at E.C. Row Expressway and Banwell Road, which will help boost connectivity to the new battery plant and related manufacturing investments.
“I always say I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of my community than I am today,” Dilkens told the Star.
“There is a lot of good happening here, so we’ll get past this little disruption with Donald Trump. We’ll figure this stuff out.
“It may not be without its own pain in the short-term, but we’ll figure it out, and we’ll be better on the other end.”