The final pickup rolled out of Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd.'s Ontario Truck Plant yesterday, on the same day that Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. cranked out its two millionth vehicle in a coincidence that illustrates how the auto industry has changed since the Ford plant opened in 1966.

A white F-150 pickup represented the end of the line for the Oakville plant and the end of a job for Hamilton resident Harry Lynch, a 60-year-old who started in the paint shop that first year or more than four million pickups, heavy-duty trucks and bus chassis ago.

Mr. Lynch left his job at Firestone Canada Inc., started out in Oakville putting masking tape on vehicles that were getting a two-tone paint job and stayed at Ford for 38 years.

"I'm not much of a mover," he said yesterday as he contemplated life away from Ford.

"I'm going to take at least a year off," he said, but "I'm too young to sit in a rocking chair." He's one of 700 people who took an enhanced retirement package. Another 500 will switch to the neighbouring minivan plant, including Mr. Lynch's son Brian, a 29-year-old with six years' experience on the assembly line.

Back in 1966, when Harry Lynch started, there were no robots spray-painting vehicles, which is how it is done today.

Toyota was barely a name in Canada and the site of the assembly plant in Cambridge, Ont., was a farmer's field.

The black Corolla driven off the line yesterday by Toyota Motor Canada president Ray Tanguay, is one of 280,000 vehicles the plant will turn out this year, reflecting in part Toyota's growth to about 11 per cent of the Canadian market.

At that level, Toyota is closing in on Ford, whose share has fallen to 14 per cent this year from the traditional level of 25 per cent.

The Ford plant is the last of three assembly plants in Canada to close in the past three years. All three were built in the era of the 1965 Canada-U.S. auto pact, which created an integrated North American market for the Big Three auto makers in return for certain production and content guarantees in Canada.

The Canadian Auto Workers union blamed the end of the auto pact -- which was eliminated because of a World Trade Organization decision in 1999 -- for the closing.

"The decision had nothing to do with work force -- this was a political decision," Pat Carducci, chairman of the truck plant unit of CAW local 707 in Oakville, said yesterday.

"It was no coincidence -- the closing announcement followed the end of the auto pact."

But it also came as part of a major restructuring by Ford Canada's parent Ford Motor Co., which announced the closing of two U.S. assembly plants and two parts plants south of the border on the same day that it announced the closing of the Oakville truck plant.

By that time, the Oakville plant was working on one shift, Ford had too much pickup truck capacity and chairman Bill Ford was set on turning his great-grandfather's creation -- the company's massive Rouge River operations in Dearborn, Mich. -- into a 21st-century industrial showcase. That new plant is making F-series pickups.

The CAW fought the closing, but lost. Workers did, however, win a commitment from Ford Canada that it would consider a leading-edge, flexible assembly plant at the Oakville site to replace it and the minivan plant later in the decade.

That $1.2-billion investment and securing 4,000 jobs depended on the union approving new work rules in Oakville and the federal and Ontario governments coming up with $200-million in financial help.

Both those conditions have been met and the next step is for Ford Canada to convince Ford's head office in Dearborn that Oakville is the best location for the investment.

"We need a firm commitment," CAW president Buzz Hargrove said yesterday. "We really do need to end the uncertainty."

The plan calls for the redevelopment of the site by 2006. At the moment, plans call for workers to assemble two new crossover utility vehicles and the next generation of Ford's minivans.