Amazon has decided to pull away from the infrastructure investments it has made in Quebec, Canada.
The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said Wednesday that it would shutter seven of its facilities in the province, in favor of using small businesses for last-mile delivery of packages to consumers in the area.
That move will result in the company laying off 1,700 permanent workers. The facilities also employ a total of 250 temporary workers, who will also be affected. According to AFP, the company will close the facilities over the course of the next two months.
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Barbara Agrait, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company believes the decision will positively impact Canadian consumers.
“Following a recent review of our Quebec operations, we’ve seen that returning to a third-party delivery model supported by local small businesses, similar to what we had until 2020, will allow us to provide the same great service and even more savings to our customers over the long run,” she said in an emailed statement.
Only the delivery piece of Amazon’s evolving operations will be supported by the small businesses that choose to partner with the company. Amazon itself will fulfill customers’ orders in its other facilities, either in the U.S. or in Canada, and the partners will handle the final leg of the logistics puzzle for the company.
Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program allows the company to leave large volumes of packages with small teams throughout an area, with the expectation that those businesses will then deliver the packages with speed and efficiency. The DSP program launched in 2018, but Amazon has also implemented other programs that see the e-commerce giant partnering with small businesses to finish the job on last-mile delivery over the past two years, particularly in the U.S. market.
Amazon first announced its plans to build facilities in Quebec in 2019, and the first facility officially opened in 2020. As of 2021, the province had a population of 8.5 million people, per Canada’s Census. It remains to be seen how successful Amazon’s play to serve that population with small business partners will be this time around. Walmart has also recently changed its course of action in Quebec. According to Global News Canada, in 2024, the retailer ditched its plans to open a new, 57,000-square foot fulfillment center in the province early this year; it was slated to spend $100 million on the now-vacant facility, which would have created more than 200 jobs. A Walmart spokesperson reportedly told the outlet the company plans to invest $100 million in various stores around the province.
Amazon’s Agrait noted that the company plans to provide resources to employees affected by Amazon’s decision to close the facilities.
“This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we’re offering impacted employees a package that includes up to 14 weeks’ pay after facilities close and transitional benefits, like job placement resources,” she said in the emailed statement.
But a labor union has already voiced its vexation at the technology and e-commerce behemoth. In May 2024, around 200 employees at an Amazon warehouse in Laval, Québec, voted to become members of the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN). Workers in support of the move shared that the “frenetic” pace of work and “woefully inadequate” safety measures and lower-than-average wages drove them to unionize. That warehouse’s efforts marked the first instance of Amazon warehouse workers unionizing in Canada.
And Amazon worked to contest that over process-related arguments—but lost. Last summer, the CSN and the company began working on a collective bargaining agreement, which had not yet been signed by the two parties.
Caroline Senneville, president of the CSN, said in a statement that the choice to close these warehouses is “a slap in the face for all workers in Quebec.”
According to The Washington Post, Amazon said the decision to shutter the facilities was unrelated to CSN’s unionization efforts in Quebec.
François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s federal innovation minister, said on X that he had spoken with the head of Amazon Canada to express “dismay and frustration” after hearing the changes the company plans to make in Quebec.
“This is not the way business is done in Canada,” he wrote.
