Amazon announced Wednesday that it is closing all of its warehouses and logistics operations in Quebec, the Canadian province where unions gained ground at one of its facilities, and will lay off 1,700 employees.
The closure represents a shift away from Amazon’s recent investments in the province. The company opened three delivery stations in 2021 and one last year. It also had a small fulfillment center in Quebec and two warehouses that sorted packages.
In total, the investments amounted to about 2 million square feet of operations, according to an estimate by Marc Wulfraat, a Montreal-based storage industry consultant who has long researched Amazon’s logistics network.
Amazon said it was closing the seven facilities to “provide the same great service and even more savings to our customers over the long term,” according to a statement from Barbara Agrait, a spokeswoman for the company. The company would not say whether unionization was a factor.
Amazon will still serve customers in Quebec by returning to its operating model before 2020, when facilities in neighboring provinces prepared packages that were then transported by third-party delivery companies to Quebec.
Amazon’s first union in Canada included about 230 warehouse workers in Laval, north of Montreal, after they unionized in May. However, the company challenged the unionization effort in a provincial labor court. He argued that the union’s certification should be revoked because workers signed union cards to show their support, rather than vote by secret ballot. The court ruled against Amazon in October, just before the peak holiday shopping season.
Amazon said litigation over the matter is ongoing.
By shutting down Quebec, “they’ve made it very clear that we don’t want that proliferation,” Mr. Wulfraat, referring to the union effort. The company has more than 46,000 corporate and operational employees in Canada.
François-Philippe Champagne, the federal minister of innovation, said in a post on X that he had conveyed his frustration to the head of Amazon in Canada.
“This is not the way business is done in Canada,” he said.
The Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, a union representing the workers, said it was informed of the closing by email from one of Amazon’s lawyers early this morning. Caroline Senneville, the confederation’s president, said in a statement that the company had stifled their unionization effort since it began three years ago through actions that included what she called “disguised layoffs.”
“It’s a slap in the face for all the workers in Quebec,” he said.
The Montreal metropolitan area has approximately 4.5 million residents, making it larger than the greater Seattle area. Moving businesses away from a major population center runs counter to what Amazon has touted in recent years as a central driver of success in its business: putting more products closer to customers to enable faster delivery. This, Amazon has repeatedly said, lowers delivery costs and gets customers to order more often.
Amazon hasn’t abandoned direct operations from a major North American population center in years, although more than a dozen years ago it routinely played roughshod with states trying to collect taxes on online sales.
Walmart and other retailers have previously struggled to establish a logistics base in Quebec, where about two in five workers are unionized. That’s the highest rate among Canada’s provinces, according to government data, and about four times higher than in the United States.
François Legault, Quebec’s premier, said Amazon’s move was “a private decision by a private company.”
“I can understand that it must be difficult for the 1,7000 families involved,” said Mr. Legault told reporters at a news conference Wednesday, focusing most of his remarks on the need to mobilize Quebecers and buy local products in response to the President. Trump’s tariff threat.
Jean Boulet, the province’s labor minister, said workers affected by the warehouse closures would receive help from the government to find new jobs.
