CANADA’S decision to sell its 70 million shares in US car giant General Motors (GM) risks thousands of jobs, the country’s largest private-sector union said yesterday.

The Finance Department announced on Monday that it had offloaded its shares, thought to be worth approximately £1.8 billion, to notorious investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs.

But automotive union Unifor said that the sale would make GM’s commitment to retain manufacturing plants in Ontario less secure.

Canada took on the shares in 2009 as part of an international bid to bail out GM and the Conservative government said it had always intended to sell.

“Our investment in GM was always meant to be temporary,” said Finance Minister Joe Oliver.

“We never believed the government should be a shareholder of a private-sector company for an indefinite period of time.”

But critics said that the sale’s timing was down to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s bid to balance the books and cut taxes ahead of this autumn’s general election.

Unifor pointed to a study it released last month, which indicated that, if the GM plants in Oshawa closed, Ontario would shed 33,000 jobs over two years and the Canadian economy would shrink by $5bn (£2.7bn) a year.

GM has refused to make a decision on the future of the plants before the end of 2016 — when a commitment to keep them open, signed as part of the bailout deal, expires.

by Our Foreign Desk