O Canada! Here are some cars we've exclusively bought or built

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Canadian auto workers build more than a million and a half mainstream vehicles every year, but all are American or Japanese nameplates. At one time, though, we built or bought cars that weren’t made or sold anywhere but here. In honour of Canada Day, let’s look at some of them.

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Bricklin

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Malcolm Bricklin was an American entrepreneur who dreamed of building a futuristic sports car. He looked for a government that would fund him in return for the jobs he would bring, and found it in New Brunswick. But the car’s gull-wing doors and acrylic body panels were problematic, and costs soared.

Canadians built them, but couldn’t buy them. Bricklin distributed them to his U.S. dealers – paying less from the factory than they cost to build, and pocketing the profit while New Brunswick paid the difference. The province kept shovelling cash in, but finally closed the plant when the tab hit $23 million. Only about 2,900 Bricklins were built in 1974 and 1975.

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Ford GT

Ford famously beat Ferrari with its GT40 at Le Mans in 1966 . Fifty years later, the company planned to mark the anniversary with a Mustang racer, but the complicated project was discontinued. Rather than give up, a group of designers and engineers created a new GT. Ford’s chiefs couldn’t shut this one down if they didn’t know about it, and so it was done in complete secrecy, after hours in a hidden lab in a Ford building in Dearborn. The team worked in conjunction with Multimatic, an automotive supplier in Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto .

A super-secret car couldn’t hide on Ford’s proving grounds, so the GT was tested at Calabogie Motorsports Park near Ottawa. Ford’s top brass was only told about it when the design was finished, and they gave it the green light and debuted it at the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. While it was designed in Michigan, every Ford GT is built by Multimatic in Markham, and that will continue until the car finishes its run for 2022.

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Manic

If a clause had been added to a contract, Quebec might have been famous for a home-grown sports car. In 1966, Renault hired Montreal-based Jacques About to see if the Renault-powered Alpine sports car would be popular with Canadians. About said yes, but then Renault said no. And so, three years later, About started working on his own rear-engine, fibreglass-bodied car, based on Renault driveline components.

Built in Granby, the Manic was light, quick, good-looking and competitively priced. About planned to make 1,300 a year. But his contract with Renault didn’t include a financial penalty if parts shipments were late, and the French automaker didn’t deliver on the schedules About needed for assembly. Only about 160 cars were built before production ended in 1971.

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McLaughlin

Robert McLaughlin started building horse-drawn vehicles near Oshawa, Ontario in 1867, and his company grew to become Canada’s largest carriage manufacturer. But his son Sam saw his first car around 1900, and that’s what he wanted to build. As many Canadian automakers would do, he based his car on an American model — in his case, a 1908 Buick. The cars used Buick drivelines but with more elaborate bodies, thanks to McLaughlin’s skill as a carriage builder.

Chevrolet was later added, and McLaughlin became Canada’s largest automaker. But when the original contract with Buick wound down, Sam McLaughlin — who had no sons to carry on his business — decided against remaining independent. He sold the company to GM in 1918 and it became General Motors of Canada, as it still is today.

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Fargo

GM, Ford and Chrysler made several unique Canadian models, and for two reasons. One was to avoid tariffs set by the Canadian government on American-built vehicles prior to the 1965 Auto Pact trade agreement. The other was that Canada had unique dealer networks, and these models gave everyone something to sell in most segments.

Fargo was an independent American truck company in 1913. Chrysler acquired it and briefly sold Fargo trucks in the U.S. in the late 1920s, but from 1936 until 1972, it was a Chrysler Canada nameplate — and was a Dodge truck with Fargo trim. Dodge/DeSoto dealers already had Dodge trucks, while Fargo was sold by Chrysler/Plymouth dealers. Fargo trucks were also sold in global markets. Many of these were built in the U.S. and exported, but Fargo trucks for Canada were made here.

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Meteor and Monarch

Henry Ford founded his Ford Motor Company in 1903. The famed Model T wouldn’t arrive for another five years, but in 1904 in what is now Windsor, Ontario, wagon builder Gordon McGregor contracted to build Henry’s cars, and formed the Ford Motor Company of Canada. In 1939, Ford introduced Mercury, which sat between the lower-priced Ford and luxury-priced Lincoln. Canada would add two new brands, starting in 1946, for its unique dealer network.

Lincoln/Mercury dealers got the Mercury 114, a Ford with a Mercury grille, which gave them a lower-priced car. In 1949, it was restyled and named Meteor. Ford dealers got the Mercury-based Monarch, a bit more upscale than the Fords they offered. Most were built in Ontario, but some of the early models were made at Ford’s plant in Vancouver. Monarch lasted as its own brand until 1961, while Meteor stuck around until 1976, but the names were used as trim levels on some Mercury models, in Canada and the U.S., until 1981.

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Acadian and Beaumont

Compact cars were becoming popular in the early 1960s, and for 1962, Chevrolet brought out the Chevy II. GM Canada put new trim on it and called it the Acadian. It was sold by Pontiac dealers but marketed as a standalone Acadian brand, not as a Pontiac model. Beaumont was an Acadian trim level.

In 1964, Chevrolet introduced the Chevelle. The Acadian was kept on the Chevy II, but the Canadian-trimmed version of the Chevelle became the Beaumont, which lasted until 1969. The Acadian was discontinued in 1971, but a few years later, the name returned as a Canada-only Pontiac version of the Chevy Chevette.

Brooks

In the automobile’s earliest days, steam and electric cars were made alongside gasoline ones. The best-known steam car was the Stanley steamer, but after that, the second-most-popular among American buyers was the Brooks, built in Stratford, Ontario from 1923 until 1929.

Oland Brooks moved to Toronto from his hometown of Buffalo, New York to sell mortgages, and from there to Stratford to build cars. The Brooks featured a boiler wrapped with almost five kilometres of thin wire to make it explosion-proof, and its sedan body was covered in leather. Oland Brooks also ran taxi companies in Toronto and Stratford that exclusively used his cars. But steam cars were expensive and complicated, and like other steam companies, Brooks eventually closed.