Truck equipment supplier opens new plant in Morden

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This article was published 29/11/2023 (1032 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Drive Products may not be a household name, but in the lucrative truck dealership world it’s a valued partner.

The diversified truck equipment supplier, based in Mississauga, Ont., has operations in every province in the country.

It has a customer service shop in Winnipeg (it used to have a much more substantial operation that closed in the early 1990s) but was looking to build a manufacturing operation to better service Central Canada.

It had a few locations it was considering, including Regina, but was won over by the kind of support it got from the City of Morden.

On Tuesday it officially opened a 60,000-square-foot manufacturing plant making specialized truck bodies in the growing southern Manitoba city and company officials couldn’t say enough good things about it.

The company had been operating out of a much smaller leased facility for some time so that it could hit the ground running in its new purpose built facility that Drive Products built on the last lot in Morden’s industrial park.

“The city has been great facilitator to connect us with the local labour market and beyond,” said Tyler Moss, Drive Products’ senior vice-president of sales and marketing. “The program is quite unique. It has been a great help in getting this operation of the ground.”

While it is opening with 22 employees, the plan is to grow production and the staff size as the order book fills up.

Drive Products has been around for about 40 years and is the country’s largest supplier of “work truck” equipment. Up until just a few years ago its main business was the distribution of all sorts of truck equipment servicing all sorts of different vertical markets, from infrastructure and construction to trees and forestry to waste management trucks.

The distribution business is still a core element of the company that employs about 550 people

For instance, it is the exclusive Canadian distributor for Muncie power take-off products, a specialized product bolted on to truck transmissions to transfer power to handle other functions on just about any kind specialized work truck.

It started to get into manufacturing about five years ago and has doubled in size during that time — the Morden plant is the sixth it has opened in the last 12 months alone. It has about 25 locations in Canada and two in the U.S.

But Morden is just its fifth manufacturing site.

The attraction of Drive Products to Morden, is the kind of win that Morden’s economic development office is built for.

“This is not just a factory opening, it’s the quintessential archetypal story of immigration and making industry successful here,” said Jason Dyck, Morden’s economic development officer. “It’s just GDP and steel welding. It’s immigration settlement at its finest.”

Robert Edmonds, Drive Products’ CEO and the second generation owner of the family business, said, “The people at the city have been very good to deal with. They are putting the necessary infrastructure in place to create a world class industrial centre here. And we are right in the heart of it with plans to expand it.”

Morden’s efforts to attract and settle immigrants and refugees is unlike what happens in most other small cities. Drive Products need welders, among other things, and the city has welding training and other services such that the company’s workforce — from its management all the way through the workforce — will be a United Nations crew with folks from Israel, Syria, Ukraine and Philippines.

Ron Koslowsky, the Manitoba division vice-president of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, said, “It’s always nice to see someone chose this province to set up.”

He’s well aware of the effort made to get new Canadians settled in the region such that they will be able to stay there.

“They have done a really good job taking a holistic approach addressing immigrants coming in,

not just in getting a job but dealing with families, housing, schools, day-cares and anything else,” he said. “If you don’t do that many new Canadians tend to come to Winnipeg or move to other bigger cities.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca