Amazon said Wednesday it was closing all warehouse and logistics operations in Quebec, the Canadian province where unions won ground at one of its facilities, and would lay off 1,700 workers.
The closures represent a reversal from Amazon’s recent investments in the province. The company opened three distribution stations in 2021 and one last year. There was also a small fulfillment center in Quebec and two warehouses that sorted packages.
Still, the investments amounted to about 2 million square feet of operations, according to an estimate by Marc Wulfraat, a Montreal-based warehouse industry consultant who has long researched Amazon’s logistics network.
Amazon said it is closing the seven facilities to “provide the same great service and even more savings to our customers in the long term,” according to a statement from Barbara Agrait, a company spokeswoman. The company would not say whether unionization was a factor.
Amazon will still serve customers in Quebec by reverting to its operating model since 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 consisted of about 230 warehouse workers in Laval, north of Montreal, after they joined in May. But the company challenged the union’s efforts before a provincial labor court. He argued that the union should be decertified because workers signed union cards to signal their support, rather than voting by secret ballot. The court ruled against Amazon in October, just before the high holiday shopping season.
Amazon said litigation over the matter was ongoing.
With the Quebec closures, “they made it very clear that we don’t want this spread,” Mr. Wulfraat said, referring to the union effort. The company has more than 46,000 corporate and operations 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 closings in an 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 efforts since it began three years ago through actions that included what she called “disguised firings.”
“It’s a slap in the face for all the workers in Quebec,” she said.
The Montreal metropolitan area has approximately 4.5 million residents, making it larger than the greater Seattle region. Pulling operations from a major population center is at odds with what Amazon has touted in recent years as a central driver of success within its operations: placing 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 population center in North America for years, though more than a dozen years ago it routinely played tough games with states that tried to collect taxes on online sales.
Walmart and other retailers have struggled in the past to establish a logistics base in Quebec, where roughly two out of every five workers are unionized. That’s the highest rate among Canadian 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 1,700 families involved,” Mr. Legault told reporters at a news conference Wednesday, focusing most of his remarks on the need for Quebecers to mobilize and buy local products in response to President Trump’s tariff. threat.
Jean Boulet, the province’s labor minister, said workers affected by the warehouse closure would receive help from the government to find new jobs.