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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins and this is The World. It's been minutes since we've given you some gloomy economics news, so let's catch up, shall we? Today, Ford announced that its U.S. sales fell 48 percent last month, and no one is optimistic about what General Motors and Chrysler are going to report. Those two companies are under even more pressure than Ford is; they've borrowed 17.4 billion dollars from Uncle Sam, and they need to pay it back. Plus, GM and Chrysler are hoping to borrow still more money from another source: Canada. The World's Jason Margolis reports from Ontario.

JASON MARGOLIS: General Motors and Chrysler produce nearly a quarter of their North American vehicles north of the border in Ontario. So the two companies are asking the Canadian taxpayer to pitch in nearly a quarter of the bailout money. This might seem odd, Canadians helping to bail out U.S. companies. But look at it this way: 130,000 people in Ontario build autos and parts. So Canada doesn't want to see Detroit's Big Three fail. Charlotte Yates is the Dean of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton. She says before Canadians help out Detroit, they should extract some promises.

CHARLOTTE YATES: We need to get some kind of recognition or guarantee of investment in jobs in Canada. You're obviously not gonna give money if then that company is then gonna take that and just move everything to U.S. Vice versa, the U.S. obviously wouldn't give all the money and then find that all the production moved to China.

MARGOLIS: In the past five years, GM and Chrysler have cut assembly plants and slashed parts operations in Ontario. Thousands of Canadian autoworkers have lost their jobs. Charlotte Yates says it's become a full-blown crisis now that the global financial system has stopped functioning.

YATES: I mean there's been a complete meltdown, to the point where people can't get loans for cars, and the automakers themselves can't get loans. The parts makers can't get loans, and that has a kind of ripple-through effect of creating a crisis.

MARGOLIS: Still, Yates says Detroit's automakers do deserve some blame; they failed to plan strategically.

DENNIS DEROSIERS: Companies get themselves into trouble in the auto sector because of three words: product, product, and product.

MARGOLIS: Independent auto analyst Dennis Derosiers in Toronto says product is why American carmakers have been losing market share in Canada for 15 years. They just don't understand what the Canadian car buyer is looking for.

DENNIS DEROSIERS: The Canadian consumer quite frankly is one of the most boring consumers anywhere in the world. All we care about are small reliable cars that are inexpensive. Period.

MARGOLIS: Derosiers blames not only U.S. carmakers; he blames the Canadian Auto Workers Union. He says when times were good, the union managed to win such generous benefits that union autoworkers now effectively double their salary with extras like a robust pension plan, added vacation, and prescription drug coverage. All told, the average union autoworker earns 49 American dollars an hour in salary and benefits, though take-home pay is closer to 25 dollars an hour. Some say that's an awful lot, but union autoworker Euan Gibb says it's not that much when you consider the work. His job was to put glass in a passenger side door.

EUAN GIBB: So picking up the glass, securing it, hooking up an electrical hookup and cycling the glass down. And yeah, you only have 40 seconds to do that. So you're picking up glass, you're running to the car, you're getting it in, like, fit inside the rubber of the door. Yeah, quite intense.

MARGOLIS: Gibb did that 400 to 600 times a day; today, he's out of work. He took a company buyout from Ford last fall. He's upset with the whole situation, and so were the other autoworkers I met in Ontario. They get even angrier when GM and Chrysler, in their bid for Canadian loans, threaten to cut back wages and benefits of the people who make the cars. Union autoworker Lindsay Hinshelwood says that makes her blood boil.

LINDSAY HINSHELWOOD: These corporations don't want to pay people to make them, but they want people to buy their products. I mean, even Henry Ford figured out that he had to double the wages of people to get them to buy his product, and people have lost sight of that. There's no paying customer anymore ‘cause no one has a steady job or a good paying wage.

MARGOLIS: But if the choice is between concessions and bankruptcy, the union has no good option. Both GM and Chrysler in Canada denied interview requests for this story, but they did send me fact sheets about their restructuring plans. The President of the Canadian Auto Workers, Ken Lawenza, did meet with me. He says the union has already conceded 900 million dollars in benefits and it's not giving up pensions because of poor management decisions.

KEN LAWENZA: I mean, the pension plans themselves are supposed to fully funded. It's a regulatory requirement, and General Motors was actually given some relief by the provincial government relative to their funding. So even when they were making profits, they didn't fund it. So that's their responsibility; they're going to have to do it.

MARGOLIS: But what if the companies can't fund the pension?

LAWENZA: Well, if they can't then they're bankrupt. That's the reality. We don't believe that that's the case.

MARGOLIS: Right now, it's a game of who will blink first: the union, the automakers, or the Canadian government. Everybody wants a better deal. They have until a March 31st deadline to come up with one. For The World, I'm Jason Margolis, Toronto.

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