"It puts a lot of fear into us," said Doug Orr, the Canadian Auto Workers representative for about 3,250 people in the Niagara Region city, where GM's workforce approached 10,000 more than a decade ago.

Orr was reacting to today's announcement by GM Corp. chairman Rick Wagoner that 25,000 U.S. jobs will be eliminated by 2008, along with plant closures, in an attempt to restore GM's North American business.

Those cuts represent more than one quarter of the 111,000 American hourly workers at GM, which is trimming costs after losing $1.1 billion (U.S.) in its first quarter and suffering a market share drop to competitors such as Toyota.

More than $1 billion Cdn has been invested in GM's engine plant in St. Catharines in recent years and according to Orr, the plant is ``booming." The same can't be said for the components factory, which makes parts for transmissions and has received little new investment.

"Quite honestly, we think they want to close that facility down the road," Orr said of the 1,600-worker components factory.

He said morale inside the components plant is already low and after today's announcement "it's almost like a dog being kicked."

Wagoner didn't outline any planned layoffs for Canada, which has 20,000 GM workers and contains some of the company's most efficient and productive assembly plants. But Orr said he doubts GM's Ontario operations - which also include three assembly plants in Oshawa and a transmission plant in Windsor - will be spared from cuts.

"They said it's isolated to the U.S. I think we'll find that will be far from the truth," Orr said.

GM Canada spokesman Stew Low said that while there are no current plans to lay off Canadian workers, "that doesn't mean that the Canadian operations are off the hook."

"It's a global environment that we operate in," Low said. ``We'll continue to drive hard on productivity and improving quality and reducing costs."

GM parts factories would be impacted by the closure of any American assembly plants they feed, said auto analyst Dennis DesRosiers, who expects between two and five U.S. assembly plants will be significantly downsized or closed.

"If you're going to be closing specific capacity in the United States, it's likely that the engines and transmissions that we produce for those plants will ultimately get hurt," DesRosiers said.

Among possible cuts in Ontario, DesRosiers said a shift could be lost at one of GM's three Oshawa plants, the main employer in the industrial city east of Toronto.

GM's total output in Oshawa fell nearly 18 per cent in the first four months of this year. Production in Oshawa of the Pontiac Grand Prix and three Chevrolet models - the Monte Carlo, Impala and the Silverado pickup - are all below year-ago levels.

A lost shift at any of the Oshawa plants could result in several hundred job cuts.

A "higher probability" could be cuts in St. Catharines and the 1,500-worker transmission plant in Windsor, which have been ``rumoured forever" as sites that could be closed, DesRosiers said.

However, GM's Windsor plant might be protected amid increased demand for the cars that use its transmissions, argues Mike Thomas, vice-president for CAW local 1973.

The plant builds four-speed transmissions for the Chevy Cobalt, Pontiac Pursuit, Chevy Malibu, Saturn Ion and Saturn Vue. Thomas said demand for smaller GM cars is improving, and noted that 315 layoffs in Windsor scheduled for June 13 were recently cancelled.

"The market is driving towards small cars right now due to gas prices, and that's actually helped us out," he said.

Orr hopes the CAW can achieve better job security when the union opens up negotiations with GM next month for a new three-year contract.

"People want job security there and we want to deliver it for them," said Orr.