69Laurentian wrote:

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It would be interesting to get the GM Docs on that wagon. There couldn't have been too many made like that!

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I remember back in 1974 when we were camping up at Ivanhoe Lake (west of Timmins, east of Chapleau). The people at the next campsite were from Toronto and had a neat Cardinal Red 1971 Pontiac Lemans Safari wagon. Besides the original bright red paint, it had woodgrain siding and factory Rally II wheels. On the rockers it said "350". Checking the oil under the hood I saw that it was a blue block engine (a Pontiac 350, not an orange block Chevy).

There is a thing called allocations when planning car production. Certain plants will build specific models or body styles. As I recall, even the Chevelle wagons in Canada for 1971 were made in the U.S. The Chevelles for 1971 only offered the Powerglide as the sole automatic behind the sixes, yet in Canada all six-cylinder Chevelles except wagons were offered with a choice of automatics, Powerglide or TurboHydramatic. Note that I said "except wagons". The Chevelle wagons were all being imported from the U.S. in 1971; it follows that the Lemans wagons were sourced from a U.S factory as well. I think that lower production body styles were all pooled at one plant. For example the Lemans the convertibles that year were all coming from Pontiac, Michigan. Remember that in the past they may have built all body styles in Canada before the Auto Pact came into full force. I believe that is partly why we saw car like the Beaumont patterned so closely after the Chevelle; the economies of scale. In Canada the Chevelle & Beaumont shared all body panels except for fender end caps. Likewise, convertibles shared all body panels. By sharing the stampings for both Chevelles & Beaumonts, plus offering a few really basic models like the 300 convertible enabled them to amortize all the specific body stampings. Hey, if GM was going to commit to tooling up, they better use whatever means necessary to get the production numbers high enough to pay for the tooling. That is probably a big reason that there was a base Beaumont & Chevelle 300 convertible in 1965-67; that, plus the slightly lower standard of living in Canada (we were cheaper than our friends south of the border).

The Auto Pact was signed in 1965 but would be too late to affect production allocations of the 1966 models. By mid-year 1967 (still in calendar date 1966) we started seeing changes to the Chevelle & Beaumont offerings (SS396 previously had been U.S.-made only whereas in Canada we initially had the Malibu SS trim with the possibility of 396 power under the hood. Eventually the Beaumonts would be phased out and Oshawa would begin building the Lemans, but only certain models or body styles. The Oshawa Lemans offered a 350 Chevy, while the U.S cars used the Pontiac 350. All larger V8s were Pontiacs though by then. Even the GTO was built in Oshawa, but that was for 1970 only. As a matter of fact, Oshawa built ONE 1970 GTO Judge with a 455!

73SC wrote:

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Cam, as usual a thoughtful and accurate comment. I will just add that GTO was actually built for two years in Oshawa, 1970 as you point out and 1973.

While I never gave it much thought before I am now thinking no LeMans wagons from Oshawa in the 70 to 77 era.

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