Welcome from Calgary....the land of the never ending winter.

While I'm sure your question will be answered by those with more back ground than I, my only idea as to Canadian Pontiac's, Meteors, Beaumonts.....was the market car manufacturers had to build for? Even recently, "The General" has built cars for US markets only. Right now I think there is another "Caprice"? It's Austrailian, but you won't see a new one in Canada for sale.  There's a Chevy SS now? Or how about the attempt to bring back the GTO? They had an excuse about bumpers. Really? Just not for us in Canada when they were new as far as I see. (You can import them in now)

Good old Chevy V-8's were put in a lot of GM cars back in the day, including Pontiacs. Maybe they thought the engine could handle winters better than the blue American engines?

Good question you have there. I'm going to watch for the answer as well.

A hardy welcome aboard James from Milton, Ontario, Canada. The main reason was economics, our population has always been small compared to the U.S.. Pontiac's for example were Chevrolet's in disguise because we were already building Chevrolet's in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada and building Chevrolet based Pontiac's was far more economical than importing "real" Pontiac's from the U.S. We could order American Pontiac's but the cost was prohibitive for many. Same goes for Dodge, an imported "real" American Dodge was far more expensive than a Canadian Plymouth based "Plodge". With Meteor it was a way of Mercury dealers to be able to sell a lower cost line of cars because after all the Meteor was based on a standard Ford car. Many other's can pipe in on the matter but in a nutshell, it was cost that drove Canadian car manufacturers to build their own versions of American cars. Of course the AUTO PACT of 1965 between the U.S. and Canada  changed all that. We could now get American cars with out having to give up our first born. James, hopefully that sheds some light on our Canadian versions of fine American automobiles. Cheers. George.