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Fifty years ago, Toyota granted a distributorship agreement to Canadian Motor Industries, which would become Toyota Canada. Bill Pasincky is on the far right behind the car.

In 1964, Bill Pasincky took a giant leap of faith. The then-28-year-old, who already owned a service station in Fort Erie, Ontario, signed a deal with a little-known car maker new to Canada to service and then sell its cars.

"I had the Toyota representative at my little home and we made a deal for the franchise," he recalls. "My wife was home from a doctor's appointment and asked how the meeting went, and I said I was going to be a dealer, but I didn't say at first that I had emptied our bank account for the $3,500 for the franchise, parts and shipment.

"Then she said she found out at the doctor's that she was expecting, and I broke out in a cold sweat, I didn't know what to say. I committed to something I didn't know was going to work, and here she tells me we're going to have a baby."

It was a gamble for Pasincky, but Toyota was also taking a chance itself; this small Japanese car company had just begun moving into Canada and brought four model lineups with it. In its first year, Toyota sold a grand total of 755 cars across the country; it was a modest beginning.

But there is an old Japanese proverb: after the rain, the earth hardens. It means adversity builds character, and Toyota wasn't about to give up on Canada so easily. This year, the car maker celebrated 50 years here and, with more than 4.6 million cars sold since that first year, its tenacity has paid off. In 2014 alone, Toyota had sold nearly 190,000 vehicles in Canada through November, including its Lexus and Scion brands.

But it wasn't an easy road.

"There was still a natural skepticism to something new," says David Worts, executive director of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association of Canada (JAMA). "The Detroit auto makers had dominated the market for so long. Volkswagen had a small hold here, Renault was here in small numbers, but Japanese auto makers were swimming upstream."

Pasincky, now 78, says the obscurity of Toyota at the time didn't make things easy for him. "Financing was a problem because, with this company, the banks would not touch you," he recalls. "So I took a line of credit of $10,000 at 17.5% -- and the manager said he was sticking his neck out."

Wortz has been with JAMA since its inception in 1984. Before that, he was involved with the Japanese tooling industry, which itself was involved with supplying auto manufacturing plants. He's seen plenty of change in Toyota's involvement since it first entered the Canadian market, with its first offices in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

"At that time," Worts says, "there were a lot of challenges; setting up dealers, even trying to convince Canadian businessmen to take a chance on your company. You can have vehicles, but if you don't have a good dealership network set up, then that's a critical part of setting up the business model. All of that takes time."

Another key to success is the right product for the market. In the early years, Toyota brought over vehicles from the Japanese market – the Corona, the Crown, the 700 UP10 and the venerable Land Cruiser. They weren't really right for the Canadian market.

"I didn't want to quit, but we had bad years," Pasincky says. "The late '60s was a really bad time; I don't know how many times I was about ready to toss the towel in, because I had to subsidize the car sales with my service station. But when the Corolla came in 1971, that started to change things."

And then the market itself changed. The 1973 oil crisis was a boon for Toyota, as fuel prices rose and North American consumers looked for smaller cars with better fuel efficiency.

"That was a seminal moment for Japanese auto makers," says Worts. "In taking advantage of the shift in market dynamic, that was really what defined the Japanese auto industry here."

Canadians began to notice Toyota. Still, later in the 1970s, with the oil crisis dismissed, the company had to jump another hurdle.

"A lot of dealers jumped ship and went back to the domestics but Mr. Togo came and talked with us individually and said that things will get better," Pasincky says, referring to the late Yukiyasu Togo, who joined the Canadian operation in 1976 and became its president in 1980, before taking charge of Toyota Motor Sales in the U.S. "I wasn't going anywhere because, as a mechanic, I liked the cars, even then they were superior than the British cars and the small domestics, like the Ford Falcon."

But Toyota was also tenacious; it brought in more models such as the Celica, Tercel, Camry and 4Runner for a deeper range of vehicles. In 1985, it made another huge leap by opening its first Canadian factory, a wheel production plant in Delta, B.C. At the same time, it announced plans for a vehicle production factory in Cambridge, Ont., which would build the popular Corolla. There was no turning back.

Corollas started rolling off the Cambridge line in 1988 and, a year later, Seiji Ichii began his first stint here with what had then become Toyota Canada Inc. (TCI) in a junior executive role. After four years, he moved on globally in the company but returned in 2012 to become the president and CEO of TCI. His earlier years in Canada proved formative for his new role.

"I learned the importance of listening, whether it was to the voice of our customers or the voice of our dealers or even the voice of our own Canadian associates," he says. "Now, internally, I tell our people that I have a hybrid management style; if we don't listen to each other – for example, a Japanese management style and a Canadian management style may conflict with each other – rather, why don't we try to find out the good side of each system. And then you can establish the best of the two, in a positive way."

Canadians differ from Americans in that we tend to choose smaller cars; Toyota's biggest seller in the United States is the Camry; in Canada, it's the Corolla.

"[Canadians] are really tough customers because they focus on the value of a product, and if they find it valuable, they don't mind spending money," Ichii says. "I consider this market to be very similar to Japan, because Japanese customers are very demanding as well. I welcome that kind of demanding customer because that will only make us strong."

Kaizen – the mantra Toyota follows that means "continuous improvement" – has been and will continue to be essential to the car maker's success, Ichii says. Toyota is focused on improvements to fuel efficiency, emotion, aesthetics and quality; its winter testing facility in Timmins, Ont., enables the company to adapt its cars for winter climates. And new technologies, such as a recently announced fuel cell vehicle, the Mirai, to be offered in limited quantities in California and Japan, show that Toyota continues to be an innovator.

Obviously, the wagers of both Pasincky and Toyota have paid off greatly; Bill's Toyota Sales has grown into a successful family-owned dealership with Bill Sr. still at the helm. Next year, when he receives the 50-year pin from the company, he's handing over the dealership to his two sons who work there.

For Toyota, on top of the nearly 200,000 annual car sales here, more than six million vehicles are produced at the Cambridge plant and another in Woodstock, Ont., which opened in 2008. Despite seeing overall car sales down 1.3% here this year, its truck sales jumped 7.8% and it is still one of the highest-selling car makers in the country. From its shaky beginnings, Toyota has a solid future in the Canadian market.

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