Amazon is willing to discuss the closures of its Quebec warehouses with Canadian and provincial officials, confirmed Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Public Services and Procurement of Canada — on Friday afternoon. What this all means is still very unclear.

This comes after the Minister François-Philippe Champagne published a letter to the American e-commerce giant on social media Thursday night calling them out for the 1,700 layoffs of regular Amazon employees and 250 seasonal workers in the next two months and the closure of seven warehouses — as announced on Wednesday.

Amazon justified its decision by saying it wanted to “return to a third-party delivery model supported by small local businesses, similar to what (it had) in 2020.”...

“[Amazon] will sit with us and apparently also the Quebec government to make sure that we can share with them the disappointment of what they have announced. Not only what they have announced, but the way they have announced it to with no pre-warning, no explanation whatsoever to cut the jobs of more than 3,000 workers in Canada is not acceptable. It’s not an acceptable way of working with Canada and with Canadians,” said Duclos in Ottawa on Friday.

Amazon tells CityNews that their plans remain unchanged...