Ontario Puts $390,000 Toward Hamilton's Tariff Response Team as Steelworkers Face Tariff Threats
Ontario is helping the City of Hamilton fund a tariff response team, a $390,000 investment Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli announced Tuesday at Hamilton city hall. Fedeli called steel made in Ontario vital to the province's supply chain and said steelworkers are under direct attack from tariffs.
The response team is being stood up as Stelco Holdings, which announced on Sept. 28 that it would idle part of its Hamilton plant, leaves hundreds of workers facing layoffs — a situation Horwath also pointed to. A $390,000 team does not replace a shift at the mill, and the province's announcement lands while hundreds of Stelco jobs are in question.
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Horwath says the team, paired with measures in the Head of Lake Ontario Plan she announced in September, is meant to make sure workers and families receive every dollar of funding available to them, including for retraining. Connecting people to programs is genuinely useful and supremely unglamorous — the kind of effort whose failure is invisible and whose success is hard to prove.
Useful, maybe — but it doesn't touch the question the province was asked directly: whether it is looking at nationalizing Stelco, an idea federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis and Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles have been promoting. Fedeli didn't directly say no, and he also didn't say his government is considering it — which makes a business-navigation desk a strange answer to the ownership question.