Town steels for trade growth

SAULT-STE.-MARIE, ONT. — They might be doling out pink slips in Windsor and watching as their french-fry cooking oil gets cold in chip trucks across cottage country, but things are certainly looking up in this Northern Ontario border town.

Last year, India-based Essar Steel purchased the local steel plant and as recently as this week inked a $1.5 million check to the city for naming rights. So if you attend a Soo Greyhound hockey game you might find yourself in the Essar Arena. (The town’s known locally as “The Soo.”)

More importantly, the company has already upped the steel mill’s production from about 2.4 million tons a year to more than three million. And Essar’s poised to sink another half a billion dollars into the plant.

“Up in the Sudburys and Sault Ste. Maries of the world—the resource sectors—we’re doing fine. It’s a case of not being able to find enough staff; not having enough trucks.,” reports the city’s economic development officer Bruce Strapp.

The city also has an unprecedented opportunity to turn itself into a major multi-modal port. It’s got a deep-water harbor because of steel ships that have been serving the industry for decades, plus it’s a ball-bearing’s throw from the U.S. market.

That’s why the City, in conjunction with Essar and a few other key players, has struck a “Global Gateway Steering Committee” designed to administer, guide and lobby whoever has to be lobbied to make sure the city doesn’t miss this opportunity for growth.

According to Strapp, the Essar mill will be shipping more steel out but needing more iron ore imported and the city’s also looking at developing local steel-manufacturing industries, so anybody involved in trucking should be keeping an eye on opportunities in the area. “Right now a couple of hundred trucks a day cross that bridge,” he said. “I can see that number growing pretty quickly.”

“As you know, making steel is a matter of product in and product out.”

And at least one major carrier who moved out of the area a few years ago has already expressed interest in reopening in the city.