Sault Blog

Mayor Shoemaker is doing the full-court press to build the Port of Sault Ste. Marie, a project proposed and studied many times by previous Sault Economic Development Corporations.

“The City of Sault Ste. Marie in partnership with Hamilton Oshawa Port Authority (HOPA) to develop a new multi-modal South Trade Corridor, creating a vital link for Northern Ontario’s industries (mining, forestry, steel) to southern markets and beyond, integrating marine, rail, and highway networks to boost supply chain resilience, economic diversification, and jobs, with potential development on Algoma Steel lands”, reports a saultstemarie.ca press release.

The projected cost of this Sault Ports project is estimated at $200 million and by all accounts in reality be excessively more after the project is started because as Mr. Robert Moses former New York State Planning Commissioner, said of large infrastructure projects: Low ball them to get them approved and when the real cost comes in its too late for governments to back out of the project.

The other significant reason to create the Sault Port project is the immediate need to employ the over 1,000 employees who will be terminated from Algoma Steel due to the steel-making conversion to the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF), which will render primary steel-making processes obsolete.

These two reasons to build the Sault Port are very compelling, and by all accounts, the green light should be given to proceed with the project if, in fact, there is a need for the Sault Port, because there may be something missing here: A real need.

Of the decades that this Sault Port has been on a shelf in the Sault EDC’s office, not one business has come forward to City Council to make a presentation requiring the Port’s services. Prior to spending 1/4 billion dollars on the Sault Port, hard questions have to be asked: Who is going to use it, how often will it be used, and, best of all, who is going to pay for its ongoing operations.

In reality, is Sault Ste. Marie’s Port construction: just a political knee-jerk reaction by our Mayor to respond to the massive job losses at Algoma Steel, rather than a clear, concise business decision based on customer demand?

There have been a number of these knee-jerk reactionary projects in our City lately, leaving more questions than answers.

In 2021, when the conversion to EAF was first announced, Steel Plant Employees and the City at large were absolutely incredulously flabbergasted that Algoma Steel Corporation would be given approximately $400 million by the Federal Government to eliminate over 1,000 high-paying union jobs. This was a Federal Government knee-jerk pressure tactic to force Algoma Steel to switch to the EAF for the purposes of proving Canada’s global climate change reduction commitments claiming the shift to the nonsensical “green steel”.

As the Sault sleepwalked through five years, since the announcement, Algoma Steel and the Sault crashed into the United State’s tariff and climate change wall, precipitating an accelerated purging of the 1,000 union jobs and plunging the City back into the well-known, decades-long survivor mode. Now fully understanding the ramifications of the EAF conversion on job losses, the Federal Government’s knee-jerk announces the creation of a “Beam Mill” at Algoma Steel without a real business plan. Algoma Steel is not a banquet hall; you can’t just move the table and chairs around to accommodate a new production line. Why was this not thought through five years ago, prior to the construction of the Electric Arc Furnaces and the expansion of the production lines? By all accounts its probably too late to economically integrate this Beam Mill into the production lines, and convincing Algoma Steel Board of Directors and Shareholders who’s stock price has evaporated to invest in this Beam Mill without a solid return on investment plan will go nowhere.

The Downtown Plaza was another City bureaucratic knee-jerk solution to all the problems and the decades-long “death-spiral” of the Downtown Core. No matter how many red-lights where thrown up on this project, it was pushed through. The duplication of services is not a concern; the spiralling of costs again once you start, you can’t stop , and the ongoing costs are not taken into account. The Downtown Plaza represents a business case study: wanting something that was not needed, when using the existing facilities that were readily available would more than suffice, and the ongoing $600,000 a year for maintenance, administration, and activation costs would be far better spent on additional snow removal teams for our City.

Americans did not pay a single dollar for the construction of the Gordie Howe Bridge, the Customs Plazas in both Canada and the United States, the 401 and the I-75 Highway alignments, or for the removal of urban blight, landscaping, and park creation at bridge approach in Detroit, Michigan. In my opinion, Americans have been thinking about reducing trade with Canada for some time and that’s why they didn’t want to pay a single dime for this bridge. When the President of the USA keeps repeating that “We don’t need anything from Canada”, we probably should take heed.

Anyone thinking that this Sault Port is going to be created to service trade with the United States, you might want to listen to the speech Prime Minister Carney delivered in Davos, Switzerland this week, where the future of Canada’s trade will be West to Asia’s New World Order, not South. No boats here needed for that.

Mark Menean, http://www.saultblog.com