Cloudhorse9

A guy I know in the trades works at one of Ontario's smaller specialized steel mills. He's one of the people who had to rebuild it. After NAFTA, the American company that owned the mill decided to shut it down. They didn't just lock the doors and walk away. They sent workers in with torches and had them cut the production lines apart, piece by piece, so nobody could ever start them up again. The mill wasn't broken. It could still make steel, and that was exactly the problem. If a Canadian buyer picked it up and fired it back up, it would compete with the American plants across the border. So they made sure that could never happen. The whole mill was later sold for scrap, and guys like him spent years rebuilding it from the ground up, slowly, at enormous cost, just to get back what we already had. All of that so an American company could shift production home and never worry about a Canadian competitor again. That is sabotage. And is par of the course in a free market neoliberal economic system. Foreign profits are treated as more sacred then hundreds of high quality industrial jobs. When I was at Stelco, I got talking with a supervisor who told me a story I've never forgotten. Stelco had done the research and development on special alloys for car doors. It was stronger steel, which meant automakers could build better-engineered cars that were lighter, using less metal, faster and more fuel-efficient. That's real industrial knowledge, the kind a serious country guards with its life. Then US Steel bought Stelco in 2007. According to the people who were there, those alloy recipes went south. Canadians did the R&D, and then Americans walked off with the results. You don't have to take the shop floor's word for it, either, because the public record is damning enough on its own. US Steel made promises to Ottawa about jobs and production as a condition of the takeover, and it broke them so badly that the federal government took it to court. By 2013, steelmaking in Hamilton was shut down. By 2014, the company was in creditor protection, and the workers, the pensioners and the city of Hamilton were left holding the bag. You'd think our country would learn something from that. We didn't. In 2024, we let another American company, Cleveland-Cliffs, buy Stelco. This fall it announced it would lay off up to 500 workers in Hamilton and Nanticoke, and when Ottawa objected, the CEO said he was ready to take Canada to court. Same story, new owner. When push comes to shove, a foreign company's loyalty is to its own plants back home. Of course it is. That's what foreign ownership means, and the only people who ever seem surprised by it are our politicians. And it doesn't stop with buying our companies. Sometimes foreign capital doesn't even bother with ownership. It just pays someone to stand in the way. Most of our oil goes to a single customer, the United States, at a discount, because every attempt to build our way to other markets gets buried in protests, lawsuits and delays. Vivian Krause has spent years following the money behind those campaigns, and much of it leads back to American foundations. Alberta's public inquiry found more than a billion dollars in foreign money flowing to Canadian environmental groups. So American money pays Canadian activists to keep Canadian oil landlocked, and American refiners get to buy it cheap. Nice arrangement, if you're American. Which raises the obvious question: why do our politicians keep letting all this happen? Some of them are too stupid to understand what's going on. But the bigger reason is that the people running this country have never really seen industry as something to build. To the Laurentian class, industry is something to skim. They look at Canadian industry the way an extractive feudal lord looks at a peasant's harvest. Over decades, they've built an entire economy of progressive make-work on top of it. Credentialed consultants, compliance officers, diversity offices, environmental reviews that run for years and produce nothing but paperwork and legal fees, sustainability reports nobody reads. None of it is tied to results. A mill doesn't make better steel because it filed another impact assessment, and a factory doesn't ship more product because it hired a diversity coordinator. That was never the point. These jobs exist to employ the Laurentian class's own people, reward its allies and keep its grip on power. It's patronage dressed up as virtue. And our industry pays for all of it. Every Canadian company carries a stack of indirect fiefdom taxes, from environmental payments that work more like extortion than protection, to the HR and DEI overhead, to the consultants hired to navigate rules written by other consultants. Every dollar spent feeding that machine is a dollar not spent on equipment, on workers or on research. Then the same people turn around and ask why Canadian industry can't compete. Compare that with China. Say what you want about it, but China cares about building things. It judges its officials by what gets built. We judge ours by what gets announced. Our system rewards siphoning, so siphoning is what we get, and the progressives drain the wealth out of our industry year after year and call it governance. When Chinese officials get caught siphoning they get executed. Being a corrupt official in China is very dangerous. If you were hoping Mark Carney would change any of this, he hasn't. He can't, because he doesn't even perceive the problem. Carney is a banker, and to a banker every problem looks like something a bank can fix. His answer to a hollowed-out industrial base is more loans, more funds and more financing vehicles. What he won't touch is the environment that's strangling our industry in the first place: the fiefdom taxes, the regulatory maze, the foreign ownership. He isn't putting out the fire. He's pouring more fuel on it and calling it "investment". The best example is his enthusiasm for a defence bank, as if rearming a country mostly comes down to financing government procurement. But a military isn't a balance sheet, and you can't rearm a society that no longer believes in itself. For generations, the Laurentian class has poisoned the cultural legacy of this country. They taught Canadians to be embarrassed by their history, to apologize for their ancestors and to treat their own nation as a problem to be managed. Then they act surprised when young Canadians feel no real attachment to the country they're being asked to defend. You can't fix that with a loan. You fix it by giving people a country worth believing in again, and that starts with taking back control of what we build. So ask the obvious question. Why are people demoralized? Why are young Canadians dying of fentanyl in the same towns their grandparents built? Look at what was done to those towns. The jobs that paid a living wage are gone, the kind that let a man who showed up and worked hard buy a house and raise a family. They were shipped south or cut apart with torches. The communities themselves have been transformed by immigration at a pace nobody ever voted for. And the homes on their streets have been inflated far beyond their reach, so an entire generation could be bled dry in one massive wealth transfer to baby boomers and existing homeowners. Then Ottawa wonders why the Forces struggle to recruit. Defend what, exactly? A country that took your job, priced you out of your hometown and remade your community without asking you? What the Laurentian class has done to this generation is worse than losing a war. At least a defeated country knows who its occupier is. That means cutting off the foreign money first. Remember those American foundations bankrolling the fight against our pipelines? That ends. No more foreign funding for Canadian NGOs, full stop. These groups can raise their money from Canadians or not at all. And if you take foreign money to physically stop Canadian industry, chaining yourself to the bulldozers on a pipeline site, you go to prison like any other industrial saboteur. Dress it up in whatever cause you like. The cell is the same size. Next, we sharply restrict foreign ownership of strategic industry. Where foreign owners have already gutted our assets, we nationalize them and settle the account. They get what the asset is worth, minus everything they owe us: the broken promises, the subsidies, the pension holes and the cleanup bill. For some of them, that comes to zero. Let them hold the bag for once. Nor is that some radical new idea. Conservatives built Ontario Hydro. Quebec nationalized its power companies under the slogan "maîtres chez nous," masters in our own house. Both founding peoples of this country have done it before, and only the Laurentian class pretends it's unthinkable. From there, we protect what we invent. Stelco's alloy recipes should never have been allowed to leave the country, and stealing Canadian industrial secrets should be treated as the crime it is. The Ministry of Industry to map every factory in Canada and what it can produce, quickly and without a decade of consultations, because we can't rebuild an industrial base that we haven't even counted. And we make sure no one ever takes a torch to a Canadian mill again. If a company wants to gut a mill's capacity, it asks permission first, and the Crown or a Canadian buyer gets first refusal. Close a plant if you have to. But you don't get to destroy one. Above all, we need to put builders back in charge. That means scaling up our engineering programs and putting engineer-minded people at the head of our companies instead of lawyers and consultants. We design our economy around technical advancement and efficient production, and we reward the people who actually make things. Do that, and Canada would kick everybody's ass. Instead, look at what we have. Foreign owners torch our mills and walk off with our research. Foreign money pays activists to block our pipelines. A domestic elite taxes what's left to fund its own patronage. And a banker prime minister thinks the cure is more credit. That is the record of the Laurentian class. They inherited a country that built a railway across a continent and steel mills that could compete with anyone in the world, and they turned it into a fiefdom with a branch plant economy. It's a total failure, and they should be held accountable fore it.