Sault Ste. Marie MPP Chris Scott says the province needs to ensure U.S. President Donald Trump is met with a government that is going to stand up for Ontario’s economy in the midst of an ongoing trade war.
The recently-elected member of provincial parliament spoke at length about the province’s response to tariffs on goods — in particular, Canadian steel — as a featured guest at the Sault Ste. Marie Chamber of Commerce fireside chat series on Thursday afternoon.
Scott said the trade war has left the province at a “fork in the road” where it could shy away from large public expenditures and make cuts along the way.
“We chose the other path, which is not growth for the sake of growth, but growth to ensure that we're coming out of this as the strongest of the national G7 jurisdictions in the world,” the MPP said in response to a question about economic opportunities for growth in the Sault and northern Ontario.
“I think for us as a community, we’re at the pointy end of the spear: these tariffs on steel and aluminum tariffs, that hits really close to home.”
In the short term this means protecting Ontario jobs, Scott told members of the local business community.
“We've got to be able to not only weather the storm, but be making the right investments to grow our infrastructure and grow our social services and grow our economy, so that we're coming out of this stronger than we came into it,” he said.
Scott believes part of that includes holding the federal government accountable.
“My boss, Doug Ford, was pretty clear about the need for these tariffs to be dollar for dollar, or more,” he said.
Ontario has already “started to put our money where our mouth is,” Scott said, by ensuring public projects in the province are constructed with Canadian and Ontario steel.
The MPP pointed to the new Darlington Nuclear Project as part of those efforts. Algoma Steel is supplying the project in Clarington, Ont. with 860 tonnes of steel that’s required for the base of a small modular reactor. Once complete, it will be the first small modular reactor in the G7.
“We’re building four, and we’ve got contracts and agreements in place with Estonia, Poland, Romania — a lot of the east block, strategically — so that when the war in Ukraine ends and the rebuild is there, small modular reactors are a big part of the strategy to get a lot of those nations and get Ukraine off natural gas and other energy sources from hostile neighbours,” Scott said.
Scott also signalled the need for Algoma Steel to “retool and grow,” so that more i-beams, rebar and rail are “coming off the lines at Algoma” in the future.
That’s why provincial leadership plans to meet with leadership at Algoma Steel “to find out what that actually looks like and how to enable it,” Scott said.