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Canada’s industry minister said Wednesday Stelco Holdings Inc. cannot use the trade war to justify cutting jobs it committed to when it bought the Hamilton-based steel plant, particularly when the head of its U.S. parent company has publicly backed steel tariffs.<\/p>\n
M\u00e9lanie Joly told reporters that the chief executive of U.S.-based Cleveland-Cliffs has supported steel tariffs and therefore cannot characterize the company’s plan to lay off up to 500 workers due to tariffs and market pressures as beyond its control.<\/p>\n
“He’s in favour of these U.S. tariffs against steel,” she said, referring to Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves’ public support of American steel tariffs.<\/p>\n
“They cannot say that this is now an act of God or force majeure.”<\/p>\n
If the company does not respond to the federal government’s demand for a plan outlining how it will meet all of its commitments, including maintaining more than 1,500 jobs, Ottawa will pursue enforcement action, Joly said.<\/p>\n
“They need to comply,” she said. “If not, we will use the full force of the law.”<\/p>\n
Canada gave U.S.-based Cleveland-Cliffs the green light to purchase Stelco back in 2024 under the Investment Canada Act.<\/p>\n
Canada’s approval of that takeover was contingent on the new owner maintaining the number of union jobs and the majority of non-union positions, Joly said.<\/p>\n
She sent a letter to Stelco president Paul Simon on Monday demanding a plan outlining how Cleveland-Cliffs intends to comply with all of the undertakings it made to Ottawa when it acquired Stelco, including its jobs commitment.<\/p>\n
Ottawa has not yet received a response from Stelco on the letter, Joly said.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, she distinguished Stelco’s planned job cuts from recent layoffs and plant disruptions in the auto sector, saying Cleveland-Cliffs made legally binding employment commitments when it acquired the steelmaker.<\/p>\n
“These obligations are binding.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101],"class_list":["post-874983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}