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Industry Minister Mélanie Joly says she’s willing to meet with the president of Stelco and the head of its parent company, Cleveland-Cliffs, but only if the company brings back laid-off workers first.
In a letter to Stelco president Paul Simon dated Thursday, Joly said she wanted to see a “concrete and credible” plan to return workers to their jobs before she would meet with the Stelco head and Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves.
“My message to [Goncalves] is, first, bring back the jobs and then we’ll meet. I want a plan, I want a timeline. And I’m serious about it. You have commitments toward Canada. You have to make sure that you respect them,” Joly reiterated to reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
Joly wrote in the letter that the plan to re-engage workers would form the basis of a conversation with Stelco and Cleveland-Cliffs about the company’s compliance with its requirements under the Investment Canada Act.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, who released a letter sent to Stelco leaders, said she’s willing to use the ‘full force of the law’ if needed in an ongoing fight over a Hamilton, Ont., steel plant, saying Stelco’s U.S.-based owner ‘failed’ its obligation to keep jobs and champion tariff-free access of Canadian steel to the United States.
Goncalves has previously asked to meet with Joly to discuss a path to bring laid off workers back to the Hamilton plant, where Stelco said last month it was idling some operations.
Joly also demanded the company bring all laid-off employees back to work “immediately.”
On Wednesday, Goncalves said in a statement that he hoped to return all 175 laid-off workers to their jobs by Christmas if the company’s plan to boost its Canadian sales is successful.
The letter is the latest in the public back-and-forth between the federal government and the American owners of the steel plant since the layoffs were announced.
Following the decision, Joly demanded that it reverse layoffs announced last month or face potential legal action for violating Investment Canada Act undertakings. The government says the company agreed in those undertakings to keep the number of unionized Stelco employees at 2024 levels through to 2029 when the purchase was made.
Goncalves and Simon have maintained that the company is in compliance, and say the layoffs are necessary to ensure the survival of the company as its been pressured by high U.S. tariffs on steel products.
Asked if the government made a mistake allowing the purchase of the Hamilton-based Stelco steel plant, Prime Minister Mark Carney said ‘the mistake here would be Cleveland-Cliffs not respecting’ the commitments it made when buying Stelco.
Last week, Joly gave Cleveland-Cliffs 15 days to reverse its layoffs before taking the company to court. That would mean asking the courts to issue monetary penalties against Cleveland-Cliffs and potentially direct the company to divest from Stelco, the minister said previously.
On Wednesday, Joly said she had contacted government lawyers about comments made by Goncalves a day before on CBC’s Power & Politics, which Joly said were “confessions” about his true reason for buying Stelco.
Goncalves said in the interview that he bought Stelco because its products were “undercutting our prices in the United States.” A legal expert told CBC News that those comments raise questions about Cleveland-Cliffs’s original intentions in acquiring Stelco but aren’t a slam dunk for the government.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said she called the government’s lawyers after the head of Stelco’s American parent company told CBC News that he only bought the Hamilton steelmaker to stop it undercutting his production facilities in the U.S.
Joly not satisfied with company’s proof of compliance
Earlier this week, the company said it had performed an “exhaustive review” of its obligations under the Investment Canada Act and determined it was in full compliance.
But Joly said in her latest letter she was not at all satisfied with the evidence given in that report, saying it “repeatedly asserts compliance” without giving enough proof.
“I find the report far from satisfactory,” Joly wrote. “Assertions of compliance are not a substitute for the information and evidence necessary to establish compliance.”
Scenes of Stelco’s Hamilton Works and people there at the plant on Oct. 9, 2026, the day workers started to receive layoff notices. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
The minister said she would need to see data, documents and other necessary evidence from Stelco and Cleveland-Cliffs that fully addresses the issues she had laid out in a previous letter in order to be convinced that they are in compliance.
With Cleveland-Cliffs’s leadership now indicating they’re hopeful they could bring workers back to the Hamilton plant, McMaster University economics professor Colin Mang says it’s possible the situation could “resolve itself,” since the government has said their ultimate concern is protecting those jobs.
But he says it’s difficult to say how successful Stelco might be in boosting that Canadian business. Stelco sells product in the construction and auto industries, both of which Mang points out have been battered by U.S. tariffs.
“Given the state of Canada’s relations with the United States, the current state of the trade war, there’s still a lot of uncertainty over where the steel market is going,” Mang said.
