Norm Schleehahn was raised in a one-stoplight Ontario town bordered by farm country before he headed off to McMaster University in Hamilton in the late 1980s. To describe him as a wide-eyed kid in those days would be a fair assessment, and his eyes grew a whole lot wider when his landlady Joan, who was big-hearted and kind, instructed her new tenant to pile into her bright red Fiero so she could show him around town.

Their tour arced around the city’s harbour, steel mills, smokestacks and coal heaps, showing off the hustle and industrial churn at the core of Hamilton’s identity. It was a scene Joan described as “romantic,” while her small-town passenger blurted out, “Wow, would you look at this?” — the only words he could find at the time.

“It was my first impression of Hamilton,” Schleehahn, now the city’s director of economic development, said. “Where I grew up, there was zero industry, and seeing the steelworks and the impact of the industry on the community and the spinoffs and whatnot, it is phenomenal. Steel is still a very strong pillar of our community.”

Drive into Hamilton along the highway from Toronto and the beating heart of the city’s economy is front and centre, spread along the water’s edge. Even though the locals can’t always see it, they can taste it in the air, depending on which way the wind blows.

Hamilton’s economy is more diverse than the steel it produces, but the

steel and metal manufacturing sector

undeniably remains the local golden goose, directly employing close to 10,000 workers and accounting for nearly $10-billion worth of exports in 2023.

Health care, in comparison, employs triple the number of people, but accounted for $5.7 billion in economic activity, while the agriculture sector, which has been growing along with the city’s port facility, employs 2,200 workers and had a $1.3-billion economic impact.

Add it all up, and the result is that this old steel town is still the same old steel town that provided generations of workers with the means to pay off mortgages and send their kids to college and university, knowing a portion of them would find their way back into the mills.

But the big difference today is

Donald Trump.

The United States president’s 50 per cent tariff on steel has folks in Hamilton “terrified,” according to Colin Mang, an economics professor at McMaster University.

He said the city is home to the “nicest” people he has ever met, including his department’s administrative staff. Some of them are married to steel or steel-related industry workers and they are having conversations around the family dinner table about an uncertain future and asking questions.

Foremost among them: What if Trump keeps ratcheting up the tariffs and the Canadian industry starts hemorrhaging jobs? What would Hamilton be if it weren’t a steel town?

Contemplating a Hamilton without a steel industry may feel like imagining Alberta without oil or Saskatchewan without wheat, but if Canadians have learned anything since Trump returned to office, it is that worst-case scenarios happen and the things once considered unthinkable are worth thinking about, particularly when the unthinkable happened to the greatest steel town the world had ever known.

Born in the U.S.A.

Pittsburgh today is renowned as a world-class health-care and medical research centre, a trailblazer in robotics and an incubator of technology companies that go from startup to billion-plus-dollar valuations in the blink of an eye.

It is a city of leafy streets, parks, libraries, rivers, bridges, a historic downtown and 40-plus craft breweries and restaurants that hipster foodies delight in. There is an NHL hockey team captained by Sidney Crosby and an NFL franchise that addresses the issue of civic self-identity just in case one fails to grasp it: the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Once upon an industrial age, the city was among the largest and wealthiest in the U.S. The Mellon family, Henry Frick, George Westinghouse and Henry Heinz all called Pittsburgh home, but it was the steel company that Andrew Carnegie founded, ultimately known as United States Steel Corp. and the world’s largest steel producer, that put Pittsburgh on the map.

At its peak in the 1940s, the company had nearly 350,000 employees. Tens of thousands worked in the mills in and around Pittsburgh until the great reckoning of the 1970s and 1980s, when soaring inflation, labour costs, foreign competition and technological advances sparked mill closures, massive job cuts and a mass exodus of steelworkers who suddenly didn’t have a future in the city to look forward to.

How bad was it? Pittsburgh today is home to a bit more than 300,000 people; in 1960, the city had just over 600,000 people.

“Pittsburgh suffered through these kinds of cataclysmic economic changes, and along with that came a psychological and personal identity crisis that was acutely felt,” Anne Madarasz, chief historian at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, said.

She is not a local, but moved to the city just as the worst of the job cuts ended, and folks were actively grieving about the loss of a livelihood and coming to terms with who they might become if they weren’t part of a steel town.

Something Madarasz has since discovered is that storytellers are prone to take shortcuts and portray Pittsburgh’s 21st-century renaissance as a health-care hub as a transformation that began the day after the steel industry died. But the truth, she said, is much more compelling.

Back in the days of yore, Carnegie, the Mellons and the other big shots had a pretty clear idea that the steel industry’s boom times would at some point go bust, so they got working on a plan B about a century ago.

Carnegie Mellon University grew out of this realization, as did the philosophy shared with the University of Pittsburgh about identifying world-class researchers in whatever the field might be and writing substantial cheques to encourage them to move to Pittsburgh and set up research labs.

Jonas Salk was one recipient of this largesse. He discovered the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Decades later, it was Thomas Starzl pioneering liver transplants. One of the first computer science departments in North America opened at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-1960s.

Red Whittaker, a trailblazing robotics professor, pulled into town in the 1970s and created devices used to investigate and repair the damage at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor following a meltdown scare. He later went to Russia to help clean up the disaster at Chernobyl. Canada’s own Geoffrey Hinton was a professor at Carnegie Mellon before he became known as the godfather of

artificial intelligence

at the University of Toronto.

But the smart people were not just working in isolation; they were creating jobs and opportunity beyond the mill gates.

“There was a real investment made in future-thinking ideas — and visionaries — and the idea was that if they’re not from Pittsburgh, well, you bring them to Pittsburgh and support them and kind of build the startups that have become the economy we have today,” Madarasz said.

Richard Florida, now a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, was originally from New Jersey and went to Pittsburgh to teach at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-1980s. What was remarkable about those turbulent years, he said, was the leadership of Richard Cyert, who was not a politician or a captain of industry, but a university president who positioned the school to be an engine for economic transformation and then he hopped in the metaphorical driver’s seat and hit the gas.

“In moving toward a more knowledge-based economy, it is pretty clear that the university has to drive it, so one of the things I do worry about with Hamilton,” Florida said, pausing to apologize for perhaps sounding too much like an “ugly” American, “is having that vision and driving that vision because it is something that is easier to do in the United States than it is here.”

Having piles of old money at one’s disposal comes in handy as well, Madarasz said, since underwriting a significant chunk of Pittsburgh’s turnaround, which included aggressive urban renewal projects often and tragically at the expense of historic African American neighbourhoods, was local family mega-fortunes rooted in the 19th century.

“The generational corporate and industrial wealth that was generated in Pittsburgh has stayed here,” she said.

Madarasz is fond of Canadians. She credits Mario Lemieux with saving the Pittsburgh Penguins — twice — and then there is Sid the Kid, a three-time Stanley Cup winner. The best she can offer Hamilton, as it teeters on the edge of whatever does or does not come of life with Trump, is the story of what occurred in her adopted steel town and the sense of hopefulness amid the hardship it ultimately inspired.

“We feel for you guys in Hamilton,” she said.

Steely determination

Back at McMaster, Colin Mang and his colleagues have been informally spitballing answers to the question of how Hamilton could pivot if the worst of the worst for the steel industry comes to pass.

One challenge in looking to the university to be an engine of change, he said, is that the Canadian system of giving research grants to geniuses is generally not geared toward those commercializing their ideas. U.S. schools have commercialization in their DNA. Fish around the archives of places such as Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you are going to discover the roots of Silicon Valley and Boston’s tech scene.

But lest Hamilton despair, what McMaster has is a crackerjack engineering department right next door to a crackerjack medical school that happens to be a stone’s throw from the school’s nuclear reactor, and that’s not a typo.

Canada’s smallest nuclear reactor is geared to research, and it produces medical isotopes used in cancer treatment. The reactor’s startup claim to fame is Fusion Pharmaceuticals Inc. and its founder, McMaster professor John Valliant. AstraZeneca PLC paid $2.4 billion to acquire the company in March 2024, but its headquarters remain in Hamilton.

Fusion has about 100 employees and they are currently hiring. Posting a job is the easy part in the current economic environment, Mang said. Where things get tricky, salary negotiations aside, is in convincing the would-be high-wage-earning scientists to move to Hamilton, which is a problem that is not unique to the city.

“Canada faces a nationwide housing crisis and getting large numbers of people to move to any area or to move from any area is really difficult right now,” he said. “Building a new industry from scratch, if you’re trying to attract workers from other parts of Canada, where are they going to live?”

Mang suggests that if the steel industry were to contract, say, by thirty per cent, steelworkers, who generally aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, could be retrained to build all those new houses that every level of government says need to be built.

Hamilton has the added advantage of its location, Schleehahn, at city hall, said, and it is ideally positioned to become a logistics hub for companies fed up with the perpetual gridlock of the Greater Toronto Area.

Hamilton has a bustling port, is tied into the Ontario highway network, has railroads that run through the town and is a 90-minute drive away from the U.S. border, plus there is an international airport that — fun fact — is already the country’s busiest airport for overnight couriers.

“If you are pitching a goods-movement-related company to come and locate here or any manufacturer, you want to have great connections, whether it is by highway, rail, port or air, and we have it all in Hamilton,” he said.

Hamilton can also, as Schleehahn’s introduction to the city as an undergraduate confirmed, claim a small-town vibe. The locals truly are friendly, and in business, everybody knows everybody and most everybody is willing to help out.

But friendliness cannot solve the big city problems — homelessness, illegal drug use, graffiti, grime, roads that need repaving, vacant storefronts and crime — afflicting a downtown core that has been earmarked for a 10-year revitalization plan.

Young strivers do not want to live in what looks like a bombed-out zone. The city has beefed up the police presence in the area, and the $280-million overhaul of the arena old-timers will remember as Copps Coliseum (now TD Coliseum) is almost complete, with Sir Paul McCartney booked to open the place in November.

Change is coming, but it does not happen overnight, and complicating the future vision of an urban Shangri-La is a local business environment with flaws that have nothing to do with Trump.

Sabrina Fiorellino, chief executive of Fero International Inc., a modular construction startup, now has close to 100 employees, and the serial entrepreneur is keen to keep growing it. The wrench in that plan is a year-over-year 66 per cent tax increase, and there could be another nine per cent tax hike next year.

“Hamilton does a pretty good job of getting entrepreneurs to come here,” she said. “But what Hamilton doesn’t do well, and arguably the rest of the country doesn’t do particularly well, is get people to stay and that is problematic.”

The tax increase worked out to an additional $600,000 hit on Fero’s books, money the CEO would otherwise have put toward hiring more people and investing in some equipment.

Modular is the shiny, future-facing thing in construction industry circles, and Fiorellino said she regularly takes calls from American regional economic development professionals who dangle all sorts of financial incentives to encourage her to pull up stakes and move south.

“They are saying, ‘Look, we’ll pay for your building, your equipment, and give you $6,000 to $8,000 per employee, and we will give you tax holidays and your effective tax rates are going to be lower for a really long time, but you need to move here,’” she said.

Fiorellino admits the “math is better” down south, but she is also a proud Canadian “with employees and their families to think about,” so the math in Hamilton needs to get better.

Moving is not part of the equation for Walt Koppelaar. He is from a family with “iron in its veins.” His grandfather Walter worked in the Netherlands’ shipyards before immigrating to Canada to build a new life. His day job in the early years was at a steel fabricator and his after-the-day-job involved putting a shovel in a wheelbarrow and rolling it down the street from where he lived and building his own shop out of cinder blocks.

The result, Walters Welding and Iron Works Ltd., opened its doors in April 1956. Seven decades later, the family-owned company, now known as Walters Inc., has 700 employees in Hamilton and another 200 or so in the U.S. It also has several major contracts, including fabricating the steel that is central to the $3-billion renovation of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.

Walter the first lived to be 100 and, as people do, he had his ways that would form the bedrock of the company’s culture. Some examples of Walter-isms: You never work on a Sunday; it is a day of rest. Do not buy things you can’t afford (a.k.a. don’t take on debt). Treat employees like family. Making a mistake is normal; it is how we learn, but making the same mistake twice is just plain dumb. Above all, remember that when it comes to the Koppelaar family dictionary, the word “can’t” does not exist.

His grandson did every job imaginable — scraping, polishing, painting, drilling holes and drawing blueprints for steel construction — on his way up the ranks to executive vice-president of the company. What he can’t and won’t do is imagine a Hamilton without a steel industry.

Prior to Trump’s re-election and declaration of war on Canadian steel, about 70 per cent of what was fabricated in Walters’ Hamilton plant was destined for the U.S. Now, virtually all of what is being produced in Hamilton is directed toward the domestic market. Times might be uncertain, and Trump’s tariffs have already cost the company millions of dollars to date, but it is understood that a family with iron in its veins can get through it.

“Hamilton is a steel town,” Koppelaar said. “We are not going to be like Pittsburgh and roll over and make it a nice city. Sure, they can beautify the waterfront here, but this is still a steel town, and we’re gonna keep it that way.”

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com