During a recent interview, Rajat Marwah, CEO of Algoma Steel, said the government has done “not enough.” This is in spite of the fact that the government already gave them $500 million in addition to implementing “Buy Canadian” policies and protective tariffs.
But this has not stopped the company from laying off 1,000 people. This is just the same old song and dance. Algoma has been given over $1.3 billion in public money since the early 1990s. Over the same period, the company has reduced their workforce from more than 6,000 to fewer than 2,000 today.
Despite the enormous amount of public money given to the company, the owners of Algoma have proven that they care more for their profits than the livelihoods of the population of Sault Ste. Marie, which has increasingly been wracked by unemployment, crime, and poverty.
The only way forward is to nationalize Algoma and introduce a socialist plan of production to produce what society needs. With the workforce Algoma once had, enough steel could be produced for 150,000 kilometers of rail, 150,000 wind turbines, or enough structural steel for 7 million homes. A nationalized Algoma, integrated into a socialist plan of production, could be used to build coast-to-coast high-speed rail, end homelessness, and provide clean energy for the entire country.
