Resilient city: Elbows Up in the Hammer

Hamiltonians are telling Donald Trump to take his tariffs and stuff it. Here are four ways we are taking action.

Last spring, only weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the future of Hamilton’s economy looked bleak. Trump imposed 25 per cent tariffs on the Canadian steel industry in March, a crucial sector of the city’s economy. In June, Trump raised the tariffs to 50 per cent amid similar tough action against the auto, aluminum and lumber industries.

At 25 per cent, the tariffs represented “a billion-dollar economic blow to our city,” Mayor Andrea Horwath said last spring. By August, with the tariffs at 50 per cent and applied to a wider range of steel products, Horwath predicted “catastrophic impact on our city’s workers, manufacturers and families.”

Flying against these early expectations, the Hamilton economy has weathered this economic storm pretty well. The mass job losses and shutdowns forecasted last spring failed to materialize. No significant layoffs were announced at the two major steel manufacturers in 2025, Hamilton unemployment remained below the provincial average, and the construction, warehousing and transportation sectors hummed along.

The total number of people employed in 2025 in the Hamilton census metropolitan area (CMA), which includes Burlington and Grimsby, went from 424,000 in January when Trump was inaugurated to 444,000 at the end of the year, an increase of nearly 5 per cent.

The Hamilton economy has proven to be much more resilient than experts, business people and politicians predicted last spring. “It’s definitely done much better than I think a lot of people expected,” says McMaster economics professor Colin Mang.

Hamiltonians are outbattling Trump to keep income flowing, plants and offices open, and people at work. A decades-long transition to diversify the city’s economy has helped, while company owners and managers are scrambling to find alternatives to the U.S. market.

Here are four of the key policies and strategies companies and governments are putting in place to help build a more resilient Hamilton.

The big switch: Steel finds Canadian buyers

Prospects for the local steel industry looked dire last spring. Bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars throughout 2025, Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie announced in December that it would lay off 1,000 workers, 40 per cent of its 2,500-person workforce.

In Hamilton, though, it was a different story. No layoffs were announced at ArcelorMittal Dofasco in 2025, and no unionized employees lost their jobs at Stelco’s operations in Hamilton and Nanticoke. ArcelorMittal Long Products shut down its Hamilton wire mill, laying off about 150 people in June due to challenging economic conditions in the wire market. But the U.S. tariffs weren’t the main cause of the closure.

Instead, both companies have transitioned some of their U.S. production to Canadian customers. Lourenco Goncalves, CEO of Stelco’s U.S. parent company, Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., said in May that Stelco had transitioned 100 per cent of its production to Canadian customers, up from a ratio of 70 per cent Canadian/30 per cent U.S. in 2024.

Mang says Algoma has relied on U.S. markets for more of its production than Dofasco and Stelco, so a transition to more Canadian sales has been easier for the Hamilton companies than their Sault Ste. Marie competitor. Exports have dropped, says Mang, but Canadian counter-tariffs have also reduced U.S. imports into Canada.

“The steel mills here have been able to pivot and fill a gap in the Canadian market left by a reduction in imports, and that’s really what’s held up their business here.”

The federal government has announced a Buy Canadian policy for public projects, trade measures to stop non-U.S. countries from dumping steel into Canada, and freight subsidies to encourage more cross-Canada steel trade. These programs were welcomed by the steel industry.

Trade and construction step up to create jobs

The unemployment rate in the Hamilton census metropolitan area was 7.3 per cent at the end of 2025, higher than the national jobless rate of 6.8 per cent, but significantly below the Ontario average of 7.9 per cent. While higher than some smaller communities such as Kingston (6.2 per cent) and Peterborough (6.6 per cent), Hamilton’s unemployment rate was lower than Oshawa, a major auto-producing centre (8.5 per cent) and tech-heavy Kitchener-Waterloo (8.2 per cent). Toronto’s unemployment rate was 8.1 per cent.

Hamilton’s position as a major trade hub has helped it weather the tariff storm. As the largest port on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes, Hamilton’s ship facilities attracted significant new investments in 2025. A $135-million sugar refinery (which will be Canada’s largest) is under construction by SucroCan Sourcing at the harbour. Grain trading company Parrish & Heimbecker is completing a $125-million expansion of its milling and shipping facilities. A total of $43.5 million in building and engineering projects were also slated for construction at the port in 2025.

Other building projects also helped to energize the construction boom. The city issued building permits with a construction value of $2.3 billion in 2025, compared to $1.56 billion in 2024 and second only to the record-setting $2.6 billion set in 2023. 

“A combination of public and private sector investment has continued to drive construction activity here in Hamilton, and so the construction industry here has actually done better than in Ontario as a whole,” says Mang.

Economic diversity helps Hamilton

Hamilton’s diverse economy was also very effective at generating additional jobs despite the threat and uncertainty of the Trump tariffs. 

“People think of Hamilton as Steeltown, but it’s so much more than that,” says Mang. “That’s what’s really been driving Hamilton to perform better than Ontario as a whole.”

With 50,000 people employed in local manufacturing at the end of 2025, industrial jobs represent only 11 per cent of the 444,000 total employed. More than 78,000, or 17.6 per cent of the total, worked in wholesale and retail trade at the end of the year, up from 69,000 in January. These jobs range from senior wholesale buyers for big companies all the way to the people who work the floor at chain stores.

The second-largest employment sector, health care and social assistance, employed nearly 60,000 people in Hamilton in December 2025. These jobs include nursing and other medical care, long-term residential care and child care. Hamilton is home to a major regional hospital system, and medical teaching and research centres, creating a large base of stable employment.

Two other big sources of jobs are the financial sector, at about 40,000 employed, and professional, scientific and technical services at 39,000 jobs.

Hamilton has benefited from a strong Canadian economy

Mang says one of the most important things to understand about the Trump tariffs on Canada is that they have been largely confined to four sectors – steel, aluminum, autos and softwood lumber. Those were sectors that were singled out for action apart from the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in April applied widely across the world. Trump did impose tariffs generally against Canadian goods, but exempted products included under the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement. That means about 85 per cent of Canadian trade remains tariff-free.

“There hasn’t been as big a trade disruption as people thought there was going to be because the United States stuck to the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement,” says Mang. 

“Other than the four industries that have special tariffs on them, everything else has actually gone into the United States exactly the way the free trade agreement envisioned.”

Not out of the woods yet

Still, with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) being renegotiated this year, Hamilton is vulnerable to Trump’s tariff policy whims. This is one of the reasons that ArcelorMittal Dofasco has not yet moved forward on a planned $1.8-billion decarbonization project to significantly reduce CO2 emissions. The company is reconsidering a plan to build a low-emission iron-making furnace in Hamilton, relying instead on iron manufactured at the company’s plant in Quebec. With an uncertain future for the company’s U.S. markets, decarbonization-related layoffs at Dofasco are a possibility. Trump could also demand major concessions to the free trade agreement, putting other manufacturing and related sectors in Hamilton at risk.

Young workers, in particular, are vulnerable. Ontario's youth unemployment (ages 15-24) reached a high of 14.7 per cent in September 2025, the highest since 2010, excluding the pandemic years. The summer job market for students in 2025 was tough, aggravated by a rise in immigrant labour since the pandemic (although federal cuts to immigration levels should alleviate this).

For older age groups though, the majority of people in Hamilton and across Canada have survived the Trump attacks, says Mang. “Given the large scope of the Canadian economy, most people have not really been affected in their daily lives.”

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He lives in Hamilton.