By Rob North
In a desperate bid to save Canada’s steel industry from the jaws of the American maw, the federal government has put up a billion dollars in subsidies and untold amounts of cash under other line items. It seems there is no other choice. It sounds like a lot. But will it be enough? It never is. Let me tell you a story. A parable if you will.
The Children of Steel
We are the children of steel. Christened by the red glow of chemical laden sunsets. Blessed with the black ash of coal smoke. Our fathers were either forgers of steel or they worked in jobs birthed by its’ blast furnaces.
In its founding, Sydney Steel was the biggest plant in North America. Surrounded by coal towns. Perched by a deep Cape Breton harbor. A perfect place to make the metal and to ship it.
When wealthy steel barons put out a call for workers, they came. From across Europe, and Great Britain. From the West Indies. On Cape Breton Island itself fishermen, farmers and lumber jacks abandoned what was pioneered by their ancestors. They traded a way of life for a steady wage.
Mid-century, after peace broke out, pregnancy was epidemic. Heady times. The war was good for steel. And now the country needed post war mending. And it needed more steel. Lots of it. Steel for railways. For bridges. For towering buildings and factories. For tools and tractors. Europe was rebuilding. America was expanding. Steel was King.
That was how the story started. No-one ever expected such a violent plot twist. But by the time it ended, children, and grand-children and great grand-children were a diaspora. Scattered around the world. And on Cape Breton Island old men drank beer and shot deer. Lonely women knit socks. On Wednesdays ladies ate French fries at the Metropolitan lunch counter. On Friday nights they played bingo at a converted dance hall. On all the other days they drank tea and waited for the mail. They hoped for photographs. They wrote their own letters and saved their nickels for stamps. They watched the telephones hung on their kitchen walls. They waited for them to ring. And when they made their own calls to away, they used egg timers to ration the long-distance bills.
Cape Breton is spiritual home to a large number of minstrels and bards. Celtic heritage. Passed down, generation to generation. This was a time for sad songs. “The Cape Breton Causeway was built for going away” and “Going down the road”. Words repeated so often they turned into a movie.
Long before the end of days, the story of steel bends. In Cape Breton, Black Friday is not a day about rough house gangs of shoppers gone mad. Black Friday is an historical marker. A time to remember the fight to keep foreign owners from shutting down the industrial beating heart of their island.
Twenty thousand people marched in the streets. But the deed was done. British tycoons who owned the plant had already abandoned it. It was a bad omen for steel made anywhere in the western world. It was that kind of a time.
The captains of industry wanted rid of workers who belonged to unions. They wanted to kick down environmental hurdles. And they were in luck. They found low rent countries. And they got exactly what they wanted.
Political heroes, or those who wanted to be, came forward. The Nova Scotia government took over Sydney Steel. But the gods of making molten metal were not smiling. Politicians soon threw in with the carpet baggers. Crafty. Clever. Cash intended to save the plant sometimes fell off the government truck, even before it reached the Island. Some was spent to buy equipment to make new and different products. And sometimes the sellers of that equipment, much of it clearly useless to Sydney steel, cashed in. Sometimes those big machines sat in rapidly erected steel buildings and rusted. The steel in those buildings was not made in Sydney. There was no gain for Cape Breton. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
No surprise here. The story does not end well. It is as if vampires sucked the life blood from a town built out of steel. A nail mill. A wire mill. Chemical biproducts from the coke ovens. All packed up and moved to an industrial park in Halifax. It didn’t take long. They failed.
An electric arc furnace was the last big buy aimed at salvation. An effort to modernize. By now the plant made only one thing. Steel rails. Good ones. Some say the best. But selling steel is a hard bargained horse trade. Plants in Ontario and their political influencers undermined a contract for Sydney to make rails for Mexico. They had their reasons. They used their clout.
In Sydney the work force shrunk. Again, and again. By the time it closed, saving the Sydney Steel plant drove the Nova Scotia government into well over a billion dollars in debt. Cleaning up the environmental remains of the day cost provincial and federal taxpayers another four hundred million. And that is from a time when a dollar spent like a dollar.
Pollution, industrial disease, and catastrophic injuries were ignored. Simply waved away with one hand. Punctuated by the expression “No smoke, No Baloney”.
As the town where we grew up rusted away, we ran for our lives. Our children will never know the joys or sorrows of youth spent in a steel town. They will not use their precious vacation time to pilgrimage to a faraway island. They will not make the trek to be with aging lonely parents or to visit graveyards. They are not children of steel. They will never really understand their parents, who they truly are, or the place and times they came from.
The Sydney Steel plant is gone. Erased. Scrapped. Sent to China, along with any good bits, like the electric arc furnace. Good for China. Bad for us. All that’s left now is a long lingering debt, lost hopes and dreams, and of course, the story of the children of steel.
