Canada’s steel industry, one of the sectors hit first and hardest by US tariffs, is starting to turn a corner on domestic demand, Reuters reported from Toronto. Steelmakers have been diversifying away from the United States since Washington raised tariffs on imported steel from 25 percent to 50 percent in June 2025, helped by mining, energy and data centre projects and by government support, although the recovery is uneven across the country.
The scale of the break is the context. Canada used to send around 90 percent of its steel exports to the US, and shipments fell 60 percent in 2025, according to the Canadian Steel Producers Association, with hundreds of steelworkers laid off. In their place, the share of steel used in Canada that was produced domestically rose to 51 percent in 2025, up from 41 percent in 2024, according to United Steelworkers calculations from World Steel data and Canadian import figures, with the import share falling from 59 percent to 49 percent.
The green shoots are concentrated in western Canada, where large industrial projects, including a 1.2 gigawatt data centre under construction in Saskatchewan, are pulling demand, and where a proposed new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast would add more. Canadian steel demand grew an estimated 2.7 percent in 2025 and is projected to rise about 0.9 percent in 2026, according to an OECD report published in July.
For mining readers, the story runs both ways. Steel is a small sector in Canada, contributing less than 1 percent of national GDP, but it is a direct customer of iron ore and metallurgical coal, and its partial reorientation from export to domestic project demand is an early test of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s effort to make the economy less reliant on the United States, achieved, Reuters noted, with a heavy dose of government intervention.