Canada once had an ‘at the time’ super-modern steel industry. Stelco and Dofasco were on the leading edge of steel making tech, using the most advanced for-the-time automated systems. But they fell behind European and Asian technology, became inefficient, and essentially closed up shop. If Canada us to be competitive, we need to completely rethink how we do things. For instance, here is an example of the newest steel making technology that is carbon-friendly, and Canada needs to take a serious look at it.
This is the type of investment needed in Canada.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/sweden-green-hydrogen-powered-steel
Remember when the cool phones were Canadian?
Ex-Nortel employees remember.
Nortel think more recent RIM. They had the phone and just let it go because they didn’t think the iPhone without a keyboard would be a threat.
The problem was allowing Apps to run on the smart phone and still maintain the tight security of the Blackberry. Security lost to Apps, and look where we are now?
This would be real handy these days:
ATI Technologies
It technically still exists. My paychecks all come from ATI. Just AMD owns them :(
This discusses why we dont invest in productivity to stay competitive, at 32:30 he goes over whats happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOXgOLCm54A
Its also called Capital shallowing.
Capital shallowing refers to a situation where the amount of capital per worker decreases, often due to falling wages that allow firms to substitute people for capital. This phenomenon can lead to a decline in productivity, as seen in the UK where falling wages allowed firms to substitute labor for capital, leading to capital shallowing.
This is actually exactly what is happening in the US, where slave-wage states are substituting cheap labor for high-tech investment. They are opening up obsolete plants and running them on cheap labor. Provides abundant employment, but doesn’t provide a good living for the worker, nor long term security.
On the other hand China is doing the reverse - their labor wage rate is escalating because it is the national priority to move all workers into the middle income group, and companies have to comply or face the wrath of the government.
In China, they invested hundreds of millions in capital into coal fired electrical production, just to provide the energy to get the economy booming. Now they are investing in nuclear and solar, and they are closing down all the coal plants they just built to improve quality of life. They have so much capital available, they can afford to do this, and their government philosophy goes along with it, not only supporting it but demanding it.
We will see which philosophy wins.
The only way Canada can compete is to change our model.
In Regina there’s currently a Russian owned steel plant that could easily be converted to green power as it’s already running an electric smelter. In the 1970s it was employed owned. In my opinion there are options.
No idea why we haven’t nationalized it and taken from the Russians.
As an American, cutting edge tech manufacturing isn’t something we do much of. In semiconductors for example, Intel is currently still working on their new node (probably made in the US and Isreal), but new Intel CPUs you buy are going to be tsmc made until then. And AMD and Nvidia, apple, etc are all making their chips at TSMC as well
A lot of tech companies are US based, but very little of the actual production process is done in the US. I guess that doesn’t matter if you just care about the money going to the US though, since buying an Nvidia made chip will still give money to the (us-based) company.
Actually, IBM is doing a LOT of research into chip assembly - in its huge mega-plant in Quebec. Also employing Canadian engineering graduated from Canadian universities to do the research. American universities just can not produce the quality of graduates Waterloo can. Even at MIT, around half of the graduate students are non-American born and educated.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-universities-war-america-coming-brain-drain
Yeah, they announced they’re basically killing science funding yesterday (for everything except like AI and a few other buzzword topics)
We have a couple good cs universities right now, I really hope that’s still true in four years
I watched in ytube we are doing well with small nuclear reactors. Its sad the amount of industry we had that used to be competitive.
Maybe companies like TerraNova Steel will shoot forward!!
Dofasco
Closed up shop
It may suck ass to work at these days so I hear, but they’re far from closing up shop, they were talking about DRI for a long time and have announced building that capacity ~3 Years Ago. They’re already well underway to going DRI+EAF, the steel that comes out of that process is apparently extremely clean metallurgically.
So yes, we already do this investment…
I am from Hamilton. I am well aware of what happened to Dofasco. Once a proud and mighty company, now a branch plant.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/arcelormittal-dofasco-decarbonization-update-1.7309360
ArcelorMital is NOT Dofasco. Same building, different company, different management, different decision makers. No loyalty or commitment to Hamilton. While Europe does, Canada just dithers. Now the big decisions are all made off shore. The original Dofasco, in its heyday, would have made the investment sooner. That company was a world leader.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64538296
Will we ever see headlines like the above?THAT would ensure Canada’s future.
Hydrogen is absolutely key to a sustainable planet. It is only path to have 100% renewable power so that surpluses, can be monetized, on most days needed to have reliable power every day.
Unfortunately, prioritizing human/national sustainability seems impossible whenever a war or any other crisis needs attention.
