Oakwood Place was once a popular social club on Barton Street in Hamilton. Now, the boarded-up venue's marquee echoes the Buy Canadian sentiments that have taken root here during Canada's tariff war with the United States.
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More than a decade before the second election of Donald Trump, before it was in vogue to shun American-made products, Oakwood Place on Barton Street dropped its concert announcements and changed its marquee to read: Save our jobs, shop Canadian.
But as many in Hamilton have learned the hard way, the plea posted at the now-abandoned social club wasn’t enough to keep workers afloat. Instead, many of them have turned to the man in the office a few doors down, Jim Huff.
Jim Huff advises Hamiltonians on how to find new kinds of work and has seen more visitors coming back in recent years as jobs grow scarce.
At the United Steelworkers Adjustment Centre, Mr. Huff has been a coach of sorts through job loss and turmoil. He started co-ordinating the centre’s free services some 25 years ago, after a massive wave of layoffs at local employers, including his own workplace – a manufacturer of plastic containers.
Since then, Mr. Huff has helped find work for those left adrift by changing economic tides in Hamilton: skilled tradespeople, sheet operators, packers, sorters, inspectors. All told, he estimates some 12,000 such workers have passed through the centre having lost good jobs, benefits and pension plans.
With manufacturing expected to take another beating in the global trade war launched by the Trump administration, the issue of employment remains front and centre for the people of Hamilton Centre during this year’s federal election campaign. Today, the riding is the third-poorest electoral district in Ontario.
Many of those Mr. Huff helps want to remain in manufacturing, historically the city’s economic engine. Changing professions entirely requires time out of the work force that most people can’t afford, he said. In recent years, he has noticed that many end up as repeat clients. Work keeps drying up.
“We don’t turn them away. We believe that once a steelworker, always a steelworker,” he said. “But generally speaking, I would say the majority do not replace the income they lost.”
Almost a fifth of people in Hamilton Centre live below the poverty line. While the area has seen a swell of homebuyers fleeing Toronto real estate prices, the majority of residents here are renters. More than 10 per cent of the area’s housing stock is in need of major repair.
But though manufacturing is no longer the biggest employer – it has been replaced by health care – many who live here are only a generation or two out from a relative who worked in the city’s steel foundries.
The ArcelorMittal Dofasco plant, partly obscured by a reflection of houses across the street, has seen several visits from Liberal Leader Mark Carney and his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, through the tariff crisis.
Dofasco employees fasten a Canadian flag to the side of the building. Hamiltonians have been showing patriotic or anti-Trump banners more visibly in recent weeks.
ArcelorMittal Dofasco (to locals, it will always be just Dofasco) still employs some 5,000 people, while rival Stelco clawed its way out of creditor protection and assorted ownership changes to reopen its coke ovens (and buy a stake in the city’s beloved Tiger-Cats football team).
That has made the 25-per-cent tariffs imposed by the U.S. on Canadian steel in March particularly sting here. Mayor Andrea Horwath says the brewing trade war could deal a $1-billion blow to Hamilton.
Mr. Huff says it feels like the city is holding its breath. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Certainly, the times we’re going through now, it shows you the importance of having manufacturing and being self-sustaining as a country.”
Stephen Lechniak, 74, grew up in central Hamilton just off Barton Street, frequenting dances and social gatherings at its many churches and halls. He worked for 36 years as a Stelco metallurgical inspector and furnace operator, but left the company in 2009 after U.S. Steel took over, closed his rod and bar mill, and moved him onto a labour gang shovelling snow and scraping tar. The working conditions, he said, pushed him to an unwelcome early retirement.
“I had a good seven years left in me,” he said. “I loved my job. I loved the guys that I worked with. I looked forward to going to work every single day.”
Mr. Huff says he has seen the same impact on the people who pass through his doors. “They always talk about workplaces being like big families,” he said. “I guess you’d call that a sense of belonging that’s missing.”
Posters at the United Steelworkers Adjustment Centre commemorate organized labour's history in the city, such as a 1980 campaign to hire more women at Stelco.
Mr. Lechniak still meets his old colleagues regularly for breakfast to talk shop. He says he’s still as interested in what’s happening at Stelco as he was three decades ago.
But when he looks around him, he wonders how younger generations will muddle through the uncertainty and expense of today’s Hamilton.
“You don’t have to look far to see a deterioration in services that the city provides,” he said.
“Look at our streets. It has to be the worst city in North America for potholes. And I would like to sit down with somebody who could explain to me, why can we not afford something as elemental as that?”
While he believes the shift to cleaner jobs is positive, Mr. Lechniak still sees steel as a solid bet – if you can find the work. Recently, he was stunned to meet a middle-aged doctoral graduate from McMaster University who made the same wage as a current Stelco employee.
“Why are so many young people living with their parents today? It’s because of necessity,” he said.
Carter Park is in the 'lower city,' as Hamiltonians call it. Hamilton Centre has been a federal NDP stronghold since the riding was created in the 2000s.
From his Barton Street office, nestled between a vacant building and hulking Pentecostal church, Mr. Huff has watched the surrounding community struggle with affordability and poverty as well. After many safety incidents, the building can now be accessed only by buzzing in – despite the centre’s public-service bent.
“It’s a terrible thing that we have to keep our door locked,” Mr. Huff said.
Still, there is tentative optimism about the prospect of a return to economic self-reliance, a pivot that would be in keeping with Steeltown’s capacity for reinvention. When an 1847 column in this newspaper mockingly called it the “Ambitious City” – suggesting Hamilton’s aspirations exceeded its talents – locals embraced the moniker as a fitting descriptor of their punchy spirit.
“We’re evolving,” said Mr. Lechniak.
In the shadow of Hamilton’s still-humming industrial sector, Oakwood Place, the boarded-up music hall, is embarking on a reinvention of its own. It will soon become a supportive housing complex for women in need – complete with a daycare, health clinic and a job centre.
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