By Anil Wasif

April 22, 2026

Ryan Irvine, a steelworker at Algoma Steel, worked his final shift on Friday, March 20. He was hired at the Sault Ste. Marie plant in 2022. His father worked there for 47 years before him.

As he told the CBC, when Irvine started, he was told the plant’s traditional steelmaking operations would run until 2029. American tariffs on Canadian steel accelerated the shutdown by three years.

Algoma issued the layoff notices in December, four weeks after closing on $500 million in federal and provincial loans that Ottawa had said were intended to limit disruption to the workforce. One thousand workers were let go on March 23, roughly a third of the plant’s employment.

The Algoma closure is just one postscript to the 40 years of Canada-US economic integration that Prime Minister Mark Carney told Canadians in his first Forward Guidance video had become a weakness.

The International Monetary Fund spent the four days before Carney’s address in its usual rhythms, with press briefings on the World Economic Outlook, the Global Financial Stability Report, and the Fiscal Monitor.

What the IMF published was not a single baseline growth forecast, which is what it had produced in every April issue for decades, but a reference case accompanied by two adverse scenarios, all organized around the duration and severity of the Middle East War.

The reference case was 3.1% for 2026. The adverse and severe scenarios fell to 2.5% and 2.0%. IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas noted in passing that growth would have been revised up to 3.4 if not for the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February.

Tobias Adrian’s Global Financial Stability Report carried the subtitle Global Financial Markets Confront the War in the Middle East and Amplification Risks, which reads less like a chapter heading than a status update. Rodrigo Valdés at IMF Fiscal Affairs named the context “shock upon shock” at his press briefing.

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called it a new normal of persistent uncertainty. The Fiscal Monitor warned that global public debt will cross 100% of GDP by the end of this decade, a level unseen since the Second World War.

The IMF is doing its job. Forecasts are public goods, and an institution refusing to pick a number would be abandoning a function its members pay for. But a reference forecast published in these conditions is doing different work than one published in 2019. It is a midpoint, and the distance to the adverse case is wider than the distance from the 2019 baseline to the pandemic that arrived the year after.

Finance ministries and central banks around the world will now build budgets and monetary decisions around 3.1%. The Bank of Canada, Finance Canada, and the team preparing the July 1 CUSMA position are among them.

So is management at tariff-affected companies. The Algoma shutdown letter four months earlier had already named the adverse case in the company’s own language. American tariffs, it said, had “fundamentally altered the competitive landscape.”

The Algoma closure is just one postscript to the 40 years of Canada-US economic integration that Prime Minister Mark Carney told Canadians in his first Forward Guidance video had become a weakness.

Carney’s 10-minute Sunday address was the operational response. Its format, rhetoric, and diplomatic weight have already been read closely by Policy editor Lisa Van Dusen on the fireside register and the genealogy of forward guidance, by Colin Robertson on the Year Two implementation challenge, by Jeremy Kinsman on the diplomatic pivot.

What remains to be said about Forward Guidance is what it means read against the week that preceded it at the IMF, and against the workers already paying the bill in Sault Ste. Marie.

The Davos formulation returned verbatim. Hope is not a plan. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But the substance lay elsewhere. The address made a concession Canadian governments have not previously offered out loud, which is that Canada’s traditional theory of leverage, privileged access to the American market through quiet reliability, no longer produces what it once did.

The twelve trade and security deals signed since autumn are not claimed to substitute for what has been lost. The Prime Ministers’ address located the replacement source of leverage inside the country. The internal trade act, the clean-energy expansion, “one Canadian economy out of 13.” These are domestic capacity arguments, not diplomatic ones.

It is also a theory that needs time. Ryan Irvine’s family does not have 47 more years. The integration Carney says must be corrected is the integration that made Algoma a viable steel producer through two working generations in the same household, and that has now ended three years ahead of schedule.

The IRPP’s Community Transformations Project profile of Sault Ste. Marie, published weeks before the final shift, recorded the local fear directly: that without the mill, the city risks following Elliot Lake and Wawa into the post-industrial remainder, smaller, older, quieter.

Mike Da Prat, president of United Steelworkers Local 2251, has been urging members to contact the union hall before making final decisions. The domestic-capacity bet will take years to build out. The Sault lost one thousand jobs in a single day.

The harder question underneath is whether the bet is adequately specified. The access-autonomy-alternatives trilemma is the shape of what Carney is asking Canada to choose. Carney’s Forward Guidance message amounts to a bet that the third lane can be widened fast enough to matter. It is a different theory of Canadian sovereignty than successive governments have operated since the 1988 Free Trade Agreement.

The IMF’s scenario architecture treats the adverse case as a war outcome. The January Supreme Court decision removing IEEPA tariff authority, the Section 122 substitution used to preserve part of the tariff wall, a July 1 CUSMA review failure: none are discrete variables in any of the three scenarios. For an economy sending more than two-thirds of its merchandise exports to the United States, the trade regime is the adverse case, not a background condition. Algoma is already evidence of it.

In January, former UN ambassador Louise Blais warned in Policy that declaring strategic autonomy without leverage is an invitation to pressure. The IMF Spring Meetings clarified the stakes of that warning. Carney’s Sunday address named them. The reference forecast is a useful artefact of a system that still believes it can model the future by averaging the plausible outcomes.

In Sault Ste. Marie, the plausible outcomes have already stopped clustering.

Policy Columnist Anil Wasif is a public servant in the Ontario government. He serves on the University of Toronto’s Governing Council and the Advisory Board of McGill’s Max Bell School. Internationally, he serves on the OECD’s Infrastructure Delivery Committee and the Board of Trustees at BacharLorai Global. The views expressed are his own.