U.S midterms: Baltimore wants a manufacturing comeback. Can Canada fit into those plans? – National

The Baltimore Museum of Industry’s “most ambitious” exhibit in recent years documents the history of Sparrows Point steel mill, once the world’s largest steel producer.

Over the 125 years the Bethlehem Steel mill was in operation, it produced material for America’s warships, the Golden Gate Bridge and parts of the Empire State Building. It shuttered for good in 2012, roughly a decade after Bethlehem went bankrupt.

Baltimore, and Maryland more broadly, can see a future when that kind of heavy industry and manufacturing operation isn’t a museum piece – but the driver of the state’s economy.

In August, outgoing Gov. Larry Hogan – a Republican who enjoyed a recent approval rating of 62 per cent in a thoroughly blue state – credited Maryland’s manufacturing sector as driving an “economic turnaround.” The state is making investments in what they call “Industry 4.0,” a fourth industrial revolution, led by advanced manufacturing and a highly educated workforce.

President Joe Biden recently echoed the sentiment. At a Volvo plant in nearby Hagerstown last month, which recently began producing components for electric vehicles, Biden wondered where it was “written that America can’t be the leader in manufacturing.”

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It’s a question resonating in Ottawa, where the Liberal government has latched onto U.S. notions of “friendshoring” – increasing trade with like-minded democratic countries, while ratcheting back dealings with authoritarian and belligerent nations – and the Biden administration’s push for domestic supply of advanced technology like semiconductors.

“We are entering an era of friendshoring,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said while introducing the government’s fall economic update last week.