Mike Garcia, the CEO of Algoma Steel Inc., was midway through a 10-day cruise in the Baltic Sea in late May when U.S. president Donald Trump announced that he was doubling tariffs on Canadian steel imports to 50%.
Before Trump launched his trade war, 60% of Algoma’s $2.8 billion in revenue had come from U.S. customers. The president’s original 25% tariff, imposed in March, had blown a giant hole in that business. Now, what was left would be going to zero. “My first reaction was, you’ve killed the company,” says Garcia. “We’re done. We’re done. There’s nothing we can do to pivot.”
The final leg of Garcia’s cruise wasn’t much of a vacation. Instead of strolling through cobblestone streets and soaking up Gothic architecture, the ship became his makeshift war room. Garcia was able to use the seven-hour time difference with Algoma’s headquarters in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., to his advantage—he had quiet time in the mornings to think when it was still the dead of night back home. In those early days, he spoke several times to Industry Minister Mélanie Joly and to reporters, and kept in frequent communication with Algoma’s board of directors. One of those meetings coincided with a stopover in Kiel, Germany, a port city dating back to 1262. “My girlfriend and her son and his buddy, they went off exploring all these churches and town squares,” Garcia says. “And I found a coffee shop with good cell coverage to have a two-hour board call.”
Back in Canada, as the days turned to weeks and then to months, Garcia realized that Trump wasn’t backing down and maybe never would. He and his team debated and agonized over disparate operational scenarios, all in a bid to save Algoma from certain death. The project, fittingly for a steel company, was codenamed “Superman,” with Garcia himself emerging as the Man of Steel.
Though the odds were heavily stacked against the 123-year-old steelmaker, over the next few months, Garcia and his team would achieve the near-impossible: securing half a billion dollars in emergency funding, goading the federal government into rolling out a range of measures that would keep the entire domestic steel industry afloat, and expediting a new business plan that would completely change how the company operates.
A quiet American isn’t the first person you’d have predicted to emerge as a real-life trade-war superhero for Canada. Garcia grew up in a small mining town in Arizona, about 3,500 kilometres from the Soo. His grandparents on his mother’s side immigrated from Mexico. The first language of both his parents is Spanish, though they spoke to Garcia and his five siblings in English. In 1986, he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, more commonly known as West Point, with a degree in computer science, and served five years of active duty, including in Operation Desert Storm.
Before Trump’s tariff gambit, Garcia almost never talked to the media. Earlier this year, however, he instructed his head of public relations to say yes to all requests. Since then, he’s made countless appearances on TV and podcasts, and in print.
Amid the trade-war chaos, Garcia has emerged as the voice of Canadian steel, speaking up when the heads of the other two steelmakers with sizeable operations in Canada have either stayed quiet, in the case of ArcelorMittal Dofasco, or openly sided with Trump, as is the case with Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns Stelco. In a Feb. 25 conference call, CEO Lourenco Goncalves gave a shout-out to the American president for a job well done. “We thank the Trump administration,” the Brazilian-born Goncalves said, for having “the courage to implement these tariffs.”
Garcia, by comparison, hasn’t hesitated to speak out against Trump, his own countryman. In his media appearances, he has dispelled myths propagated by the Trump administration that Canadian steelmakers are dumping steel into the U.S. and destroying American jobs, pointing out that the Canadian steel industry is an integral part of an interconnected North American supply chain that goes back decades. Americans, he has said time and again, are being forced to pay more for steel because of tariffs and, since Canada produces a fraction of what the U.S. does, the dumping thesis is senseless.
“I am a U.S. citizen. I served in the military. I’m as patriotic as any other American,” Garcia says. “But this is a very unique situation where I feel that everything I’m advocating for is in the best interest of Canada and the U.S.”
Amid the trade-war chaos, Mike Garcia, an American and U.S. army veteran, has emerged as the unlikely hero of Canadian steel.
Earplugs are not optional at Algoma. The steel mill—on the banks of the St. Marys River, across from the Soo’s sister city in Michigan—is as loud as an Iron Maiden concert. There’s a piercing hiss as steam is released, the clanging and banging of metal, and an earth-shattering KHHHHHHHHSSSSHH each time the air brakes are deployed on the locomotives that go back and forth all day long, delivering inputs to the mill.
Garcia’s drab but functional office sits a few hundred metres from the cacophony, the ceiling adorned with old acoustic tiling. With his close-cropped hair, square jaw and compact frame, he still evokes the military man he once was. Garcia speaks in a measured timbre, and in an era defined by shameless self-promoters, he’s modest almost to a fault—more Clark Kent than Superman.
In the army, he served with the III Armored Corps’ Cavalry Regiment. As a scout platoon leader, he had 30 soldiers under his command, though during the Gulf War, he worked in logistics, away from the front lines. And while he’s intensely proud of his time in the military, Garcia says it wasn’t his calling. “I was probably on more of the laid-back scale,” he says, “which did not make me an outstanding military officer.”
After leaving the army in 1991, he carved out an international management career that saw him work for aluminum giant Alcoa in China, Evraz-Highveld Steel in South Africa, and at Domtar Inc.’s pulp-and-paper division in South Carolina, where he was president.
But in 2021, he found himself at a crossroads. He’d taken a package at Domtar, which was undergoing a restructuring, and moved back to Arizona to be closer to his family. He considered himself retired. He spent a lot of time that winter skiing in Utah, but he decided he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the quiet life. “I didn’t do an Ironman. I didn’t get into the best shape of my life. I didn’t solve world hunger,” he says. “I kind of felt, well, something is missing here.”
Then came a call that brought matters to a head: Algoma’s then CEO, Michael McQuade, was nearing retirement, and the board was looking for a successor. Would Garcia be interested in moving to Sault Ste. Marie?
There was little tying him to Arizona. His marriage had ended in 2019, and he had no children running him off his feet. Besides, the professional challenge appealed to him. “I got more and more excited about the company and how important it was to the community,” he says. “And I’m like, yeah, I could do this.”
When he took over in June 2022, Algoma was riding the tail end of a booming steel market that had seen the commodity hit a record of almost US$2,000 a ton. One of Garcia’s earliest tasks was signing off on $58,000 profit-sharing cheques that went to every unionized Algoma employee that year—a total giveaway of $152 million.
The honeymoon wouldn’t last. In mid-2023, the company jacked up the budget for its new electric arc furnace (EAF) project—two years into construction with a year and a half to go—to $900 million from $750 million due to inflationary pressures. Then, in early 2024, a collapse in the coke oven took down the blast furnace for a month, costing about $150 million in lost profits.
Then came the mother of all catastrophes: Trump’s trade war, which wiped out a business model Algoma—and Sault Ste. Marie itself—had relied on for decades.
With 2,750 employees, it’s by far the biggest employer in town, with another 6,000 local retirees drawing a pension. “We don’t have a broader economy like Hamilton’s that’s able to buttress the losses in the steel mill,” says mayor Matthew Shoemaker, whose father worked at Algoma for 35 years.
Garcia has driven home both how important Algoma is to the northern Ontario economy and to Canada as a whole, as this country’s last independent steelmaker. But he’s been careful not to bully the government or threaten to shut down if he doesn’t get the support he needs. “He’s doing it in a way that I think is being received properly by the government,” says Shoemaker.
There’s ample evidence his message is getting through. For months, he’d hammered away at Ottawa for failing to crack down on foreign dumping of steel, which has made it extremely difficult to build up Algoma’s domestic order book in the face of declining U.S. revenue. This past summer, the feds cracked down on foreign dumping twice, setting quotas and tariffs on serial abusers like China and Turkey, which don’t have free trade agreements with Canada, and later imposing similar restrictions on countries that do. At the time, Garcia called the moves “a step in the right direction” but still not enough to stem its falling U.S. order book.
One of Algoma’s most intractable problems was its inability to reduce costs by cutting production. Blast furnaces are designed to operate at full tilt, so Algoma was cranking out far more steel than it could sell at a profit, forcing it to take huge losses. The EAFs, which can be powered on and off on a dime, would allow it to lower production to meet demand. But that reality was a long way off—the blast furnace wasn’t scheduled to be powered off until the end of 2026. But with tariffs killing its revenue, there was no guarantee Algoma would have enough cash to survive that long.
Stephen Briglio, Algoma’s general manager in charge of steelmaking, was one of the Project Superman team tasked with addressing this dilemma. Briglio has spent 20 years at Algoma under six different CEOs. He says he’s never worked with anyone quite like Garcia. One of his boss’s obsessions, he says, is making sure everyone understands the “commander’s intent,” a holdover from Garcia’s military days: Clearly communicate the goal but leave room for employees to improvise. “You’re training people to effectively deal with situations, rather than doing it for them,” says Briglio. “And it does take a patient personality to allow a team to work through different solutions and gently guide, as opposed to direct.”
In practice, that means Garcia has a light touch, hiring the best people and trusting them to do their work. Throughout the summer, he let the Project Superman team run with it, only occasionally popping into meetings to keep track of their progress.
Meanwhile, he spent much of his time in talks with the federal government, trying to secure $500 million from Ottawa’s $10-billion Large Enterprise Tariff Loan program. In the early innings of the negotiations, the government was riding Algoma hard on interest rate terms, in part because there was a chance the loan would be seen as bailing out a company that was destined to fail.
What would ultimately bring both the federal and provincial governments around was the plan that came out of Project Superman: Algoma would shut down its blast furnace and ramp up the new electric technology a year earlier than planned, drastically reducing costs and allowing Algoma to better meet market demand.
On Sept. 29, Algoma announced that it had raised $400 million from the feds and $100 million from Ontario, at rates far below what was initially demanded. “We see a future for Algoma being a bedrock of the Canadian steel industry,” Garcia said the day the loans were announced. “And we see that future even if the 50% tariff remains as a permanent or long-term feature of the trading relationship.”
Major challenges remain. Ian Gillies, an analyst with Stifel Canada, estimates the public money gives Algoma enough liquidity to survive until mid-2027. During that time, Algoma must prove that it can reliably manufacture steel using the new EAFs and meet its customers’ stringent standards. Trade war or not, Algoma will become a smaller version of itself: About 1,000 people will lose their jobs, largely because fewer workers are required to operate the electric furnaces.
Over time, it should become easier for Algoma to win more business at home, especially since the Canadian government recently put in place new rules that require the use of domestic steel in federal construction and defence projects, both of which are about to see tens of billions in new spending. Algoma certainly has an edge over both Dofasco and Stelco on the defence side: It’s the only domestic manufacturer of discrete steel plate, which is used in military applications like ships and submarines. Though military contracts would only be a start: Garcia has said Algoma could make enough steel plate for 10 Canadian warships in just two days, meaning it will need lots of new contracts to move the needle.
One final X factor hangs over Algoma: On Oct. 29, the company announced that Garcia is retiring at the end of 2025, with long-time chief financial officer Rajat Marwah taking his place.
Garcia, who is 61, first broached the idea of retiring with Algoma’s board late last year, with his original plan to leave this past summer. But then came the trade war, and he agreed to stay on until the end of 2025.
Given the significant challenges Algoma must continue to navigate, Garcia knows the timing isn’t ideal. But the truth is, he’s in love, and he’s relocating to Toronto to be with his girlfriend, whom he met after moving to the Soo. “I wish I could be the CEO of Algoma living in Toronto,” he says, “but it’s just not possible.”
He has no immediate plans to take on a new role, either. And he’s a tad conflicted about the decision to put his personal life over the company. “You feel a little bit like, is it unfair to Algoma for me to leave?” he says. “But I’m very happy that I have somebody I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
Algoma chair Andy Harshaw, meanwhile, says he’s highly confident in Marwah’s abilities and has high praise for his outgoing CEO—in particular Garcia’s ability to connect with all manner of people, from politicians in Ottawa to the troops in the mill. Never once, says Harshaw, did Garcia shy away from telling them the hard truths directly—including that job losses were an inevitable part of Algoma’s operational shift. “He was upfront,” says Harshaw. “And I think they appreciated the fact that they weren’t getting this from the back door. He was on the plant floor talking to people.”
Though it’s a world away from where he grew up, Garcia will miss the Soo. The Algoma CEO is a bit of a celebrity around here—“a big fish in a small pond,” as he puts it.
On the day the government loans were announced, Garcia climbed into his pickup truck and headed to Giovanni’s, an Italian restaurant that’s in his regular rotation. It was a Monday night, but the place was hopping. Garcia studied the menu before settling on a Caesar salad, chicken-and-artichoke angel-hair pasta and a Diet Coke.
A few diners recognized him and came over to shake his hand. That’s not always the case: Often when strangers find out he’s an Algoma guy, they assume he works in the mill. He recalled one particular incident at the local golf course, when a gregarious young guy kept asking if he knew so-and-so on the floor at Algoma. Garcia did not.
“We finish up,” Garcia recounted, “and the guy goes, ‘Well, it was really good to meet you. What was your name again?’”
The next day, Garcia saw the same young buck again. With zero inhibition whatsoever, the guy yelled out, “Mike, you didn’t tell me you were the f—king CEO!”
Garcia laughed heartily at the memory. It made his day, he said—maybe even his entire year, during one he’ll never forget.
CEOs of the Year 2025
Strategist of the Year and overall winner: Gord Johnston, Stantec
Newcomer of the Year: Bill Lomax, First Nations Bank of Canada