Evraz to lay off more than 100 workers at Regina's steel mill

More than 100 Evraz employees will be laid off from Regina’s steel mill in February, according to the company.

The steel company plans to reduce its two-inch and 24-inch pipe production, resulting in layoffs at the Regina and Camrose, Alta. mills.

“That’s really in response to our customer forecast dropping off. Customer orders have dropped off over the past weeks that has been driven by imports in the market,” Michael Yeats, Senior Vice-President, Canada for Evraz North America explained.

“We just don’t have enough orders to sustain that same level of production that we were at.”

According to Yeats, high volumes of cheap imports from China and Korea are flooding the Canadian market and making it difficult to compete for business.

Over 100 workers will be temporarily laid off in Regina and more than 30 employees will be impacted in Camrose.

Ryan McKenzie, acting president of the United Steelworkers Local 5890, said the union is in talks with Evraz. He expects the company to finalize a list of layoffs this week.

“It’s never a good time to get laid off and right now it’s probably worse than most with the economy,” McKenzie said.

“It’s the nature of the industry. It’s cyclical. It’s something you never look forward to, but it’s something that’s not a big surprise.”

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Evraz has two active trade cases open to deal with what the company calls “unfairly traded imports.”

“We’re working closely with the Canadian federal government to ensure our trade laws are enforced and that imports don’t continue to undermine or hurt the domestic steel industry,” Yeats said.

Yeats said it is hard to predict when the market might rebound and pipe production will resume to normal levels.

However, he said he is optimistic about the longer-term market, adding that it will depend on the federal government’s enforcement of trade laws.