Thank you for the question. As I said in my submission, we've had a very engaged provincial government, and Ontario is working very closely with us with respect to what's happening up in the Soo and also within Hamilton.
We had the opportunity and the pleasure to meet with the Hon. Navdeep Bains back in April, and he was very conciliatory and very open and recognized the importance of a very strong steel industry. We had a follow-up meeting with some of his staff on June 14 here in Ottawa and talked about some of the issues. We talked about dumping and some of the regulatory issues that are at hand. I sent off another letter at the end of last month, requesting another meeting, because we're now getting to that stage where we have some potential buyers in play and we are hoping to be in a position to get these two facilities out of CCAA, which they've been into for a long period of time.
That being said, we've not had any assistance from the federal government at this time, but as I say, we've had a couple of meetings. We've now requested the third, and I'm hopeful that we will have that meeting very soon. We want it to be engaged in the process. This is a crucial industry of some $14 billion with 22,000 direct jobs, and if you do the add-in factor of another five to one, this is very significant. I think the federal government acknowledged that. We need it to be engaged in the process, because there are some issues there. There are some tax issues, and there are also some environmental issues, with which I'm sure it can be of assistance in some form or fashion.
The other one we'd like it to consider is capex. The fact is some major investment is needed, and I don't want to go through what happened when the former government allowed U.S. Steel to come into this country. To me, that was not a net benefit for Canada whatsoever. It went off to the side and signed this secret deal with no involvement from the community, no involvement from the workers, and for that reason we're in this particular difficulty.
There is a serious need in one of the most modern facilities in North America, which was built in the mid-1970s, the integrated mill at Nanticoke. The blast furnaces there need some realigns, and those realigns don't come very cheap. We think that it's a capex situation in which the government could very much be of assistance.
The third thing we have to get back to is some assistance in training and adjustment. We need skills for the modern industry. It's high tech. The steel industry is high tech, and we now recognize that baby boomers are retiring and all those sorts of things, so we need some assistance on that.
I go back to the days in the steel industry when we had CSTEC, which was a sectoral council, and the good it did. It wasn't just CSTEC; we had a whole bunch of other sectoral councils.
Those are the three areas that we think the government needs to be engaged in, and again, we look forward. I'm very hopeful that in the very near future we're going to have another opportunity to meet with Minister Bains to talk about these issues that are crucial, because we've been working day and night recently in regard to having some potential buyers, and this is not an easy task. This is not an easy task, considering what has transpired in the steel industry.
In last year and a half—and you know the circumstances very well—20,000 of those retirees had their health care benefits cut out. These are people who have toiled. These are people who have helped build this great country of ours, and there they are in the greatest need, knowing full well that when they went into those industries they were looked after with respect to their benefits. So it's a serious crisis, and we have to move forth with it.