Before we moved to Canada in 2021, my husband spent time in China. One memory from my visits to him has stayed in my mind: a street vendor working a wok over a high flame, noodles going up and coming down again, with amazing smells filling the air. My kids took one bite and were done negotiating with vegetables for life. I have long wanted to recreate that scene at home. I myself would wield a well-seasoned carbon steel wok with a wooden handle, a big ladle in my other hand, tossing vegetables just like that vendor did.
At the same time, I wanted my new kitchen staple to be Canadian-made. Elbows up sentiment is something I understand very well. I grew up with a word for this: Swadeshi, buying local as resistance. My grandparents' generation used it against colonial rule in India. It just has a different flag this time. I decided to go buy a Canadian-made steel wok. This shouldn’t have been hard: Canada has huge Asian communities, a booming Asian restaurant scene, and no shortage of home cooks who've fallen for the same food I have. Surely, I thought, that kind of demand should have produced at least one domestic wok maker by now.
At Costco, where I'm a regular, woks are imported from the US or overseas. Same on Amazon. Where, I wondered, were the Canadian woks? While working on a story for The Walrus about steel, I found CBSA data that answered the question I'd already been asking: most stainless steel kitchenware in Canada is imported. Perhaps the same was true for woks.
I checked my own shelves. Some utensils came with me from India when I moved. The rest were from Ikea, Canadian Tire, Costco, or Kitchen Stuff Plus. As it turns out my kitchen wasn't an anomaly: In 2024 alone, Canada imported $177.76 million of stainless steel cooking utensils and kitchenware. The companies bringing it in weren't manufacturers; they were the very same stores that stock my kitchen shelves.
Zoom out to stainless steel kitchen and household items in general, and the imbalance gets starker. According to CBSA trade data, China alone accounted for $249.6 million of the stainless steel kitchenware Canada imported in 2024. The United States, meanwhile, sent just $25.6 million, or about 10% as much.
It's not just my kitchen, either. Colin Mang, an economist at McMaster University, told me stainless steel is one of the few categories where import volumes haven't budged, even as the rest of Canada's steel trade reorganizes around the tariffs. “It's something that we need here in Canada,” he said. But Canadian steelmakers focus on products that are in high demand locally – cold-rolled and hot-rolled steel for auto and construction – rather than stainless steel.
I live in Hamilton, Ontario's steel town. Stelco and ArcelorMittal Dofasco make real steel here, as does Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. The steel my own city manufactures doesn't make it to my kitchen.
In fact, that capacity is shrinking. In late September, Stelco announced it would idle its cold-rolled and coated steel operations at its Hamilton plant beginning Oct. 9 (the federal government has since attempted to thwart those plans). The company blamed US tariffs and a sharp drop in demand for those products; production is shifting to the company's Nanticoke facility, and up to 500 jobs could be affected.
Possible layoffs aside, Canada still makes plenty of steel. I figured it shouldn't be rocket science to at very least find some Canadian-made utensils. I went looking and found Meyer, a company with an actual factory in Canada – and one that made genuinely Canadian forks and spoons. More than half of their sales volume comes from one plant in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, that has been in operation since the late 1970s.
When it comes to the stainless steel used for utensils and pots, Canada has been completely outdone by the US.
That plant has been growing since 2017, says Mike Howsam, Meyer’s vice president of sales and marketing, and got a real boost from elbows-up sentiment. The craze was intense enough that the plant was capacity-constrained for most of last year, and has only caught up with demand in the past couple of months. Over its many years of operation, the plant has also received its fair share of government assistance, which has included a $1.8 million repayable loan from the federal government in 2019.
At last! I thought I had finally found a true Canadian steelmaker. But again, I was getting ahead of myself. As it turns out, the steel and aluminum Meyer uses to make its utensils themselves is itself imported, mostly from China, because the specific alloy grades needed aren't produced in Canada – or North America, for that matter.
Stymied again. But why doesn't Canada make kitchen steel? The answer splits two ways. When it comes to the stainless steel used for utensils and pots, Canada has been completely outdone by the US. The American market is much larger than ours, and American steelmakers can achieve greater cost efficiency on a less common product. As a result, says economist Colin Mang, all of our stainless steel is imported, and we don't produce any of it at all.
For carbon steel – the kind I’d use in my wok – the barrier isn't the material; Dofasco in Hamilton can make cold-rolled sheets in the gauges needed. Instead, it’s economics again. Woks are manufactured more cheaply in China, where wages are lower and the consumer market for cookware is vastly larger. Canada's mills, meanwhile, specialize in high-volume products for the US auto and construction industries rather than kitchenware.
We can, and do, make the right kind of steel for woks, but we don’t go the distance because China already dominates the market.
Beyond Meyer, I reached out to two Canadian knife makers: Grohmann, in Pictou, NS, which has been making knives for more than 65 years; and Cosmo Knives on Salt Spring Island, BC. Grohmann imports its high-carbon steel from Germany, a tradition that started with founder Rudolph Grohmann's original preferences. They've lost some American orders to the tariffs, but plenty of US customers are still buying and absorbing the extra cost.
Seth Burton at Cosmo Knives told me their steel comes from the US and Sweden, not Canada, because the alloys he needs for premium knives aren't made here. Unlike Grohmann, he's stopped selling into the US, since the tariffs add roughly 30% to an already-expensive handmade knife.
And there my journey ended, with no Canadian-made wok in hand. We can, and do, make the right kind of steel for woks, but we don’t go the distance because China already dominates the market. Instead, our steel industry has specialized in products for the US auto and construction industries, while kitchen goods manufacturing followed the economics offshore. Meyer is the exception: a steel company that invested in automation and received government support to stay competitive in the finished goods market.
But that’s just one factory against the logic of continental trade. My perfect noodles will have to wait.
