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It is argued that Canada's leading primary steelmakers supported the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Canada and the US because of their belief that steel markets were increasingly continental and because of their ideological adherence to the neoconservative agenda of corporate business and the Federal Progressive Conservative government. Steelworkers and their union, the United Steelworkers of America, opposed the FTA because of the loss of jobs that would ensue with its implementation and because of its larger "right wing" economic and political direction. While, to this point, it is difficult to differentiate the specific impact of the FTA from factors associated with industrial restructuring in the steel industry as a whole, the FTA is increasingly the central economic and political factor in the deepening crisis of the steel industry in Canada. The rationale for the steel industry's backing of the free trade initiative lay mainly in the economic benefits which owners and top-level managers believed would accrue to their companies.