About Sault Ste. Marie

Sault Ste. Marie is a city on the St. Marys River in Ontario, Canada. It is the third largest city in Northern Ontario, after Sudbury and Thunder Bay, with a population of 74,948. Residents of the city are called Saultites.

The city has made a name for itself in steel-making, and Essar Steel Algoma (formerly Algoma Steel) is the largest single employer with 3500 employees at the main plant and approximately 554 at an adjacent tube mill operated by Tenaris. During the 1940s, the steel and chromium operations were of substantial importance to the war effort in Canada and the United States. Algoma Steel and the Chromium Mining and Smelting Corporation were key producers for transportation and military machines.

Similar to many other Northern Ontario municipalities, Sault Ste. Marie's population has declined sharply in the 1990s and early 2000s, with many individuals migrating to larger cities in southern Ontario. Since the early 1990s, the city had dropped from 84,000 to 74,566 residents, but in the 2006 census the city's population grew very slightly to 74,948. The city's census agglomeration, consisting of the townships of Laird, Prince and Macdonald, Meredith and Aberdeen Additional and the First Nations reserves of Garden River and Rankin, had a total population of 80,098, up from 78,908 in 2001.