The federal NDP responded to the news by blaming Stephen Harper's Conservatives for failing to do enough to keep manufacturing jobs. Their Ontario cousins did likewise with Kathleen Wynne's Liberals. And just for good measure, so did the provincial Tories.

And yet when Hamilton's mayoral candidates convened this week for an economic debate, not a word was spoken about U.S. Steel Canada – the company that took over the city's Stelco plant in 2007 – filing for bankruptcy protection.

For a city that built its economy, its identity and its image around steel, that omission is something of a surprise. But there could hardly have been a more welcome sign for Hamilton's future than the fact that its iconic industry was not mentioned at all.

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The fallout from U.S. Steel's disastrous Stelco stewardship cannot be completely ignored, particularly when it comes to the company's pension obligations to its former workers. But on the subject of whether politicians should be vowing to save jobs there, or bring more steel jobs back, it is instructive to look at the U.S. city to which – optimistically, from Hamilton's perspective – it is often compared.

Pittsburgh, once similarly defined by steel, is widely considered the gold standard for Rust Belt revitalization. A city that suffered a complete collapse in the early 1980s has turned into one of its country's best comeback stories by rebuilding itself around more modern industries such as advanced technology, medicine and life sciences.

Even there, it took a long time to accept that always cyclical steel would not come back. And that was partly because politicians kept stoking unreasonable expectations that it would.

"I used to run political campaigns," Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto told me during a recent visit to his city. "As late as 1994, you'd wear the hardhat, you'd be inside the mill, you'd show the sparks behind you. Politicians from both sides spoke about it in almost jingoistic terms, about how 'this is Pittsburgh, this is steel, this is what we are and we'll rebuild.'"

Pittsburgh was lucky, as Mr. Peduto and others explained, because leadership came earlier from other civic leaders: the heads of its universities, as well as the rich charity foundations left over from the industrialist era, and to some extent the business community. And in the mid-1990s, the politicians caught on, with then-mayor Tom Murphy pushing through major public investments to modernize the city's core – including buying old steel mills to use the land for something else.

The result, experienced only in the past decade or so, has been to position it as a place that is attractive and affordable to work and live, with decent business infrastructure and a highly entrepreneurial business culture.

Matters have never got quite as dire in Hamilton as they did in Pittsburgh. It has not seen unemployment at close to 20 per cent, nor has it lost nearly half of its population. Whereas Pittsburgh experienced pretty much a complete exodus of its steel industry, Hamilton still has its Dofasco plant, which employs far more people than the old Stelco plant did.

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That can lead to less urgency about reinvention. And indeed, there seems to have been a degree of complacency under outgoing Mayor Bob Brattina – who, incidentally, has been more vocal about U.S. Steel than his would-be successors.

But the city also has business and civic leaders who boast about its diversification. And it has still got a long way to go to match the vibrancy of that other (former) steel town. The fewer politicians who confuse matters by claiming Hamilton can go back to the future, the better.