Do we need a Ministry for the Future?

The following is a re-print of the July 2024 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.

One of the big ideas in the latest Alternative Federal Budget is the creation of a Department of Economic Foresight and Strategic Transitions—or, more informally, a Ministry for the Future. What if, in contrast to the short-termism endemic to contemporary politics, we had a federal body with a specific mandate to develop strategies and implement public policies with timelines of more than 10 years?

It’s a concept with some precedent—and not just from Kim Stanley Robinsons’ visionary novel of the same name. Finland, Wales and Hungary, for example, have created future-oriented institutions within their governments. For its part, Canada already has a government think tank called Policy Horizons that’s thinking decades into the future. It just doesn’t have a policy making mandate.

Canada’s new foresight department, on the other hand, could leverage legislation, regulation and spending to proactively address the biggest problems looming on the horizon. That includes not just the net-zero transition but also issues like Canada’s coming demographic crunch and the anticipated impacts of artificial intelligence on the workforce.

Short-term political expediency is a huge social, environmental and economic liability—the current housing crisis being perhaps the most salient example. A minister with an intergenerational mandate could push the government to make the difficult but necessary decisions we know will pay off in the long run, such as winding down oil and gas production and investing in large-scale alternatives.

And, who knows, it might just be popular too. There is a dearth of hope at the present moment, and people are looking for “big and audacious” projects, as Seth Klein argues in a recent call-to-arms. Let’s do something worth getting excited about.

The Ministry for the Future is not the only big idea in this year’s AFB. For those out of the know, the Alternative Federal Budget is the CCPA’s flagship annual publication. We bring together upwards of a hundred experts from dozens of different movements to develop a shared progressive agenda for the federal government. In most years, the AFB is intended to inform federal budget consultations, but in an election year the AFB also serves as an all-you-can-eat buffet for party platform development.

This year’s AFB is packed with delicious morsels in every area of public policy that lay the groundwork for progressive advocacy in the crucial year to come.

For now, though, let’s turn to the latest research on climate and work from Canada and around the world. After a summer lull, there was a boatload of new work released in the past month. Let’s dive right in.

Storm surge: this month’s key reads

ILO drops magnum opus on global just transition

The latest World Social Protection Report from the International Labour Organization is a nearly 400-page behemoth focused on a just transition to a cleaner global economy.

“The climate crisis represents the singular gravest threat to social justice,” according to the ILO, and “a rapid move to a just transition is therefore urgently required as a response.” Social protection (including income security, labour rights, health care and other such public benefits) is not only morally just, argues the report, but it also enables more ambitious climate policy by pre-empting one of the key barriers to action: the threat posed to workers in carbon-intensive industries.

The report is mainly focused on lower-income countries where social protection systems are largely absent. Workers in these countries are far more at risk from climate change and climate policy than workers elsewhere. But even for rich countries like Canada, the ILO report has an important message: strong social protections need to be in place before the effects of climate change and climate policy are felt by workers. Far too often, governments in Canada wait until the workforce is disrupted before swooping in with band-aid transition programs.

New CCPA book examines Trudeau’s legacy

The CCPA is excited to announce The Trudeau Record, a new book that critically reviews the nearly 10-year record of Justin Trudeau on more than 20 public policy issues.

I contributed the chapter on climate policy to the book, in which I argue that the Liberals’ achievements on this file have been both a historic triumph in comparison to previous governments and a tragic failure in the context of the accelerating climate crisis. The chapters on labour rights (Stephanie Ross), infrastructure (Nate Wallace) and Indigenous communities (Niigaan James Sinclair) may also be of particular interest to Shift Storm readers.

The Trudeau Record is edited by my colleagues Katherine Scott, Laura Macdonald and Stuart Trew and is available in bookstores and online now.

Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate

To no one’s surprise, oil and gas remains the key sticking point for Canadian emissions. The Canadian Climate Institute’s preliminary estimates of Canada’s 2023 greenhouse gas emissions finds that emissions were likely down in every sector of the economy last year except fossil fuel production and transportation. Unfortunately, those are also our highest emitting sectors, which means overall emissions were basically flat last year. It’s hardly news, but it can’t be said often enough that the crux of Canada’s climate problem is the fossil fuel industry.

Forest emissions are massively undercounted in Canada. Canada’s forestry sector produced 2.4 megatonnes of carbon in 2023, according to CCI, or about 0.3 per cent of Canada’s total emissions. However, if you include wildfire emissions, which are bizarrely excluded from Canada’s climate accounts, then Canada’s forests produce closer to 150 Mt per year—comparable to the transportation sector. That’s according to the 2024 Logging Emissions Update from Nature Canada, Nature Québec and the Natural Resources Defense Council. A related study published in the journal Nature, “Carbon emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires,” reaches similar conclusions. The latter paper calls into question the “long-term durability of these forests as carbon sinks,” which undermines a key argument for ignoring those emissions in the first place.

Carbon budgeting can get Canada to its climate targets. The Net-Zero Advisory Body published a new report, Climate’s Bottom Line, that recommends Canada adopt a GHG reduction target of 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. The NZAB also recommends Canada adopt a carbon budgeting approach, which has been used to great effect in places like the UK. Carbon budgets limit the total amount of emissions produced in a period of time in contrast to point-in-time targets that make it easy for governments to kick the can down the road.

Carbon pricing is still the best climate policy nobody likes. I have a new op-ed that calls out the inherent political toxicity of carbon pricing, but an article published in the journal Science reminds us that putting a price on pollution is still among the best approaches for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The authors studied 1,500 different climate policies from 41 countries and found that pricing systems had the biggest measurable impact on emissions reductions. Crucially, however, the study found that a combination of pricing, regulatory and spending measures worked better than any of those approaches on their own.

A green industrial strategy for Manitoba’s buildings sector. CCPA-Manitoba and the International Institute for Sustainable Development published Manitoba Builds Green, which dives deep into the challenges and opportunities for residential retrofits in that province. I was a reviewer on the paper and I appreciated that the authors didn’t shy away from ambitious proposals for decarbonizing the sector, including a ban on gas heat and the creation of a public green bank to finance retrofits.

Nova Scotia climate plan misses the big picture. Turning east, my colleagues in the CCPA’s Nova Scotia office published an analysis of that province’s climate plan. Since 1990, Nova Scotia has done more than most other provinces in reducing GHG emissions, but that is no guarantee of future success. While the new plan includes progressive principles, such as a commitment to a circular economy, the actual policies in the plan are focused more on short-term green growth with ambiguous climate benefits. The government has shown little recognition of the systemic nature of both the climate crisis and of its solutions.

Everyone’s talking about electric vehicle uptake. For Canada to meet its regulated sales targets for personal zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs), consumer prices must come down at least 31 per cent by 2030, according to a new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. New research in the U.S. published in Energy and Climate Change similarly concludes that smaller, lower-cost models are key for mass adoption, as opposed to the large and/or luxury ZEVs that are currently being prioritized by manufacturers. As for commercial ZEVs, Clean Energy Canada argues in The Payload that trucks and vans won’t shift to electric unless incentives and regulations are brought in comparable to those for personal vehicles. And if you just can’t get enough of this stuff, the Pembina Institute is hosting a webinar on an equitable ZEV transition on October 2nd that you can register for here.

U.S. green industrial policy is paying off for workers. A report from the business-backed NGO E2, Clean Jobs America 2024, finds that more than 150,000 jobs were created in renewable energy, efficiency, EV manufacturing and related sectors in the U.S. in 2023. That’s two to three times the growth rate of the U.S. economy as a whole. The report attributes this success largely to the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, which has driven more than US$120 billion in private investment into clean tech. If you’re interested in learning more about the state of American green industrial policy, the Roosevelt Institute is hosting a webinar on Oct. 9 that you can register for here.

U.S. book offers blueprint for joint climate-labour organizing. In case you missed it like I did, an anthology published earlier this year, Power Lines, collects contributions from labour and environmental justice organizers working to build a shared movement. A great resource for campaigners looking ahead to the federal election.

Compendium of skills research tackles sticking points for green job creation. The federally-funded Future Skills Centre has been producing excellent research for the past several years. Their latest State of Skills Report summarizes much of that work in one convenient place. Without enough skilled workers our decarbonization efforts will ultimately fall flat.

Overhyped carbon capture projects come with a big public price tag. A report from Oil Change International, Funding Failure, estimates that US$30 billion has been spent globally on carbon capture subsidies to date, of which US$4 billion comes from Canada. Not only have those projects underperformed from a climate perspective, but in many cases the captured carbon has been fed back into the production process to extract even more oil (a process called enhanced oil recovery). Looking ahead, OCI puts Canada’s promised future carbon capture subsidies in the US$12-41 billion range. That’s a lot of money we could be spending to actually deal with the climate crisis.

Report exposes troubling gender and racial impacts linked to fossil fuel financing. Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network published Gendered and Racial Impacts of the Fossil Fuel Industry in North America and Complicit Financial Institutions. The report is a challenging read—it highlights, among other issues, widespread sexual violence in and around oil industry work camps—but a necessary reminder that the ravages of extractivism are not borne equally. The report ultimately concludes with a critique of the financial institutions that perpetuate the fossil fuel industry and calls on them to fully divest from companies connected to fossil fuel extraction.

Is “green trade” a contradiction in terms? Over on the CCPA blog, Gavin Fridell explores the inherent problems with treating “green trade” as a climate solution, as groups like the World Trade Organization suggest. For starters, trade already produces a quarter of global emissions, so there is good reason to be shipping less stuff around the world. Trade and investment agreements also get in the way of countries implementing domestic climate policies. And, climate aside, there are the long-standing issues of the global trade regime being used to extract value out of the Global South for the enrichment of the Global North. International cooperation is absolutely essential for combating the climate crisis, but a corporate-led trade agenda is probably not the answer.

Polish case study unpacks competing understandings of a just transition. A new study published in Energy Policy, “Multiple just transitions?,” reports on interviews with labour, industry and community leaders in the Silesia region of Poland, which is currently grappling with a decline in coal mining. The main takeaway is that there are various, competing understandings of “just transition” in play. The author concludes that authorities need to do a better job of engaging with affected groups and prioritizing local perspectives in policy development, a lesson Canada would also do well to learn.

Climate conference season heats up. ‘Tis the season for climate events, apparently! CAN-Rac’s Climate Action Convergence is currently in full swing in Montréal, as is NYC Climate Week south of the border. The Assembly of First Nations’ National Climate Gathering runs Oct. 8-10 in Calgary (I’ll be there so come say hi!). October 10 is also the date of the third annual pan-Canadian climate conference hosted by the Canadian Climate Institute and Net-Zero Advisory Body in Ottawa. The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment is hosting a virtual conference on climate and health on Oct. 26. And then of course there’s COP 29, which kicks off in Azerbaijan in November and involves various lead-up events. We’ll talk more about COP in the next newsletter.