The following is a re-print of the January 2025 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.
The spectre of Trump tariffs and other threats of American “economic force” hang over the Canadian economy like a guillotine.
Across the political spectrum, there is little disagreement among Canadian politicians and leaders that our economic dependence on the United States is a big problem—and that we need bold ideas to change course.
After all, the current state of Canada-U.S. integration is no accident. It is the deliberate outcome of a decades-long commitment to free trade, falling corporate tax rates and deregulation. Giving free rein to private markets in Canada, including to U.S. investors and multinational corporations, has produced some economic growth, but it has also created a web of cross-border economic and financial integration largely free from public control.
You would be forgiven, then, for assuming that our leaders—draped in the flag and committed to a stronger, more independent Canada—might want to do something meaningful to rein in a corporate sector with no loyalty to Canada or commitment to the public interest. Yet the most persistent policy proposals to bubble up over the past month would do no such thing.
First, slashing so-called interprovincial trade barriers (i.e., regulations) would merely increase corporate profitability while providing far fewer economic benefits than proponents suggest, as my colleague Marc Lee explains in an illuminating new article. Harmonizing standards to the highest common denominator is a project worth pursuing, but that’s not the proposal on the table.
Second, building an east-west oil pipeline with public money would merely subsidize Canada’s most profitable and polluting industry while further entrenching our dependence on a volatile and precarious export market. It would fail to solve either our short-term or long-term problems, as I argue in a recent blog. Even the oil industry thinks it’s a bad idea.
Calls to cut corporate tax rates and lock Canada into more deregulatory trade and investment agreements fall into the same trap. These are ideas with intuitive appeal, insofar as they play to our constructed expectations of what “sound economic management” looks like in the neoliberal era, but they would do little to resuscitate our economic independence. In fact, ideas like this are likely to make foreign corporate control even more pervasive.
If the Trump threat is a test of Canada’s political imagination, this is a brutal failure. At a moment where we need to fundamentally reexamine our national economic strategy, our leaders talk of doubling down on the very market-led approaches that created Canada’s present vulnerability.
There are genuine alternatives that would put Canada on a different trajectory. I propose ten of them in a recent blog about Trump-proof nation-building projects, for example, but there is no shortage of other good ideas out there.
What’s missing is the political imagination—and courage—to seize on big ideas that break from the status quo. As a federal election looms, it’s more important than ever for our leaders to dream a little bigger.
This issue marks two years of the Shift Storm newsletter. If you’ve been reading since the start, thank you for sticking around! If you’re new, welcome! I hope this monthly briefing is as useful for you as it is rewarding for me to write. As usual, there is plenty of new research to dig into this month, so let’s get going.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Climate disinformation plagues Canada’s public discourse
Two new reports highlight the extent to which disinformation (i.e., the deliberate spread of false or misleading information) is polluting perceptions of climate change in Canada.
In Climate Obstruction, McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy explores the history and tactics of the oil and gas industry in pushing for a Canadian “petroculture.” Through decades of overt lobbying and advertising, as well as through more clandestine approaches such as political interference and astroturfing, the Canadian fossil fuel industry has played an outsized role in shaping public opinions on climate.
The report presents public opinion surveys that reveal widespread agreement with oil industry narratives today, especially (1) that climate action is elitist, (2) that Canadian oil is more ethical than the oil produced in other countries, and (3) that Canada does not bear a significant responsibility for global emissions. All are demonstrably false, but these narratives continue to be used as the basis for delaying or avoiding climate action in Canada.
In Polluting Education, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and For Our Kids dive deep into one particular strategy used by fossil fuel companies: influencing the education system.
Industry efforts to downplay climate change and greenwash the fossil fuel sector range from sponsorships to directly providing curricula, all of which has been enabled by a lack of regulatory oversight and inadequate public funding for climate education.
There is no simple solution to this problem. The first report calls for stricter regulation of false and misleading climate claims, especially on the online platforms where disinformation spreads most aggressively. The second report recommends banning fossil fuel advertising to students, requiring more transparency in school sponsorships, and reinvesting in public science education, among other approaches.
Getting the public on the same page about the basic facts of climate change is essential for policy progress. As the rise of artificial intelligence supercharges online disinformation, the need for a disinformation policy framework is only getting more urgent.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
High-speed rail announcement undercut by P3 commitment. The federal government announced Alto, the long-awaited high-speed rail line to be built between Toronto and Québec City. It’s exactly the kind of project we need from both a climate and industrial policy perspective. Unfortunately, the government’s insistence on using a public-private partnership (P3) model—despite the recent, high-profile failures of light rail P3s in Ottawa, Montréal and Toronto—introduces unnecessary risks. As Simon Enoch and I argue on the CCPA blog, a project of this scope should be owned by the public to ensure it delivers on its public mandate. Otherwise, we are likely to see cost-cutting during construction and profiteering once operational.
Moving away from personal vehicles will create more jobs than building EVs. A report from the U.S.-based Climate and Community Institute, Jobs for More Mobility and Less Mining, argues that all of the political and economic resources currently being spent on electric vehicles would be better invested in alternative modes of transportation, such as public transit, rail and bikes. The crux of the issue is that personal vehicles, electric or otherwise, are expensive and inefficient. Far more public benefit can be achieved by investing the same amount of money in less car-dependent infrastructure. Although many U.S. auto sector jobs (and highway construction jobs) would be lost in the scenario the report describes, they are more than made up for by new jobs in cleaner tech manufacturing, rail construction and transit operations. I’d love to see a similar analysis for Canada.
A labour-centred vision for Colorado’s clean economy. Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute released Colorado’s Clean Energy Jobs Path, which was developed in collaboration with labour leaders. The report offers deep analysis and thoughtful recommendations for reducing emissions and creating good jobs in the state. The authors offer estimates for job creation, emissions reductions and fiscal cost of various measures, which are useful benchmarks often left out of policy recommendations. The key takeaway is the importance of tying workforce development objectives into industrial development by, for example, attaching labour conditions to public funding.
Clean construction creates more jobs than the status quo. C40, a coalition of global cities including Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, published Green job opportunities in clean construction, which finds that moving from business-as-usual construction to an approach that emphasizes lower-carbon designs, materials and retrofits would create more jobs overall. Once again, the report identifies the importance of integrating workforce development into an industrial strategy to ensure good jobs and an adequate supply of skilled workers. Although not worker focused, a new report from the UK-based Energy Transitions Commission, Achieving Zero-Carbon Buildings, offers a much deeper technical breakdown of decarbonization in the buildings sector.
Hundreds of thousands of new homes at risk of climate impacts. In Close to Home, the Canadian Climate Institute reveals the extent to which Canadian homes are threatened by increasingly frequent extreme weather events. As Canada scrambles to build millions of new homes to alleviate the current housing crisis, there is a serious risk that many of them will be built in flood-prone or fire-prone areas. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: don’t build in known danger zones. Unfortunately, permissive land use policies are failing to account for future climate risk, putting many new builds in danger.
Inadequate consultations around energy projects plague Indigenous communities across the arctic. A study published in Energy Research & Social Science compares the experiences of Indigenous communities in Canada, Finland, Greenland and other arctic regions in the context of decarbonization projects. It finds a growing recognition of Indigenous rights in principle that are not supported in practice. A new report from Amnesty International, Just transition or ‘green colonialism’?, reaches similar conclusions. Indigenous communities, when consulted, often lack the right to say no to a proposed project. And terms such as “Indigenous-led” have been exploited by governments to gain access to land and resources. A truly just energy transition in the north will require a far stronger commitment to Indigenous self-determination.
Achieving a just transition requires place-based strategies. Also in Energy Research & Social Science, an international team of academics finds that most industrial decarbonization efforts worldwide are not specifically considering or engaging with local communities. Taking a place-based approach with genuine community participation leads to better economic outcomes and, crucially, creates social license for more transformative changes—a finding echoed in a new case study of German and Polish coal regions published in the journal Land. The lack of geographic considerations is one of my top criticisms of Canada’s tax credit approach to clean investment. There is simply no guarantee that investment will flow to or benefit the communities that need it most.
Diverging opinions on power sources driven mainly by politics, not evidence or experience. A Swedish case study published in the journal Energy Policy compares public perceptions of wind and nuclear power and finds opinion divides clearly along ideological lines. Progressive environmentalists support wind and oppose nuclear, while conservative opinion is reversed. The “politically motivated reasoning” described in the article is not particularly surprising. What’s interesting, however, is that opinions shift significantly when respondents are asked about expanding these power sources in their own communities. When forced to consider the issue pragmatically, rather than politically, opinions tend to moderate. The lesson here is that progress on climate policy is more likely when the debate is taken out of the heated, online political context and brought into more practical, community-level discussions.
Half of Canadian jobs at risk of AI disruption. Canada’s Future Skills Centre released Right Brain, Left Brain, AI Brain, which attempts to divide the Canadian workforce into occupations that have high or low exposure to AI as well as those that have high or low complementary with AI. The high-exposure, low-complementary group, which includes many administrative and data-driven jobs, is at greatest risk of automation. The findings are similar to a Statistics Canada study released last fall. Unfortunately, both studies offer only tepid suggestions for how to manage this potentially massive impact on the labour market in the near future. Neither one even entertains public interest regulations that would attempt to manage these impacts proactively.
