Unions have been calling for an industrial strategy for quite a while now.
If you look across the actions we've been doing, there are parts, pieces and different strategies, but there's no visionary plan that one can actually follow. I say this because we really need one to provide us with some framework to go forward with. I mentioned the industrial policy, and it's in the document the Canadian Labour Congress put out in December 2023—“A Sustainable Jobs Blueprint Part II: Putting workers and communities at the centre of Canada's net-zero energy economy”. Among the economy-focused recommendations is the recommendation to develop a net-zero industrial policy that creates conditions for thriving industries.
I've always felt that we talk about the work we do in terms of the low-carbon economy. That is really good, but on the other hand, we need to push a little further and don't always need to push in the same direction as the United States. We can do our own things. There is no reason, as we produce some of the cleanest steel, that we can't use it in local public infrastructure. Why aren't we compelling the use of that, or local lumber?
This is all part of the rethinking that needs to go into the industrial policy, just as with diversifying the economy. We have a very rip-and-ship model, which is that we rip out the raw stuff, extract it and more or less ship it out. It adds no value for us, and we need to develop value-added downstream activities to create good jobs. I can't go through the whole thing, but certainly that's what is generally meant by that.
We need to create jobs but not just existing jobs. There are new jobs out there in the low-carbon economy that, quite frankly, we can't even imagine yet, just as with the development of AI. There are new jobs coming up, and we really need to provide supports for workers who are transitioning to other sectors, whether they're traditional ones or new, low-carbon ones. We also need to provide them with training for upskilling, re-skilling and skilling in general.