Is Canada Falling Behind on Green Industrial Policy? with Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood

Perspectives: A Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy

To help make Canada into a “good society,” Ed Broadbent was a major proponent of “industrial strategy” throughout the 1970s and 80s as leader of Canada’s NDP, to use this policy vision for social democratic change and challenge the dominance of market mechanisms, ultimately to the working-class the tools to build a just and equal economic democracy.

Today, comprehensive policy plans in the United States, Europe and China have taken the form of industrial strategy to guide their economic transformation and development in the face of economic and climate crises. Canada, on the other hand, seems to have lagged behind on this front, despite Ed Broadbent’s urging to develop industrial strategy from decades ago. While Canada’s political discourse becomes embroiled in revisiting industrial-scale carbon pricing, the USA has unleashed the Inflation Reduction Act, and China has become a world-leading producer of electrified products such as electric vehicles and photovoltaic cells.

Why is Canada lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to industrial policy, and how can industrial strategy help Canada take serious climate action?

Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives focusing on international trade and climate change policy in Canada, sat down with the Perspectives Journal Podcast at the 2024 Progress Summit in April to discuss Canada’s industrial policy vision.

Subscribe to Shift Storm: Transforming Work in a Changing Climate—a newsletter on work and climate change by the CCPA’s Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood. In this newsletter, he breaks down all the latest research and news related to green jobs, a just transition and industrial policy from Canada and around the world.
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The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is awarded to economist Dr. Isabella Weber for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy choices and help to empower workers.
Each year’s prize recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture. We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30 for the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, at the Sears Atrium (3rd Floor, George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre), starting at 7pm EDT, followed by a reception with light refreshments.
Professor Isabella Weber is an economist and a leading voice against corporate profiteering, identifying economic shocks as the cover that the rich and powerful use to raise prices and put the working-class through an affordability crisis.
Her analysis has come to accurately illustrate the forces behind today’s price inflation, and why governments have not effectively addressed the affordability crisis
Weber has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization, and is now a regular feature in the business papers. For her work on “Sellers’ Inflation,” she has been profiled in the New Yorker, Jacobin Magazine, and recognized as one of TIME100 Next by US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Tickets to the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture are now available: 2024-ellen-meiksins-wood-lecture.eventbrite.ca