In efforts to reach net zero by 2050, Ottawa’s strategy to transform the workforce toward “sustainable jobs”—”green” jobs in a low-carbon economy—sparked extensive criticism from analysts due to its top-down approach and departure from traditional market-based economics.
On Feb. 17—the Friday before a long weekend and overshadowed by the verdict on the government’s use of the Emergencies Act—the feds released its interim Sustainable Jobs Plan for 2023 to 2025.
The government deems a job to be sustainable, if it is “compatible with Canada’s path to a net-zero emissions and climate resilient future.”
Carleton University business professor Ian Lee told The Epoch Times that, although he’s not opposed to decarbonizing the economy and thus not criticizing the intentions of Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, he has significant concerns about the feds’ approach.
The “centralized planning described in the interim plan is a fundamentally different direction from what has been used to manage and develop western economies historically,” he said.
“This has been studied and studied and studied by an enormous number of people for a very long period of time. And the record of central planning has been miserable.”
Lee adds that “centralized planning collapses under its own weight” and needs an enormous amount of information and a “massive bureaucracy” to function, all while stifling innovation and healthy market forces.
Ottawa plans on establishing sustainable jobs legislation this year, which will require future federal governments to prepare and implement action plans starting in 2025 and every five years thereafter.
“With a five-year plan, where everything must be approved long in advance, you create this gigantic bottleneck for decision-making, because everybody has to go in to make sure that they’re in conformity with the [government’s] decisions,” Lee says.
Lee says, “It’s going to require a massive body of public servants evaluating every company, every employer, and every job to determine if it indeed is sustainable.”
The feds are creating a secretariat and a partnership council to oversee the transition, provide information, and coordinate among numerous stakeholders.
‘Subsidized’ Sustainable Jobs
Ottawa envisions the sustainable jobs to be created as being high-quality and well-paying.
“Our main concern with this is that Ottawa could be transitioning people off of six-figure jobs to go to $50,000-a-year jobs, which is not exactly the same thing,” Renaud Brossard, senior director of communications at the Montreal Economic Institute, said in an interview.
Brossard was previously Quebec and Atlantic director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
People flock to the oil and gas industry for its high salaries, he said, noting that currently, green jobs aren’t paying enough.
“This is not creating sustainable well-paid jobs,” Brossard said about Ottawa’s “plan to have a plan.”
He adds that “these are going to be subsidized jobs that Ottawa favours instead of market-based.”
Brossard points out that some towns or villages will become impoverished as their main industry is shut down—not unlike what the cod moratorium did in Newfoundland and Labrador in 1992.
“The problem is the location for where that job creation is going to happen is not necessarily the same location as where these jobs were lost,” he said, adding that the Atlantic province is still feeling the effects today, given its unemployment rate (11.8 percent) being more than double the national level (5.0 percent).
Brossard says that people in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador will likely experience a similar fate as the cod moratorium.
Dan McTeague, president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, said in a Feb. 9 commentary that the “ideological drive to shut down an industry,” referring to the oil and gas sector, will be felt especially by workers in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
“It is delusional to imagine that ‘green jobs’ installing turbines and solar panels will replace that,” he wrote.
Worker Shortages or Widespread Layoffs?
Ottawa said it’s expecting labour shortages because it foresees that an abundance of green jobs will be created in areas like electricity supply, smart communities, and transportation—including in the energy-producing provinces.
“There are also very significant opportunities for sustainable jobs in conventional energy industries, enabling Canada’s producers to be low-emissions suppliers of products to a world in transition,” says the interim sustainable jobs plan in its overview.
Lisa Baiton, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), told The Epoch Times via email that “We need to … grow Canada’s energy workforce so we can be a preferred global supplier of safe, secure, affordable and reliable energy for the decades to come.”
Baiton said CAPP “will look to engage through the federal government’s process as outlined in the interim Sustainable Jobs Plan.”
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, a Dec. 20, 2022, federal report “Evaluation of the Core Climate Change Mitigation Program” warns of the impact on oil and gas workers from climate change policy.
“It is likely that a sizeable workforce will need to transition out of the oil and gas sector,” said the report, which did not calculate the financial impacts on families or estimated job cuts by industry.
In addition, Natural Resources Canada warned in a 2022 memo that over 2.7 million Canadians work in sectors that face “significant labour market disruptions” as a result of the workforce transformation envisioned.
“How many jobs will be lost in the oil and gas sector as a result of the Government of Canada’s climate change actions?” the memo posed the question. “The answer to this question depends.”
Political Uproar
Ottawa began consultations on “Just Transition” legislation in 2021. The issue then was that government bodies and companies were accelerating their push toward emission reduction goals without adequate measures in place to ensure that negative impacts on workers and communities would be minimized.
Alberta premier Danielle Smith called Ottawa’s jobs transition plan an “unconstitutional and existential threat to the Alberta economy,” and federal Conservatives leader Pierre Poilievre has backed Smith’s view that Ottawa has an anti-oil-and-gas agenda.
Federal Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan has previously said that Canada needs more oil and gas workers and that he does not like the term “just transition.”
Ottawa says in its Sustainable Jobs Plan that the concept was developed by the North American trade unions movement in the 1970s “to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers’ rights and livelihoods during a fundamental shift in economic and environmental practices.”
The feds also say that the term “sustainable jobs” is “more inclusive and indeed more accurate for Canada than terms like ‘just transition.’”
But Lee says the wealthiest countries don’t use top-down, “coercive” approaches to managing their workforces.
“I think they’re making a mistake in going down this road to achieve their goals.”
