CP-Web. A newsboy holds up a newspaper with a banner headline reporting the invoking of the War Measures Act, in Ottawa, Oct. 16, 1970 the first time Canada had invoked the act in peacetime. The act was put into effect following the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte by the terrorist FLQ. An author of Quebec’s high-school history textbooks casts the federal government as the main villain of the October Crisis 40 years ago, disputes that Pierre Laporte was murdered, and defends the terrorist FLQ whose victims were, he says, mere “collateral damage” in the greater cause of independence.
The world that made Canada prosperous is gone.
To our south, the United States is using tariffs, economic pressure, and threats to our sovereignty to advance its own interests.
Across the Pacific, China has capitalized on the West’s abandonment of domestic manufacturing. The jobs that once sustained middle class Canadian families has fuelled China’s economic rise.
At home, climate change is ripping through our communities, choking our cities with wildfire smoke, destroying infrastructure and costing billions of dollars every year.
Today, facing an American trade war, the collapse of domestic manufacturing, and a climate catastrophe, Canada needs to rediscover something we once understood: national prosperity depends on national production.
We need a new industrial strategy. On a scale not seen since the Second World War.
In 1939, Canada declared war against Nazi Germany.
Yet we lacked the industrial capacity to produce the weapons modern warfare required. We did not have factories turning out tanks, aircraft, naval vessels or military trucks on anything near the scale our allies required.
Few believed a rural country of just 11 million people could become one of the great manufacturing nations of the democratic world.
Yet within months, Canada made a national decision that changed everything.
Government stopped thinking in election cycles and started thinking in generations.
28 Crown corporations were created where markets alone could not deliver.
Victory Aircraft expanded into one of the Commonwealth’s largest aircraft manufacturers, producing Lancaster bombers by the hundreds.
Polymer Corporation was built from scratch to secure Canada’s supply of synthetic rubber.
The Canadian state coordinated the allocation of scarce resources for the wartime effort.
Automobile plants became tank and truck factories. Machine shops were retooled to manufacture artillery, engines and ammunition. New industrial plants rose from empty fields almost overnight.
Steel mills blazed around the clock. Sawmills turned logs into lumber at a relentless pace. Freight trains stretched for kilometres. Shipyards launched corvettes, frigates and cargo ships at astonishing speed.
Excess wartime profits were taxed at a rate of 100% and re-invested into domestic production.
By war’s end, Canada had built more than 16,000 aircraft, 5,000 tanks, 800,000 military trucks, hundreds of naval vessels and millions of rounds of ammunition.
It had built a middle class. Canada’s GDP more than doubled in just six years. More than a million Canadians worked in wartime industry.
The remarkable thing is not simply what Canadians built. It is the speed at which we moved once the country decided on a common purpose.
That same ambition is needed again.
This time, the arsenal we need is different.
Instead of bombers, we need water bombers.
Instead of shells, we need the equipment that protects communities from wildfire, floods and extreme weather.
Instead of ammunition factories, we need plants producing transformers; electric buses, rails and trains; and the infrastructure that powers a modern industrial economy.
Nickel from Sudbury for durable appliances and advanced manufacturing.
Lumber from Ear Falls for high-efficiency affordable homes.
Lithium from Red Lake for battery storage systems.
Imagine Timmins becoming North America’s centre for battery-metal refining.
Imagine Hamilton’s steel mills running at full capacity.
Imagine factory whistles marking the beginning of another shift. Overhead cranes carrying massive steel castings across bustling shop floors. Sparks flying from welders’ torches. Freight trains loaded with products stamped Made in Canada.
That is what an economic boom sounds like. And in the face of catastrophic climate change, we need it now.
Climate change is often discussed as a cost.
In reality, it is also the largest industrial opportunity of the 21st century.
Every grid expansion requires steel, transformers and skilled tradespeople.
Every public transit investment requires manufacturing and construction workers.
Every battery plant, refinery and processing facility creates jobs that cannot be outsourced once they are built.
The question is not whether this transformation will occur.
The question is whether Canadians will build it or buy it from China.
This is not simply a green agenda.
It is a nation-building agenda.
A new industrial strategy would create the industries needed to tackle climate change while rebuilding the middle class.
It would strengthen our sovereignty in the face of American aggression.
It would reshore the jobs lost to Chinese manufacturing.
It would create hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs in mining, refining, construction, engineering, manufacturing and the skilled trades.
And it would restore prosperity to communities that have spent decades watching opportunity leave town.
Every new factory supports local suppliers.
Every processing plant creates demand for railways, ports and trucking companies.
Every manufacturing job supports restaurants, hockey teams and hair salons.
Industrial policy is not about picking winners. It is about deciding that Canada should be one.
Government cannot, and should not, do everything, but it can do what Canada’s greatest generation understood was essential: set a national direction and mobilize Canada’s immense resources, talent and labour force toward a common purpose.
Our grandparents’ generation proved that when history demanded extraordinary ambition, Canadians answered the call.
They built factories where none existed.
They mastered new technologies.
They transformed an economy in the throes of the great depression into one of the great manufacturing powers of the free world.
Our challenge is different.
But the answer is remarkably familiar.
Build.
Build to protect our sovereignty.
Build to bring back good jobs.
Build to tackle the climate crisis.
Build to restore the promise that if you work hard in Canada, you can build a good life.
The next great Canadian boom will not come from hoping globalization suddenly starts working for ordinary people.
It will not come from bowing the knee to the United States.
And it will not come from throwing up our hands in despair at the quagmire of climate change.
It will come from rediscovering something we once knew instinctively: when Canadians build, Canada wins.