Break In Case of Emergency

Emergency Marker 2: Create New Institutions (w/ Alex Himelfarb, Linda McQuaig & Seth Klein)

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In episode 2 of our 6-marker series, we turn to the institutions we need for an emergency-scale response. Erin Blondeau speaks with Alex Himelfarb, Linda McQuaig, and Seth Klein about why relying on private incentives hasn’t worked, and how Canada once excelled at building bold public institutions. From Connaught Labs to Ontario Hydro, they revisit the legacy of Crown corporations and imagine what new ones could achieve today: from publicly owned renewables to EV manufacturing to national retrofit programs. They also explore the promise of a Youth Climate Corps. It’s a call for imagination, democratic accountability, and rebuilding the public capacity we’ve allowed to erode.

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More on the 6 Markers of the Climate Emergency:

Credits:
Produced by Erin Blondeau and Doug Hamilton-Evans. Written and hosted by Erin Blondeau. Music by Anjali Appadurai. Audio editing by Blue Light Studios. Artwork by Geoff Smith.

Hello and welcome back to Break in Case of Emergency, a podcast about mobilizing Canada for the climate crisis with audacious solutions rooted in justice and workers' rights. I'm your host, Erin Blondeau, and this episode is part of a special series where we're breaking down the Climate Emergency Unit's guiding framework, our six markers of climate emergency. We've been exploring what it means when our governments shift into genuine emergency mode, what it looks like when our leaders truly understand crises to be the emergencies that they are and act accordingly. In today's episode, we're digging into marker number two, which is create new institutions to get the job done. And to do so, we've assembled a stellar panel. I'm very excited to be joined by Alex Himelfarb, Linda McQuaig, and the CEU's own Seth Klein. Alex Himelfarb joined the public service in 1981, rising up the ranks and ultimately serving as Canada's top civil servant, the clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet from 2002 to 2006. Alex has advised three prime ministers and later served as Canada's ambassador to Italy. Before joining the public service, he was a professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick and later served as the director of the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs at York University from 2006 to 2014. He has written many books and papers on Canadian society and public policy and has chaired and served on the boards of many esteemed organizations, including the Atkinson Foundation, the Narwhal, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. Hi Alex, so excited to have you here. I have so much I want to talk to you about.

Well, great. Good to see you, Erin.

And we also have Linda McQuaig, who is an activist, an award-winning journalist, and best-selling author known for challenging Canada's power structures. Her seven national bestsellers have been hugely influential and include It's Crude Dude, War, Big Oil, and The Fight for the Planet, Behind Closed Doors, How the Rich Won Control of Canada's Tax System, The Trouble with Billionaires, co-authored with Neil Brooks. And most recently and perhaps most relevant to our conversation today, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists, How the Rich are Stealing Canada's Public Wealth. This book is a history of Crown corporations in Canada, both their origins and privatization. Linda brings decades of experience exposing how existing institutions serve the powerful. Hi, Linda, your books sound absolutely fascinating.

Hi Erin, very nice to talk to you.

And we are also joined by Seth Klein. Seth is the team lead and director of strategy here at the Climate Emergency Unit. He is the author of A Good War, Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, and is a regular columnist with Canada's National Observer. He has also spent many years as the director of a progressive think tank and currently serves on the board for the BC Society for Policy Solutions. Hey Seth, so glad to have you here too.

Hey, Erin, good to be doing this with you. And can I just say, like, what a thrill. It's always great doing this with you, Erin. But what a thrill it is to be doing this with Linda and Alex, because these are like two people who have had a huge influence on me. I've been reading Linda's books since I was an undergrad, and Alex's work had such an impact on my book. So my younger self's head is exploding right now.

It's nice to have a couple of oldsters with you.

For decades, we have been told that the market is the best way to solve problems. We've been told that private companies can innovate their way out of the crises that they've created, including the climate crisis. The government only seems interested in incentivizing their way to net zero with no urgency around indigenous rights, environmental racism, mass unemployment, or the broader struggle of climate breakdown.

Meanwhile, we are still mass polluting while handing billions to oil companies. Our existing institutions benefit a very specific world, one with infinite growth for a small few, while the majority of us bear the brunt of these intersecting crises. We argue that the climate emergency demands emergency institutions that are publicly owned, not reformed versions of corporations that have already failed us.

but new public corporations and new public programs purpose-built to meet the climate crisis at the speed and scale. So let's figure out the difference between private corporations and public ones, how we got here and what we can do to fix it. So I do want to start by helping our audience understand some basics about the differences between private versus publicly owned companies because

I'll admit I have kind of struggled with the implications of both, so I would love to break that down. And we can also talk about how and why Canada created public corporations or what we call in Canada as Crown corporations. So, Linda, to start, I would love to ask you, what is a Crown or a public corporation? And historically, when and why did Canada create them?

Well, basically a crown corporation is something that is owned by the government, which by that we mean by all of us, because we all collectively, you know, elect a government, live in a democracy. And so if the corporation is public, publicly owned, we mean the government owns it, which means we all own it. And this is terribly important.

Really interesting history of this in Canada because Canada has a very strong history of developing really good crown corporations, much more so than, for instance, the United States. And there's historical reasons for this. sort of the key point is that while the US has a very strong history, you could say, of developing and of having private enterprise,

Canada hasn't been so strong in developing private enterprise, but we have distinguished ourselves in developing very effective public enterprises, companies, enterprises that do important things in our economy that are owned by us all collectively through government. And the tragedy is we have this strong history.

But in recent decades, we've kind of gone on a privatization binge and privatized so many of these very effective corporations, in some cases shutting them down, in some cases just turning them into private, much weaker versions of their original self. And, you know, now we can see there's an urgent need, and Seth, of course, has written about this extensively.

There's an urgent need to address the climate crisis. And one of the key ways we can do this is through strong public corporations. And so we have this strong history of public corporations that have served important public purposes. And now more than ever, know, unfortunately we've been privatizing so many of the ones we have, but now more than ever we need new ones specifically.

to deal with the climate crisis because the private sector is not dealing effectively with it.

Yeah, Linda, so you just brought up Seth's book and Seth, I wanted to come to you with this because in your book, A Good War, you argue that the climate crisis requires an emergency level response similar to the government response during the Second World War. So in terms of creating new crown corporations to meet a civilizational threat like Linda was just talking about, whether that threat is fascism or climate change.

How do we know that this could work? Is there a historic precedent for this? And why do you fixate so much in your work on the need for public corporations?

Yeah, so I do sort of fixate on Crown corporations, it's true. And part of that is because in the absence of having public corporations, really the best that a government can do is to try to incentivize somebody else to build and do what needs to be done to meet an emergency in a crisis.

And really, if you're looking for a one sentence summary of the current federal government's failed approach to climate, look no further, right? They've just been trying to incentivize somebody else to build and deploy what's needed. And to your point about historic precedents, yes, for me, the World War II story really does offer that precedence. During World War II, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy and its labor force pumped out this volume of military equipment that is simply mind blowing. During those six years, Canada with a population roughly a quarter the size that it is today, produced 800,000 military vehicles more than Germany, Italy and Japan combined. 16,000 military aircraft ultimately building the fourth largest air force in the world at the time. Here in the province where I live, British Columbia.

where we seem to struggle to build a single BC ferry anymore. The BC shipyards produced about 350 ships and the Vancouver Shipbuilders Union went from a small local of 200 guys to the single largest local of men and women in the country. But again, all of this virtually from a base of nothing. Now, a lot of that was coordinated by this guy, C.D. Howe.

He was dubbed the minister of everything under the Mackenzie King government. Now, he was a private sector guy. He'd made a lot of money in the private sector before going into politics. He was kind of on the right wing of Mackenzie King's cabinet, but he was also in a hurry. Now, he was happy to give a lot of contracts to the private sector, to those shipyards and so on. But anytime the private sector couldn't quickly do what needed to be done to meet the emergency.

he created another Crown enterprise to do it. In the course of the war, he created 28 Crown corporations to meet the supply and munitions demand of the war effort. In fact, interestingly with C.D. Howe, even before the war, he was the minister who introduced the legislation to create the CBC, our public broadcaster, and to create what ultimately became Air Canada, which is private today, but started as a Crown corporation. And part of his thinking at the time was, and again, he's a private sector guy, and you have these new things, public airwaves and air travel. And he was thinking, why should the private sector get all of the benefit of this? Why don't we have some public competitors to get in on the action? So I take a lot of inspiration from this story, from the war that around how you use these Crown enterprises to get done what urgently needs to be done. And also he was clever about it. He always had a Crown enterprise during the war in each major line. So shipbuilding, aircrafts, munitions. Why did he do that? Because here he is giving all these private contracts. All of it's new to Canada. We weren't an arms manufacturer of any scale before. and he wanted to know what do things cost. And so by having a crown enterprise in each of these lines, he's basically able to know that he isn't getting bilks on all the private contracts that he's also pursuing.

It's so interesting to hear. Did you say he was like kind of like the right wing? Yeah, I cannot imagine that in today's right wing is creating all of these public institutions. But Linda, I wanted to go back to you for a second because in our capitalist economy, governments constantly choose to incentivize and subsidize private companies rather than creating public institutions. So for example, we've chosen private incentives for decades. I know you were already touching on this, but what has been the consequences of this? Do you think that choosing private incentives and private corporations has contributed to the climate crisis as we see it today?

Well, absolutely, I do think that. And as Seth was pointing out, for one thing, it's a very indirect way to do things. You know, rather than actually set up a public corporation that has a mandate to do something we need, we create incentives for the private sector. This is obviously an indirect way and largely an ineffective way because it isn't necessarily, well, it isn't the goal of these private companies to do these things. They're just doing it to get tax breaks. What ends up happening more often is that we go along with their desire for tax breaks and incentives on things they want, like their current obsession with carbon capture and storage technology, which is no solution to the climate crisis. we're directing, Canada's directing billions of dollars in subsidies to big oil because they want these special incentives that won't advance anything. So much more effective is to actually set up corporations that do these things ourselves. And as Seth points out, we did that very effectively during the war. We did it even earlier, long before the war.

This is a tradition in Canada that unfortunately we've moved very badly away from as part of the whole neoliberal revolution of the past few decades, which I guess brings us to Alex Himelfarb.

Yeah, I can't wait to get deeper into that. And I just wanted to bring Alex in to kind of contrast a little bit of the differences between the public and the private responses here. So Alex, you have spent decades inside the government at the highest levels. And when we think about the climate crisis or other emergencies like the pandemic, for example, what would be the outcome of a private corporation rising to the task versus a crown corporation?

Is there a difference, do you think, in the speed and scale of mobilization between private or a government-led organization?

Yeah, well, just to jump on to what both Seth and Linda said, not only did we do it before the war, that is build things, make things, own things collectively, but we did it after the war. When I first came to Ottawa, which was in the late 70s on an interchange, I came to a government that I thought the job was to build things.

to make things, to own things. And we did, we owned, I don't know, over 60 crown corporations. We owned an airline, we owned a vaccine agency, we owned a railway, we owned an energy company, we owned airplane building companies. We owned a lot of things and we were good at it. John Meisel,

very respected and not left-wing political scientist called us public enterprise society. That's how we thought of ourselves as a public enterprise society. Over the next decades, I was part of, I suppose, contributed to the hollowing out of that state capacity and lived through exactly what Seth and Linda talked about, this privatization.

And so increasingly the job became how do you get the private sector to deliver public goods? And we used some mix of carrots and sticks, regulations and tax incentives and bribery to try to get public goods done. if you wanted to take two examples...

This was the sort of the new norm. The new norm was less public, more private, less collective common good, more commercial. if you want to get a vivid sense of how that played out or what the consequences were, COVID-19 exposed, I think, the cracks in our system, or even amplified the cracks in our system. I'll just give two quick examples.

One of them is long-term care. Our reliance on long-term care, and there's a wonderful study, I say wonderful because I contributed to it, but a wonderful study called Investing in Care, Not Profit that studied the implications of the privatization or the dependency on private delivery of long-term care of elderly Canadians, including some of the most vulnerable Canadians. 

And what was clear was the consequences were often fatal. There was more disease, there was more. And that's because, not because these people are evil, wanted bad things to happen, but because the profit motive took precedence over the public good, including health and safety, that the staffing models and efficiencies often came at the expense of public health and safety.

And the evidence is overwhelming. People died. People got ill needlessly. And much more so than happened in collectively owned, publicly owned long-term care. So that's a good example. And the other example that's even perhaps more profound with enduring implications is vaccines. So here we are in need of vaccine and

urgently, but we have no vaccine production capacity. Think about it. We used to have a world-respected vaccine research and production and distribution capacity. World-respected Connaught Labs. Linda's written beautifully on this and several, I mean, she's written the book, so I should probably not even talk about it. But given that, What did we do? So we signed contracts to buy huge amounts of vaccine, even in advance of their production with a number of companies. Indeed, we overbought in a way that's quite sensible when you have no capacity and you're trying to manage risks. But because we had no...capacity and because we're a small population, had no leverage. So there's no question we paid more than we had to. We bought more than we should have. We were a price taker and a policy taker. We had no influence on the process or the types of vaccines we were getting.

But also we were doing this in a competitive way, because that's the nature of this privatized vaccine world we've helped build. And we were hoarding vaccines when poor countries were having unbelievable difficulty in accessing. So even when we got 80 % of Canadians vaccinated, like 5 % of the countries in Africa got vaccinated. And with a pandemic, we're safe only when everybody's safe. It's a moral aberration, but it's also practically bad public policy.

It really is. I do want to come back to the vaccine thing as well, because I did want to ask Linda about it, but I wanted to just move back a little bit for a second and ask, why did we privatize then if these are the outcomes of this? You were just talking about the failures of healthcare in many of these ways. What happened? Why?

Why? First of all, government became almost single-mindedly focused on economic growth. And the theory of economic growth that was dominant in the 80s was you had to remove as many of the barriers to business profit as politics allowed. policy was driven by what's good for maximizing profit. Right?

Hmm.

It was increasingly government and public enterprise was seen as a drain on the economy. So what did we have? had policies that demanded low taxes, tax cuts, and taxes instead of being the price we pay for the country we need and want became a burden, a punishment, theft. Regulations increasingly were described as red tape, costs for business, know, regulations that were protecting the environment, protecting labor, protecting human rights, were now seen as a burden, a constraint on profit. And public enterprise was seen as competing with the business sector. And, you know, in many ways, the business sector saw these enterprises, many of which were very successful, as a way of extracting.

Right? Another mode of extracting, extracting from the public domain to feed growth, economic growth, profit. Yeah. So, and just quickly, all of this with the sort of ethic of efficiency. And we fail to ask the question, efficient at what and efficient for whom?

Yeah, it does seem very concerning because I think we're seeing a lot of these similar narratives with Mark Carney talking a lot about tax cuts and things like that. But Linda, I did want to come back to you for a second because Alex brought up vaccines and the fact that we used to have a crown corporation for vaccine production. And I wanted to ask you you know, how did the privatization of vaccine production cripple our pandemic response? But more on the topic of what can this teach us about how we should be responding to the climate emergency? Are there lessons from the COVID pandemic that we can take for the climate emergency?

Absolutely. And certainly the whole story of Connaught Labs, which was our publicly owned pharmaceutical / vaccine development company, is just such a beautiful story and such a tragic one because it ends up being privatized. But it's a beautiful story of Canadians, building this, started by a doctor in Toronto was concerned about diphtheria. It's just a wonderful story. It gets built into this fabulous public enterprise that for decades is one of the world leading companies in vaccine development and distribution throughout the world. At one point, the World Health Organization, for instance, is trying to stamp out various disease in the world, and they partner with Connaught Labs in Canada because of our expertise and because of the scope of what Connaught Labs was able to do. So was just a fabulous company. And it was privatized, well, starting in the 70s, basically because, well, as Alex described, this sort of mentality, this business mentality takes over that profits are everything. And because of that and because the business sector is so influential, it ends up being privatized. And so in the COVID crisis, we are left with a situation where we do not, here we are having been for decades, the world's leading, having the world's leading company in vaccine development and here we are, we don't have access to enough vaccines to protect our own people. And, you know, Alex describes how crazy the response was in order to deal with that. And I recall, because at the time I was writing about how ridiculous this was with that we'd given up Knaut Labs. And I remember some national post commentaries against me saying, but that's ridiculous.

Connaught Labs still exists, its production facilities still existed, but they're now owned by a French company. But that makes all the difference in the world because what that meant is we have no control over vaccines and what that company's doing. So in fact, it's true that Connaught Labs, a lot of the labs still existed, but they were no longer doing what was in the interest of Canada and broadly in the interest of the world, they were doing what was in the interest of that company. So we couldn't get them to do what we needed during the crisis. And so this is a perfect example of how in the climate crisis, what we need is to create publicly owned companies that will actually address the specific needs of the climate. And by the way, there are companies, countries over in Europe that are doing exactly this. There's the Nordic countries, Spain, Portugal, Austria have created publicly owned companies that advance and sell and develop renewable energy. Why can't we do that?

Can I just weigh in, before we switch gears entirely back into climate and crowd enterprises to tackle that crisis, I just want to weigh in on this Connaught example. You know, it strikes me, particularly that first year of the pandemic, there was a lot that the government did right. They were very swift in getting checks out the doors and wage subsidies in the SERB. But as we're all saying, one thing they didn't do is create new institutions.

And in this case, an obvious would have been to recreate something like Connaught. And in the absence of that, you get what then Alex have both described, which is Canada basically using its economic muscle to outbid poor countries to secure the supply that we needed. And the tragedy of that to me, like when I compare it to the World War II stuff, is that is the opposite of what we did in the war. In the war we were the arsenal for our allies. When I described earlier all of that production that we did during the war, much of that wasn't for us. It was for our allies. That's what it means to actually mobilize in an emergency and to use public institutions and enterprise to actually meet the task. we didn't do that in the pandemic.

Can I jump in on, again, before we turn to the climate crisis and just another word about the Connaught Labs and public enterprises. The Connaught Labs did work with the WHO on smallpox and other diseases international cooperation, it shared its intellectual property. It wasn't in competitive mode, it was in collaborative mode. It worked with other countries. saw Canada's health tied in intimately to global health. It was collaborative, not competitive. was one of the huge advantages of public enterprise and absolutely relevant for climate change. That has to be collaborative, not competitive.

And can I just add one further example about Connaught? Connaught, of course, was integrally involved in the development of insulin. And for years, Connaught Labs was the producer of insulin for the world. And it provided insulin for the world at very, very low cost. And it's the privatization of that whole system that has created chaos for people that need insulin.

Anyway, just another example about how public corporations can serve the broader public good. That's what they're all about.

Yeah, it almost seems like capitalism is kind of in conflict with massive change that we need to see. But I do want to kind of shift gears and talk a little bit about what it could look like to make, what kinds of new institutions can we make? So I would love to ask all of you, when you think about what's needed right now, what new crown corporations should Canada create immediately to fight the climate crisis?

Maybe I'll go first on this one. So before I was telling you this story about how in World War II, know, C.D. Howe creates all these Crown corporations. First of all, when you look at the record of the Trudeau government, in contrast to all of that, Trudeau created two new Crown corporations. He created the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is kind of tedious and a sort of privatization partnership thing that's accomplished very little. And the other one...is the Trans Mountain Pipeline Corporation. It's the one that makes us all of the shared owners of this 60 year old oil pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia. If we were really to embrace this model, we would be asking, you know, what by the same logic that we have done this in the past, we would be taking inventory of all of our conversion needs to determine, you know, how many heat pumps and solar arrays and wind farms and electric buses are we going to need to end our reliance on fossil fuels? And we would start to ramp up a new generation of public corporations to get that done. I think partly where we're stuck is that if we're really going to expedite this transition to, particularly in the face of Trump's attacks, a made in Canada economy at speed and scale, a true green industrial strategy,

We're going to have to do much of it by ourselves through our public institutions and Crown corporations with direct investments in public infrastructure and indigenous economic sovereignty projects and renewable energy. Definitely in East West electric power grid is part of that. High-speed rails part of that. Zero emission vehicle manufacturing could be part of that. And I think we should be asking

What would that new generation of public corporations look like to hasten that transition off fossil fuels and relocalized manufacturing? I'd love to see provincial utilities, public utilities, mass producing and installing electric heat pumps and rooftop solar, or neighborhood energy utilities that are public and doing geothermal heating and cooling, or a new housing corporation or maybe a subsidiary of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that's mass building, zero emission, non-market housing or a new public corporation to manufacture electric battery ships or buses or farm equipment. Like once you start, it becomes a kind of fun exercise to imagine what all of these could be. But let me just give you one concrete example that's a bit of a bugaboo for me, which is very nerdy.

And it's heat pumps. Heat pumps are this incredible product, right? Like they, you know, they not only heat in the winter, they keep us cool and safe in the summer. They're incredibly more efficient than heating through gas or electric baseboard. But the market for heat pumps is broken. And it's broken because the government's used them, they've left it to the private sector, private contractors. The only thing the government does in certain jurisdictions is offer rebates if you convert your home to electric heat pump. But what happens is those private contractors simply hoover up the value of those rebates. And so we've seen incredible price escalation in converting to heat pumps. There's gouging going on. There's profiteering going on. the very kind of gouging and profiteering that was illegal in the second world war. The system isn't working. What if we had a public enterprise that was mass producing electric heat pumps, made it simple for everybody, took the profit margin out, got the economies of scale, the cost would come way down, you know, an army of installers who would come to our homes and tell us how to get it done without us wondering, you know, getting a bunch of quotes from a bunch of private contractors and trying to figure out which one of them is gouging us less than the other guy. I mean, this is, to me, a perfect example of a market that cries out for a new public enterprise.

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because I tried to go through the process of getting a heat pump, but it is actually just very inequitable to do this whole rebate thing. And people are so busy in today's society too, that getting a whole bunch of quotes, filling out a whole bunch of forms, waiting for all of these things, it's just not equitable. And when we're in an emergency, we don't have time to be spending doing all of this stuff. And I also love Seth that you talked about

Crown corporations for housing and things like that, because I think a lot of times people look at climate change and they're just thinking, you know, renewable energy or things like that. the climate crisis really requires all of these things, housing, infrastructure, all of them. And Linda, I would love to turn to you and what kind of Crown corporations do you think that we need to fight the climate crisis?

Well, when you say what we need is crown corporations that do things that we need done. And I think the example Seth uses is a fantastic one, the heat pump idea, but also housing, other things. mean, Seth also mentioned that the public or the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was one of the innovations of the Trudeau government, But it's a disaster because what it is is basically it's all about, you know, public-private cooperation partnership, which really is all about, you know, that's just a smoke screen. It usually just means catering more to the private sector. So what we need is public corporations, call them crown corporations, call them agencies, doesn't matter what you call them, that have a public mandate to do something that we need done. And you know, I mentioned the example of European countries are doing this. They are doing this publicly owned companies to deal with the climate crisis. And you know, one example that I find very interesting of the European countries is Norway. Norway, like Canada, has a lot of its own oil reserves.

So you would think, you know, there'd be resistance to setting up companies, setting up a public company to do renewable energy, which is potentially maybe in competition with oil reserves, with the oil companies. But the difference is Norway, unlike Canada, has not allowed itself to be essentially captured by big oil interests. Even though it has lots of oil, It's maintained its independence and it's in fact set up a publicly owned oil company. But now in addition to that, they also have set up a publicly owned company dedicated to promoting renewable energy, Statcraft it's called. And it's extremely effective. It's been a major success selling in the European market. And there's no reason that we can't follow a model like that in Canada.

We have, it's obviously a need, there's obviously a market for it. We just have to get over that mentality. Things always have to be done through the private sector. We always have to rely on the private marketplace to do things. I call that the kind of market derangement syndrome that you assume the market is the only vehicle for accomplishing the things you want. It's completely wrong.

Mm-hmm.

Alex, I want to turn to you for the same question, but if I could also just tack on what kind of political pressure and conditions do you think we need to actually have these new public institutions created?

Yeah. But first of all, I love what Seth and Linda said. I agree with all of that. even before thinking about, and I agree with the specific examples, but even before building new ones, I mean, just imagine the infrastructure bank getting a new mandate, and that new mandate would be climate emergency, climate crisis, the transformation, that it would build into its mandate a just transition, just as they do in Europe, by the way. That is, work with the unions to make sure that you have the, you're creating the good union jobs and the training and assistance necessary to make the just transition, and that the infrastructure bank drops the requirement for private partners altogether and deals directly with communities, municipalities, indigenous communities and funds, indigenous led initiatives, municipal initiatives. Imagine it's the same, unless they take the money they have and sweeten it with moving all of that carbon subsidies into this bank and building out that way. Imagine that you transformed the export development companies to the sub. supporting the export of fossil fuel and started supporting the export of green energy. Imagine that the business development bank had a very explicit green. So it's good to imagine new, but let's fix the old. We have some crown corporations now that could be hugely instrumental and they're failing even in neoliberal terms. They're not actually delivering the goods for anybody. Why not deliver the goods for the public? Sorry, go ahead.

Go.

No, I was just going to say like Seth always is telling me, why reinvent the wheel? Like you said, we already have them, so let's just fix them and get them going.

And yeah, the wheel worked pretty well. now what would it take if I knew what it would take, we would have it. I do believe that it's a combination of a ground game, a narrative, a story that changes how people think about the role of the state.

But it's also, so it's an air game. In politics, they talk about the air game and the ground game. The air game is the ideas, the vision, policies, and the ground game is the organizing, the mobilizing. And I think that's what we need. We need an air game that tells a very clear story. And think about the story that Connaught Labs tells. It's a fabulous story.

The enthusiasm that Linda uses when she talks about this extraordinary thing, by the way, just might add, it started not as public, but not as a crowd corporation. It wasn't even state owned. It was public, but not government. So it really built a lot of trust. It was kind of, it actually got worse. I say this as a public servant, got worse when the Canadian Business Development Bank bought it. But in any case, it started as a public enterprise.

It's a great story and it worked and it worked well. We should tell those stories. should tell those stories. And those stories should have a moral content, right? And they should have some concrete asks that show people it's actually doable and we should point to that that is doable. But we also need the ground game of like the use classic or of building.

Yeah.

coalitions and grassroots movements to counteract the inevitable opposition. You you can't underestimate how much the business community invests in creating a climate that pushes for policies good for them. They invest enormously in this. And the only way to counter that is a strong story and a strong civil society coalition that can't be ignored.

Yeah

Well, I just, before we switch into the youth climate core, can I just weigh in on this question of what would it take? I mean, obviously, you know, we need to be demanding this from civil society that we want these new public institutions. But on the other end, in terms of the governments that we're trying to pressure, you know, one of the things I've learned from Alex over the years is that, and I experience it a lot in my own work with the climate emergency unit when I'm meeting with public.

elected officials is simply this failure of imagination. I'll give you an example a couple years ago when the BC government, I'm in British Columbia, when the BC government, an NDP government approved the Cedar LNG facility. It's a partnership between Pemba pipelines and the Heysla Nation.

Speaker 2 (45:49.922)
And I met with the cabinet minister at the time and she was emphasizing, it's 200 jobs. So how can we say no? And my response was, yeah, it's 200 jobs on a floating platform that's basically going to be built in South Korea. Are we so bereft of imagination that we can't make a counter offer to produce something with 200 jobs on a floating platform?

We got thousands of ships up and down the coast that need to urgently be converted to electric marine battery. We could do that on a floating platform and we can make money doing it in partnership with the First Nation. But it's the imagination piece that isn't there. Like again, sticking in our province of British Columbia, we had the NDP government in the early 70s that created a lot of Crown corporations.

We had an NDP government in the 90s that created quite a few crown corporations. But we have an NDP government now that desperately doesn't want to create crown corporations or doesn't have the imagination for it.

Well, I just wanted to jump in on the failure of imagination point. I couldn't agree more with that's what's happened with this whole neoliberal revolution and the condensing of dreams and the failure of imagination. I just wanted to bring up one other example, again, going back to crown corporations versus the private sector. You know, we had in this country, historically, we used to have, well, we had two major railways, one private CPR and one publicly owned CNR. And we hear so much about the great escapades of CPR building the final rail and everything and that is kind of exciting. But what we never hear about is the incredible imagination and innovation that CNR, the publicly owned railway did. What they did, they came up with the idea of putting radio on trains. Radio was just being developed. It was the new hot thing, but nobody had thought that it could actually go on a moving object like a train. But CNR came up with that idea and they championed that idea and they developed it and they developed it. that because of that, this was very exciting back in the...20s and 30s that you could hear radio on train. Because of that, CNR pulled ahead of CPR in the competition about which was more popular with the public. But also, importantly, because of radio on trains, then it also developed the idea that we'd have, the CNR developed radio stations in different cities across the country. And this was partly, of course, to bring the country closer together to enable the country to communicate easier, more easily with each other. Anyway, to make a long story short, it's those radio stations created by the public corporation CNR that become the basis of the CBC, the National Broadcaster. And I think Seth was mentioning about C.D. Howe and his role in that. That's true.

You know, importantly, it was the creation of the CNR in creating this incredible national radio network, which by the way, was more advanced at the time than the equivalent radio networks in the US, CBS and NBC in many ways. And it became, of course, the CBCs. It's just a wonderful story. There was so much public joy at the idea of the country being able to have its own broadcasting network, which of course, you know, the likes of Poliev just want to disparage that and destroy the whole idea that we would want to have a national network, which we would want to have it. It's important to be able to communicate important ideas that aren't just about advancing the market.

Yeah, exactly. That is so, I had no idea, Linda, about that history there. So that's so interesting. And I think coming back, like this whole conversation about having imagination, Seth, it is reminding me of the Youth Climate Corps, which is a campaign that we've been working on. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what a Youth Climate Corps would do and how this is an example of a climate emergency measure?

Yeah, I mean all of this is about trying to excavate imagination. We've been talking about the important role of Crown enterprises and interestingly, the thing about Crown enterprises, because people are always like, well how will you pay for it? These things make money. What we're talking about is are Crown corporations that will produce a product that people will buy or pay for in monthly utilities or...

or in fees when they take the train or whatever, they can easily make money. That said, when we talk about Marker 2 and the need for new institutions to get the job done, it isn't just about new crown corporations, it's also about the need for new public programs. And as you say, Erin, one of the flagship campaigns in the climate emergency unit has been advancing this idea of a youth climate core. And, you know, for me, this also drives a bit from the World War II story where, you know, a million Canadians enlisted in the war and 64 % of them were under the age of 21. And, you know, as someone who gives a lot of talks to youth and post-secondary audiences and that kind of thing, it has long been this gut feeling of mine that there are tens of thousands of young people across the country who get the emergency, who want to surf, who want to roll up their sleeves and meet the moment and are like, where is my goddamn invitation? So that's really the origins for me of this idea. What if we had a new public institution, a new public program that said to everyone 35 and under, if you get the emergency, you want to spend two years getting trained up and employed, doing the work that urgently needs to get done, meeting, responding to disasters like floods and fires and heat domes, shoring up ecological and community infrastructure in the face of these events, and most importantly, driving down our emissions, doing work in renewable energy and building retrofits and public rail and public transit. Again, I would point out, you know, most of these activities are inherently public. This is why we're so stalled out.

We have a government that has approached this by trying to offer tax credits to the private sector, hoping, you know, imagining somehow that the hordes of them are waiting to join the struggle if only they had a 15 or 30 % tax credit. They don't exist. They're not there. We have to do these things ourselves and we're going to need to train up a new generation of people who know how to do this work.

The polling we commissioned a year and a half ago from Abacus Data also told us, you know, I said before I had a gut that there were all these people, gut feeling that these people were ready to sign on. We tested that in a national poll. We found huge support for this vision of a youth climate core across the board, all ages, all demographics, every province. But we asked a question that only went to, a second question that only went to people under 35. And it said, If a program like this existed, how likely would you yourself be to enroll for two years in a program? 65 % of them said they would consider it. 15 % of them said, definitely, I'm ready. You know, if you extrapolate that to the population of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 35, that's one 1.3 million Canadians saying enough already stop talking about it here I am Call me up That's a mobilization But we're still waiting

That's a terrific idea. Just terrific.

I agree with that. It's a huge idea. If I can just jump onto this, not only has the stunting of the political imagination been one of the consequences of decades of market fetishism, but the other consequence has been the erosion of solidarity. There's an epidemic of loneliness. We define problems in individual terms. We define solutions in individual terms that is sort of a kind of extreme individualism and consumerism. And people are desperate for some kind of connection. sometimes they look to tribal connections and young males turning to the wrong kinds, in my view, connections, but understandable because they're feeling scared and put upon and confused, offering a morally, diverse people to come together with moral purpose is the epitome of rebuilding solidarity. is so essential, imagination and solidarity are two of the ingredients of a better and more resilient Canada shared sense of purpose for sure. Can I mention Alex, one other fascinating thing in those poll, the poll results that we got. I, you know, I'm someone who tracks climate polls very carefully. This poll with abacus on the youth climate core is the only climate poll I've ever seen where the enthusiasm among young men outstrips young women. This speaks exactly to your point that hunger for a sense of purpose and camaraderie to

Roll up your sleeves and get the job done already.

I understand where young men are coming from and offering them an opportunity to make a positive difference is a huge part of the answer. know, Astor Taylor recently wrote that solidarity is a means to these greater ends, but it's also an end in itself because we do want to build a more solidaristic society, a society where people live in harmony with each other in nature. This actually models the kind of society we want to build. I think it's really important.

Yeah. You know, I think it feels like our broader kind of Canadian society, like you just said, Alex, is very individualistic. We have this hyper individualism that's kind of guiding all of these young people. But, you know, what would you say to people who call the solutions that we've talked about today dangerous socialism or worry about government overreach? What would you say to those people?

And first of all, this notion that we have to dismiss something by putting a label on it's really weird to me. So instead of taking on the idea, you just label it as something that make it sound scary. It's interesting that in New York, the Merrillton primary, the candidate didn't run away from the notion of democratic socialism. He didn't get embarrassed. What he said was, yeah, I problems with capitalism and the way we've organized ourselves. And I believe that we should have to do things more collectively and more democratically. So call me what you want. Too often we run away from the accusations instead of taking them on.

People will say, what about freedom? we know that freedom requires this kind of collective, know, people aren't free to have childcare if there's no structure of childcare available, that we are actually contributing to freedom. I think we have to take back the language of freedom. We have to take back the language and stop running away from accusations that we're this or we're that.

Yeah, Linda, and same question to you and maybe just adding on, like, how can we ensure that these crown corporations wouldn't become tools of authoritarianism or something like that?

Well, first of all, their mandates would not be about being authoritarian. It would be to accomplish specific public interests and goals. But just on the broader question about government overreach, what about the ridiculous government overreach I think we're about to embark on with this enormous expansion of our military to the point that we'll be spending five percent of our total spending on of our GDP on the military within 10 years. That, you know, this is strangely pleasing to Donald Trump, but this is an idea that's going to impoverish the other priorities in this country. So, you know, if you want to about government overreach, that to me is a perfect example of government overreach. What we're talking about here is not government.

Overreach is making policy that is broadly in the interests of people and not always having to kowtow and having to adjust to what the market wants. I don't know, do I have time for one quick more example of Crown corporations? Yeah, just don't think a very relevant story to this conversation is the story of very effective crown corporation that we had in this country for years in the area of renewable energy, hydropower. The story of the development of Ontario hydro is in fact an incredible story. And what it comes out of is in the early 1900s, they figured out how to harness the power of Niagara Falls.

And it looked like the people that were going to get control of that were what were called the water barons, the very wealthy, big hydro development companies that were operating in the United States. But in Canada, in Ontario, developed a very strong public movement, participated in by ordinary people, demanding public

They didn't want water barons owning this incredibly important new technology and new form of electricity, hydro power. They wanted the people to own that and they called that public power. And they agitated over a number of years. It was an ongoing struggle, led in part by Adam Beck. Eventually, eventually they won that struggle.

And they won it to the point that the Ontario government, it was a conservative government of James Whitney. He actually created Ontario Hydro as a crown corporation. And I love what he said when he did it. He said, you know, in the future, the things as important as our water will no longer be, And these are His words, the sport and prey of capitalists. They should belong to the people. Now, I didn't do that just to get in a reference to my book, which is called The Sport and Prey of Capitalists. I just truly believe that is just a beautiful, beautiful expression coming from a conservative premier in Canada. It shows you what we're capable of doing. And by the way, Ontario Hydro went on become the largest and highly effective, world's largest publicly owned power company. Very, very successful. Until tragically, you know, all these privatizers got their hands on.

Can I just mention, just Alex, if I may on the public electricity piece, you know, each province tends to have, you know, has its own origin stories of its public electricity. In Quebec, it actually came during the war and here in BC, I think it was in the 50s or 60s, I can't remember. But, oh my God, how fortunate are we now as we get ready to mobilize to confront the climate emergency, that in most of the country, thankfully, electricity remains public. If the object of the exercise is going to be to electrify virtually everything, that's what we have to do in the face of climate. It is a huge advantage that we have that in most jurisdictions in Canada, it's a public enterprise that with a little more vision and imagination, can actually drive a huge amount of that.

I think those are great examples. I want to just jump in and modify the answer I gave you about government overage. I actually think it's a real issue. Given the distrust in government, given the distrust in politics and even in public servants, yeah, people are going to be worried about it, but we're not seeing this as government.

This is not about building government, this is about building democracy. And democracy is not a side issue. The way these agencies are built has to take into account transparency, citizen engagement, accountability, respect for Indigenous rights and reconciliation. We have to do this in a way that's better than what we've done in the past. We have to recognize it.

A lot of what we have to do is trust building. And what we need is more democracy. that we're not talking about building up government for government's sake. That's not the purpose. We're talking about building, as Linda said, power.

Yeah.

Can I just say though, could I just jump in and say, we certainly don't want to build up government for government's sake, but we do want to restore the concept that government is important and can play an incredible role and in fact is really pretty much the only vehicle that allows us to come together collectively in a democracy and do something. And it's the exact opposite of what the market is.

You know, part of the whole goal of the business revolution in last few decades has been to denigrate and make people mistrust government. And they've been so successful in doing that.

I agree with that entirely, that we have to have a movement to rebuild trust in government and to rebuild government as the major tool for collective action. But we also cannot defend government as it has been for the last three decades.

Because it's been mostly private sector oriented government and not very democratic. so what we have to do is rebuild government, I agree with you, rebuild belief in government, but also make government better.

I mean, Erin, I think you're quite right to be asking us, you know, how do we avoid, you know, these enterprises being engaged in overreach or authoritarianism. I think the short answer is we have to be alive to all the risk, always. And look, I'm somebody, I've been super frustrated over the years with BC Hydro and Ontario Hydro and Hydro Quebec. But in the end, we at least have the potential to hold these institutions accountable in a way that will never be true of private corporations. And I think we need to temper the cautions with the recognition that when you think about public electricity or public auto insurance or public broadcasting or public universities or public healthcare or public childcare, our lives are greatly enriched by the fact of all of these things.

Yeah, but I was also thinking of remote issues like electoral reform are not irrelevant to this issue. That the more we strengthen democracy, the more we convince people that their voice votes matter, that their voices matter, that there is equality of voice, equality of vote, that the more we do that, the more they're going to trust that government can do its job.

that we have to revitalize government. And that's not a side issue. think that has to be, and you know, I bring up electoral reform as part of every agenda. We have to convince people that government's theirs, that they own it, that they've chosen it, and that it's accountable to them.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, I know that we could follow all of these threads down and have a conversation all day long about this. But we are coming to a natural close here. And I did want to end with asking all of you, maybe if you had like one piece of advice for people who are trying to create these institutional changes, who are trying to pressure the government to do this, what would it be? Linda, I'll start with you.

One simple piece of advice, I feel like I'm just going to say something predictable like, you know, keep fighting, don't give up. You know, obviously there's enormous forces against us, but it is possible to bring about enormous change. You you look at something like what FDR did, you know, I'm using an American example there, in the, you know, coming out of the depression when people were just in absolute despair and he managed to, you know, get people excited and he took actual action that strengthened government in ways that were very important. For instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority that he created actually was modeled on Ontario Hydro, the idea of public power. Anyway, I'm just saying, think perseverance and the idea, let's get some, I love Seth's idea about the climate core. think that captures everything.

Hmm

Alex, what about you?

Yeah, I would probably have sort of contradictory idea or advice. I would probably say, you've got to be willing to stay the long term. These are big changes and you've got to be persistent. And it doesn't necessarily fit in the electoral cycle. And the second thing I'd say is don't ignore the electoral cycle. Politics matter and you should be working to influence the political electoral cycle at the same time.

You've got to persist even when you lose, but try to win.

And Seth, to you, but I just wanted to also tack on as well, what's the cost of sticking with the status quo?

Well, we know what the status quo looks like. The status quo is an approach to the climate emergency where we have flatlined and just kind of started to bend the curve, but not nearly at the pitch and pace that justice and science demands. And if we continue on this path of simply trying to incentivize households and businesses to do what needs to be done, we're fried. So I guess my advice would be

be to go back to this imagination point. Why do we talk about Marker 2, create new institutions to get the job done? Because too much of what we've seen to date has been this package of tax cuts and rebates and tax credits and rebates and price signals trying to cajole and encourage the private sector to do what needs to be done. It's not going to work. It's no way to prosecute the fight of our lives.

When we face an emergency, we're just going to have to lean in and create new institutions to get the job done.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, the climate emergency demands new solutions, not reformed versions of what failed us, but new publicly owned institutions designed for the scale and speed that this crisis requires. Thank you so much to Linda, to Alex and to Seth for joining us for this essential conversation as we explored marker number two, which is of course, create new institutions to get the job done.

This is the second part of our six markers of climate emergency series. And I'm your host, Erin Blondeau. And be sure to check out our next episode in the series, is marker number three, shift from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures. There is a lot to discuss on that one. If you like what you heard today, please like, subscribe, and share with a friend. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Bye.