Delivering on ambition in our fragile federation

The outcome of the First Ministers Meeting in Saskatoon will be an early post-election indicator of what we can achieve with the Prime Minister’s call for nation-building projects.

Image of a pier at Churchill, Manitoba, on Hudson Bay — from the website of the Artic Gateway Group (AGG). AGG is a partnership of 29 First Nations and 12 isolated communities served by the Hudson Bay Railway (HBR) in Northern Manitoba. Manitoba has made the development of Churchill a proposed “One Canadian Economy” strategic national project for facilitating both north-south trade and global trade with Canada’s Arctic. Announced just before the start of the election, the federal government has already earmarked almost $200 million in infrastructure funding for the HBR and pre-development activities for an upgrade and expansion of the Port of Churchill, owned by AGG.

Canada’s first ministers are meeting this week with a focus on identifying priorities for “nation-building projects” and ways to accelerate their development and implementation. Whenever the federal government pursues an ambitious “national” agenda – and clearly ambition is just what’s needed given Canada’s challenges – some of our fault lines are inevitably exposed. Witness, for example, the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments’ demands that key elements of Canada’s climate strategy be rescinded.

Consider as well the concerns of Indigenous leaders about their exclusion from the meeting (“AFN national chief calls for seat at upcoming federal-provincial meeting: Woodhouse Nepinak tables $349B plan as fast-tracked projects raise concerns over Indigenous and treaty rights” – May 28). The Pledge addressed the importance of including Indigenous peoples three months ago, here (“Ending the sidelining of Indigenous Peoples’ leadership, making good on the Pledge’s call for an all-of-Canada effort” – March 2).

Federal ambition inevitably tests the capacity of our model of federalism to find the sweet spot that reconciles the need for national solidarity and effectiveness and the need for flexibility to accommodate the diversity of interests. Later this week we will explore some of the ideas out there about how we might meet that test – what we should do and what we should not.

This week we consider what the criteria ought to be for selecting the “big national projects.” The Prime Minister has already set out some broad guidance: “We need to move on these projects. So projects that bring Canada together, projects that diversify our economy. Projects that help us export to new markets and really move this forward.”

That all makes sense but recent excellent work by Social Capital Partners puts forward additional criteria our first ministers might well consider. As part of their special series, Always Canada, Never 51, CEO Matthew Mendelsohn makes the case that in determining priorities and designing national projects we need to ask above all “do we want to own, or be owned” but also who benefits and what broader social and environmental goals are served.

We encourage you to read the whole Mendelsohn article (“As the federal government sets out to ‘build, baby, build,’ do we want to own or be owned?” – May 15), but here are are some key passages:

First, we must put our economic sovereignty and ownership of our own assets front and centre. We need more community ownership, employee ownership, local independent business ownership, and indigenous ownership.

And:

We must remake our economic model so that independent entrepreneurs, smaller businesses and new ventures have a real chance to compete against our entrenched, consolidated and financialized corporate sector.

And:

We must use all the tools of strategic industrial policy to catalyze investment in the Canadian economy, which will require new government skills and capacity….If we place popular “missions” at the heart of our industrial strategy – like food security and affordable housing – we can succeed in finding a path through this moment of historic disruption and emerge, truly, as ‘masters in our own home.’

Such a “mission driven” approach recognizes that our economy is embedded in nature and society and that the surest path to success is to integrate social, environmental, and economic objectives – in other words, industrial strategy focused on public value. As one example, Social Capital Partners published this article, by Sarah Doyle, a foremost expert on industrial strategy and Alex Himelfarb, a Pledge for Canada coordinator, on how our national school food program not only contributes to social justice and well-being but also could, indeed should, contribute to our economic and climate objectives. It’s a short piece and we encourage you to read it all (“School meals aren’t just good for kids: they can also be good for industry” - May 2) but here’s how it concludes:

Scaling up access to school meals is a big win for children and families. It could also be a win for agrifood businesses, the climate and workers, contributing to a more resilient, just, sustainable and less dependent Canadian economy – but only if Canada’s newly elected government takes an ambitious collaborative approach to how food is procured.

Ambitious and collaborative. That’s the challenge.

What do you think should be the criteria for selecting and fast-tracking “nation-building projects”?

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(For information about the Pledge for Canada / Engagement pour le Canada, see the “About” page of the Pledge’s publication: here.)