ILPC 2027

The end of the global commodity boom and 2014 crash in oil prices brought an abrupt and early end to Canada’s hopes for a fossil fuel-reliant growth strategy in the 21st century (Laxer 2015). Out of the economic and political wreckage of this reversal, new governments at the federal and provincial level elected in the past several years, backed by novel coalitions of labour and liberal-reformist interests, have begun improvising an economic adjustment program for an emissions-constrained world.

In this context, the labour movement and its allies have championed the priorities of a Just Transition to a low-carbon economy. Inspired by union efforts to defend the incomes and re-employment opportunities of chemical industry workers facing displacement by health, safety, and environmental regulation (Leopold 2007; Stevis and Felli 2015), in the 1990s and 2000s, Just Transition has come to apply to workers impacted by climate-change policies (CEP 1998; ITUC 2009). Since 2014, the demand for Just Transition policies in Canada has taken on additional urgency, as new experiments with carbon pricing frameworks threaten to compound the prolonged industrial restructuring following the Great Recession.

To ensure a Just Transition for Canadian workers, robust labour-market programs and income support measures are vital. Yet unions confront the legacy of 25 years of neoliberal labour-market restructuring and an already anaemic state capacity to develop and implement labour-market policy (McBride 1998; Stanford and Vosko 2004; Drummond 2009). Is it possible to achieve a fair and equitable transition for workers displaced by climate-change policies in the context of a neoliberal and deregulated approach to labour adjustment, training, and unemployment insurance? And how might unions ensure that workers’ interests are articulated in the transition process, now that tripartite institutions and governance structures granting labour a modicum of influence have largely been dismantled (Gunderson and Sharpe 1998)?

This paper will examine the neoliberal political, economic and institutional forces shaping the development of a Just Transition framework in Canada. Against the backdrop of spreading labour-market deregulation and a hollowing-out of labour-market institutions, the paper will explore the shifting and contested meaning of Just Transition for unions and policy-makers. Using the Canadian experience, the paper will ask whether the concept of Just Transition can be made to conform, Procrustean-style, to a neoliberal economic and labour-market context, or whether unions in liberal market economies must simultaneously advance a post-neoliberal vision of labour-market and industrial strategy.