I was pleased to participate in the panel “A Stronger Canada: Building Our Economy in Uncertain Times” at last month’s 2025 Progress Summit hosted by the Broadbent Institute. There, as the video below shows, I argued that to replace fossil fuels, Canada must double its electricity supply by 2050 and that public ownership of the electricity sector is the most cost-effective way to achieve this. We should prioritize highly-unionized, dispatchable hydro and nuclear power, rather than relying on low-union, intermittent wind and solar. But to do this, we must address a more fundamental challenge: how the federal NDP can reorient its electrification policy in the wake of its disastrous April 28 election results.
The NDP’s collapse was not just the product of international headwinds or shifting personalities. Post-election analysis confirms a long-running trend: the party has lost the support of rural and suburban blue-collar workers. Its base now lies mostly among urban, white-collar professionals. This shift is electorally disastrous. These two groups—blue-collar and white-collar workers—have different outlooks and class interests. The NDP has increasingly tailored its policies to the latter, further alienating its traditional working-class base. As blue-collar workers abandon the party, their perspectives disappear from NDP priorities, creating a vicious cycle of decline.
Public ownership of electricity has been one of the great progressive victories in Canadian history. Visionaries like Adam Beck in Ontario, Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, and René Lévesque in Quebec ensured Canadians had access to cheap, abundant, publicly provided power, unlike in the U.S., where private ownership dominates, or the U.K., which privatized under Margaret Thatcher. This model delivered high union density and good jobs for generations.
Yet, this legacy is under attack from all sides. Conservatives have a clear agenda: privatize and commodify. Since the 1990s, they have succeeded in privatizing Nova Scotia Power and Ontario’s Hydro One, and in deregulating Alberta’s electricity sector.
Progressives, influenced by “small is beautiful” thinking from the 1970s, have grown suspicious of large Crown corporations. Instead of defending public utilities, they’ve promoted “community” solutions, models that appeal only to a narrow band of urban professionals with the time and resources to participate in co-ops. This solution is not practical for most households or for the majority of our electricity generation, which is used to power our factories, mines, hospitals and, increasingly, transportation.
The NDP has transformed from a technology-neutral, industrially ambitious party—demanding growth to improve the lives of workers, often through Crown corporations—into one dominated by a low-energy, pastoralist vision of scattered rooftop solar panels and wind turbines.
Environmentalists have also shifted NDP policy, pushing for wind and solar while opposing nuclear and, at times, hydro. But wind and solar have the lowest rates of public ownership and unionization, while hydro and nuclear remain union strongholds. The environmentalist focus on conservation, “the best energy is the energy you don’t use”, has morphed, in some circles, into a “degrowth” ideology that calls for planned reductions in production and consumption. This vision is fundamentally at odds with the needs of working-class Canadians.
The NDP has transformed from a technology-neutral, industrially ambitious party—demanding growth to improve the lives of workers, often through Crown corporations—into one dominated by a low-energy, pastoralist vision of scattered rooftop solar panels and wind turbines. The former model offered construction and operations jobs in a growing, publicly owned grid—jobs that appeal to unionized, blue-collar workers. The latter appeals only to a white-collar urban aesthetic, disconnected from the industrial base of modern society. This retreat from modernity has ceded ground to conservatives, allowing them to push a pro-growth, neoliberal agenda and attract working-class voters.
The path to NDP renewal is clear: embrace a growth-oriented industrial strategy that delivers real material benefits to workers. Rebuild public power. Champion large-scale, unionized electrification. If the party continues to chase a narrow, urban professional base, it faces self-imposed electoral “degrowth” and irrelevance.
The NDP’s future depends on reclaiming its roots and fighting for the workers who built this country. The alternative is a slow fade into political obscurity.
WATCH ‘A Stronger Canada: Building our Economy in Uncertain Times
Click here for more highlights from the 2025 Progress Summit.
