How the Abundance Movement Is Dividing the Left

Website Editor: An important read here! “To just say we are going to go back to what we’ve always done, which is, dig, drill, chop, is such a missed opportunity, [and dangerous in a time of climate crisis!]” McDowell said.

“What they’re not hearing or listening to is members of the public saying, ‘You need to build right. You need to build for the future.’” 

Nov. 7, 2025

Calls for fewer rules and faster building have found a progressive audience, including in the BC government.

American broccoli and carrots may be languishing on B.C. shelves, but one U.S import still has a straight shot to Canada’s halls of power.

Abundance, a book by California-based podcaster and New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson, is helping shape Canada’s fast-track agenda with its rallying cry for scrapping regulations in the pursuit of economic growth.

This spring, the B.C. government tried to have Klein and Thompson present to the NDP caucus. “An appropriate time that fit everyone’s schedules could not be found, and no presentation occurred,” said the premier’s office in an email.

The Tyee has learned that the book’s influence has permeated upper levels of federal and provincial governments. A spokesperson for the B.C. Office of the Premier confirmed that an official even gave a copy to an unnamed member of the press gallery.

Ezra Klein has also acknowledged its influence in Canada. “A lot of people in government are reading the book,” he said in an August episode of his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

Frequently dubbed an “airport book,” Abundance is heavy on catchphrases and light on specifics. It argues that decades of social justice movements and environmental laws have gone too far, creating a straitjacket of rules that inhibit the U.S. government’s ability to build big things like it once did.

“We envision a future not of less, but of more,” the authors write, after a futuristic introduction featuring a life of AI-enhanced and solar-powered ease replete with “star pills” that reverse aging and curb hunger.

By the authors’ own admission, Abundance is more than just a book. It’s a pitch to disoriented liberals for a new political order shaped around the ethos of more — more energy, more major projects, more homes. “Can we solve our problems with supply?” Klein and Thompson write, igniting a debate among those across the U.S. left who answer “Yes,” “No” and “It depends.”

Shortly after the book was published in March, Canadian governments across the political spectrum released laws aimed at cutting regulations and permitting processes from major development projects.

BC Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote doesn’t think that’s a coincidence: “I believe it’s been widely read within the government and has contributed to the ethos of their legislation.”

Abundance found Canada and B.C. in turbulent times, racked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and their global fallouts, but rooted in the longer-standing issues of a resource economy inclined to booms and busts. Rising inequality and job losses in rural communities punctuate these crises, and governments are scrambling to contain the political fallout.

Though its case study is rooted south of the border, Abundance frames itself as a prescription for similar kinds of economic and political malaise.

But it’s not acting alone. The book has ties to politicians and financiers seeking to contain the growing movement of some working-class voters towards Bernie Sanders-style economic populism on the left, and others towards Trump’s MAGA movement on the far right.

“We are in a rare period in American history where the decline of one political order makes space for another,” write Klein and Thompson in their book.

Coming off the heels of nail-biting federal and provincial elections, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s and B.C. Premier David Eby’s wins narrowly dodged comparably shifting political winds. And their governments appear to be taking notes.

The left’s ‘divided soul’

Abundance bases its prescriptions on lessons learned from history, beginning with the 1930s-era New Deal, when the United States’ ability to build new things was unparalleled. But it came at a cost: all that dam building and coal mining led to flooded lands and black sooty skies, and it prompted the creation of an environmental movement aimed at curbing development’s worst excesses.

That’s when the left developed its “divided soul,” say the authors, resulting in an approach that attempted to marry economic growth with an ethos consumed by what the authors call a “politics of scarcity.”

The problem, in the authors’ telling, spun out from there. Leftists became fixated on the project of curbing capitalism’s social and environmental ills through redistributive policies such as Medicaid and food stamps and through laws to protect air, water and workers’ rights. They de-prioritized economic growth, creating “liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.”

“The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly,” they write. “The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by progress.”

When it comes to solutions, Klein and Thompson keep it vague on which laws and safeguards they’d keep and which they’d scrap, noting that “what’s needed here is a change in the political culture, not just a change in the legislation.”

“To unmake this machine will be painful,” they add. “It will require questioning treasured nostrums and splitting old alliances.”

But the book doesn’t specify whose pain and which alliances are at stake.

The costs of speed

In the months following Abundance’s publication, fast-track laws began to emerge across Canada.

In Ontario it was the Conservatives’ April introduction of Bill 5, the “Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act,” which creates special zones where provincial regulations and environmental rules no longer apply.

In B.C., the NDP followed suit weeks later, announcing a “collection of tools” to “get things built faster,” including the ability to remove the need for pending permits or environmental assessments from chosen projects.

By June, the federal government had joined in with Bill C-5, which, similar to B.C.’s and Ontario’s bills, could scrap environmental assessments and, in a new twist, could deem projects effectively pre-approved.

South of the border, California called 2025 its “year of abundance,” highlighting a stream of deregulatory moves such as removing environmental assessment from tech facilities. The fast-track approach was a long-brewing goal of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’” Newsom said in 2023 — as quoted by Ezra Klein in the New York Times — on the struggle to build high-speed rail.

Carney evoked a similar retro frame in his pitch for Bill C-5, noting, “We used to build big things in Canada, and we used to build quickly.”

As a case study, Carney cited the 1950s-era construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a 3,000-kilometre system of channels reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, which “took just five years to build.”

But that velocity came with consequences.

The construction of the seaway caused the deaths of at least 25 workers.

The seaway also drove Kahnawà:ke communities off their land — a fact the government later copped to by paying an extra 10 per cent on meagre compensation fees “for forcible taking.”

In the 1990s, the Piikani Nation’s legal efforts to resist displacement by the Oldman River Dam in Alberta triggered the country’s first environmental assessment law. Other provinces soon followed.

“Environmental assessment laws are essentially a look-before-you-leap approach,” Jessica Clogg, senior counsel and executive director at West Coast Environmental Law, told The Tyee. While the laws are wildly imperfect, she added, they establish a baseline Clogg wants to keep.

“It’s this idea that we can avoid expensive disasters and harm after the fact by thoughtfully assessing the risks and benefits of a project in a comprehensive, transparent and ideally inclusive way up front,” she said.

Abundance’s authors, on the other hand, describe the environmental law movement’s efforts as a puzzle that’s been solved.

“They succeeded, often brilliantly,” write Klein and Thompson, but “they were responses to the crisis of a different time.”

The mismatch is now of a different character, Klein and Thompson write. In short, now it’s the environmental laws getting in the way of the better world they sought to create.

Will ‘cutting red tape’ work?

Are zoning rules and environmental laws a material block in getting projects built?

It depends.

Take housing, for example, one of Klein and Thompson’s key focus areas. A recent study found a modest 0.8 per cent expansion of local housing stock in the United States through zoning reform, an increase the study authors call “inadequate in the short term.”

In B.C., limited research has found stronger effects, including that zoning rules likely contributed “strongly” to high housing prices in cities like Vancouver and Victoria. The province introduced zoning reform in 2023, announcing that it would pursue “sweeping changes” to push cities to boost housing density.

But resource and infrastructure projects are another issue. Klein and Thompson present a few examples of such projects, including a stifled high-speed rail project originally intended to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco, later rerouted to run between the less populated and less-contentious-to-build regions of Merced and Bakersfield. Reasons for the rail project’s malaise are varied, including, to the authors’ point, a litany of environmental lawsuits. But it was also thanks to the fallout from a slew of odd planning choices — including the original route choice, which would have routed the line through agricultural lands and cities rather than alongside a pre-existing major highway, and a decision to move ahead with construction without acquiring the necessary land beforehand.

Compared with the United States, the case for getting natural resource projects built by scrapping regulation is even less clear in Canada, Clogg told The Tyee, noting that U.S. state law and its litigious legal system are vastly different.

“The premise that the reason they are not happening is because of overregulation is fundamentally false in the Canadian context,” she said. “Canadian legislation tends to have a lot of discretion.”

Clogg said judicial review processes tend to afford wide powers to decision-makers.

“If anything, we suffer from gaps in our regulatory framework and weaknesses,” Clogg said.

Mining, for example, is a key target of both B.C. and federal fast-track agendas, but a recent study found regulation was a factor in just three of 20 stymied projects in B.C. The most common factor? Global markets.

Removing environmental laws will only undo needed safeguards, Clogg said.

During his Bill 15 announcement, Eby referenced two unnamed examples of delayed school projects, one kept waiting for a city’s community plan, and the other due to a ditch protected under B.C.’s Water Sustainability Act. He mentioned no evidence of such delays for major resource projects.

“One anecdote doesn’t make a trend,” Valeriote told The Tyee.

“It’s almost certain that we cut back too far, and then in five years we’re saying, ‘Oh, well, this major damage was done.’”

Communities’ economic struggles aren’t a fiction, said Brynn Bourke, executive director of the BC Building Trades, who hears from members that the province’s permitting processes can stall development.

“Delay in getting permits is real,” she said, adding that fixing the issue is all the more imperative in the context of the province’s shifting economy, where, for example, the union’s members previously employed in the province’s closing pulp mills are now left looking for work.

“We have seen it as a deindustrialization of our province, which has been led by the collapse of our forest industry that has been devastating for communities,” she said.

But Bourke is wary of attempts to build at all costs. “I wouldn’t trade that project prioritization or urgency in terms of review for the rigour that I expect governance to bring to reviewing these projects,” she said.

Rule-cutting can also backfire.

It is true, for example, that switching fossil-fuel-powered homes, cars and industries to electricity will require more power and, inevitably, more land to generate it on. But a broad theme in academic literature suggests forcing renewable projects through is a path to more opposition, not less. Instead, researchers frequently call for measures that ensure affected communities have a chance to benefit.

Forcing projects through instead of opting for thorough assessments can also lead to their wholesale cancellation. Former prime minister Steven Harper’s omnibus Bill C-38, dubbed the “Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act,” scrapped Canada’s Environmental Assessment Act, replacing it with a limited process that didn’t require a review panel, for example.

The law didn’t succeed in expediting the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Instead it was quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal because it offered “only a brief, hurried and inadequate opportunity” for First Nations consultation. “Rubber stamp” consultation, the court found, was inadequate.

Over decades, a deepening bedrock of court cases has established a clear footing for First Nations whose title is inscribed in Canada’s Constitution, said Robert Phillips, political executive with the First Nations Summit.

“Aboriginal title is very real, and it’s here to stay,” he said. “They have to respect our laws.”

Abundance makes no mention of Indigenous rights throughout its 226 pages.

The tip of an ‘Abundance’ iceberg

Abundance sits atop a bedrock of organizations and financiers intent on advancing a particular remedy to growing political polarization and unrest.

Among them are the Abundance Network, the Abundance Institute, the Niskanen Center and the Institute for Progress. They convene at events like the Abundance Conference, now in its second year, and are funded by common means, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, whose group Open Philanthropy is “one of the most active funders” of the movement, and the Koch network-funded State Policy Network, a group renowned for its union-busting and climate misinformation efforts.

These groups frequently argue that theirs is a big-tent network, capable of convening diverse interests and ends. But they unite around one thing they can get behind, and it’s best summarized by controversial columnist and Niskanen Center senior fellow Matthew Yglesias: “We have to get back to a faster, more accelerant rate of growth.”

That focal goal also pits them against a growing field of economic populists on the right and on the left, recently crystallized under the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drawing crowds of over 30,000.

“We’re in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics,” said Derek Thompson in an interview with Lex Fridman’s podcast.

“What we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends.”

For Klein and Thompson, those “ends” are a better world, made possible by the means of money and technology. They write, for example, that “as societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean the air and water.”

But there is no evidence that wealth and technology automatically result in a cleaner environment. Instead, rich countries tend to offshore their impacts elsewhere.

Growth also frequently fails to make people’s lives better, says writer and essayist Luke Savage, adding that corporations are designed first and foremost to seek profit, a goal that “often conflicts pretty directly with the public interest.” Perhaps this is why messaging on the Abundance agenda trailed economic populism in recent U.S. voter polls. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, which Klein and Thompson cite as a period of “interlocking crises of scarcity, supply and unaffordability,” global billionaires grew their wealth by 54 per cent.

And corporate success and employment don’t always go hand in hand. In Canada, even though oil production has grown by 47 per cent in the last decade, jobs in the oil and gas industry fell by 35,000. Meanwhile, companies have left governments with billions in unpaid oil and gas well cleanup fees.

So far, Canada’s fast-track regime is heavy on benefits to private companies and light on efforts to shape a better path ahead for people, said Liz McDowell, senior campaigns director for Stand.earth.

“To just say we are going to go back to what we’ve always done, which is, dig, drill, chop, is such a missed opportunity,” McDowell said.

“What they’re not hearing or listening to is members of the public saying, ‘You need to build right. You need to build for the future.’”