Yesterday, Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan announced that the federal government will begin to engage energy workers through consultations for Just Transition legislation, to hear worker input on transitioning to a net-zero energy sector.
The state of the American labour movement has, since the mid-1970s, been dispiriting. There have, of course, been moments of creative and inspiring resistance, but the predominant story has been a chronicle of decline: private-sector unionization rates below where they were a century ago, the abject failure to make breakthroughs in key emerging sectors, defensive stagnation in bargaining achievements, and – election-year rhetoric aside – the political marginalization of working-class concerns.
The climate mobilization in Canada, as I’ve written in previous columns, has yet to feel like a grand societal undertaking. Among the bold initiatives that would send such a signal — a Youth Climate Corps.
Remember during the 2016 Democratic Primary when Hillary Clinton ineptly said she was “going to put a lot of coal miners […] out of business”? The Bernie crowd — myself included — had a good time with this gaffe, finding in it a microcosm of a certain centrist Democratic politics that touts supposedly progressive policy (in this case, clean energy) while treating the needs of working people as an afterthought, at best.
