Canada Doesn’t Need a "Green New Deal"

There are few left-wing movements in the world so Americanized as the Canadian Left.

In 1935, in the lead-up to a general election, Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett called for a “New Deal,” on the US model of the same name. Voters weren’t convinced by Bennett’s last-minute conversion to economic populism, and Bennett was ousted, along with any future for a Canadian New Deal.

This fact has not stopped Canadian political leaders from calling for a Canadian Green New Deal as shorthand for an all-consuming climate policy. There is no greater advocate for a Canadian Green New Deal than Avi Lewis, who now leads the New Democratic Party. Lewis famously collaborated on the short, viral video about AOC and the GND, “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” and has made a CGND one of the key platforms of his campaign for the NDP leadership.

There are aspects of his vision that are well thought out and in many cases, uniquely Canadian. Lewis calls for the expansion of “green” crown corporations to “mass-produce and install electric heat pumps, rooftop and balcony solar and backup batteries; support new neighbourhood energy utilities that provide geothermal heating and cooling; manufacture electric-battery delivery vans and buses, and farm equipment.” Most Canadians interact with crown corporations—what Americans would know as state-owned enterprises—every day when they want to buy beer, take the train, or send a piece of mail. They are explicitly framed in the language of resisting US tariffs and strengthening the Canadian economy.

So why frame this as part of a “Green New Deal”? In the US itself, the GND framing is of questionable use: while voters like the concrete policy proposals often raised in association with it, the idea of a Green New Deal itself has arguably failed as a rhetorical strategy. Few unions actually ended up supporting it, it lacks the class basis of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and right-wing disparaging combined with the general political inexperience of many of its boosters damaged its reputation.

But at least in the US, there is a foundational American nation-shaping event to point to as a reference. In the New Deal, the country itself was remade, both politically and physically. Infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam have left a lasting impression and serve as a physical reminder of the promise of the New Deal in the American psyche. This is the theoretical strength of the Green New Deal in the US. It appeals to what people already know: memories of their grandparents, infrastructure projects they pass on their way to work, and policies that they interact with every day of their lives. Even where the GND is polarizing, it establishes itself within a clear lineage of American history.

The Canadian Left’s obsession with a GND, by contrast, is simply bizarre. There is no foundational event of an original New Deal to draw on, or Depression-era infrastructure to point to; it is a policy based on an imported logic, framing, history, and politics.