By Ken Zino
Canada, with its abundant material resources and its advanced automotive industry with extensive production and qualified workforces, is ideally positioned to thrive in the inevitable electric vehicle industrial revolution. The entire EV universe can only grow as the devastating effects of climate change from fossil-fuel use intensifies. Canada’s federal government not only recognizes this, but is actively pursuing an industrial policy that is beneficial for its constituents as well as for the environment.
Free market ideologues, many of them backed by fossil-fuel-providers, disdain such progressive thinking. They are in my direct experience positively scornful of a federally directed industrial policy such as the one established in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act*. Not a single Republican ideologue -- idiotologue? -- voted for it. This, arguably, is the United States’ first significant climate law since congressional hearings were first conducted on the environment 40 years ago. Such anti-government ideology reminds me of my experience over the years with Republican-led governments, which are demonstrably harmful in innumerable ways to all but the ultra-rich.
More importantly, in my view, the Inflation Reduction Act also represents significant change in political philosophy toward rational thinking over ideology and sundry idiots. As I understand it, this policy change soundly reasons that the U.S. shouldn’t let the misleadingly labeled free market move, say, all semiconductor production offshore to areas that are hostile to U.S. interests, or let it mock and abandon trade agreements or vital international alliances.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discussed expanding Canada’s and Germany’s deep and long-standing partnership in areas of common interest, including trade and investment, clean energy and clean technology, and global climate leadership. The leaders and ministers expressed their resolve to address the impacts of climate change, including the importance of expanding the international coverage of carbon pricing in the lead-up to COP27, according to an official government readout of the meeting.
To read Zino’s entire commentary, click on The Gray Area.