Building an abundant Canada beyond Bill 5

National Observer

16-07-2025

Canadians are living in a time of paradoxical scarcity. GDP has never been higher, but there are not enough houses for every family. Electronics have never been cheaper, but there are not enough doctors for every patient. The stock market shatters record after record, but there are not enough good-paying jobs for every worker.
Canadian politics, in turn, has become a politics of scarcity. A politics is so consumed with the need to keep working people afloat, that we have abandoned visions of prosperity. A politics that looks to the past with nostalgia, instead of to the future with hope.
To solve the paradox of scarcity, we need to imagine something better; something abundant. We need to dare to be hopeful.
Imagine a Canada where your home is heated and cooled by energy so clean it doesn't emit an ounce of CO2, and so cheap, you barely pay attention to your utility bill. Where your fridge is stocked with fresh produce grown in a vertical greenhouse, just a few miles down the road. Where your daily commute and cross-country vacation travel is on fast, reliable, electric public transit. Where you get paid more to work less because of the wonders of artificial intelligence (A.I.)
One hundred years ago, this was a utopia. Today, it's eminently possible. Solar panels are now cheaper than fossil fuels. The Netherlands — a country half the size of New Brunswick — is the second-largest exporter of vegetables in the world because of vertical farming. A.I. technology may be as revolutionary as electricity.
If we can imagine an abundant Canada, we can build it. But to do that, we need to build more of what we need — public infrastructure, greenhouses, renewable energy and transmission lines. Not more of what corporate profits demand — pipelines, gold mines and ammonium nitrate plants.
It also means that we need to use what non-renewable resources we have — critical minerals, aggregates, precious metals — to build what society needs and not what drives corporate returns.
If we can imagine an abundant Canada, we can build it. But to do that, we need to build more of what we need — public infrastructure, greenhouses, renewable energy and transmission lines, writes Luke Hildebrand
Unfortunately, we are barrelling headlong in the exact wrong direction. Ontario's Conservative government has enacted Bill 5 — Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, 2025, and Canada's Liberal government enacted Bill C5 — The One Canadian Economy Act.
Both pieces of legislation fast-track corporate mineral extraction and crude oil projects by gutting environmental protections and trampling labour rights. They give cabinet the power to waive any environmental or labour law, which slows down corporate extraction.
The Liberal and Conservative Bill 5s amplify a politics of scarcity. They speak to the fact that we need more infrastructure projects and skilled jobs. But they set out to accomplish this by doing more of what caused this scarcity in the first place: re-allocating societal resources to projects which maximize corporate returns.
Instead of advancing the long-term public good, they prioritize short-term private profit. These policies lead in only one direction: more corporate profit, more emissions and fewer sustainable jobs and resources to build a green economy.
The Bill 5s effectively shunt the public service to the side, so supposedly uber-efficient companies can get things built. They manifest a worldview that the public service is devoid of the know-how to build projects, and only the private sector can save us.
This is a fairytale. Corporations do what is profitable, not what is desirable. The same public services that organized the Canadian economy for two world wars, built the trans-Canada highway and developed the Canadarm which constructed the International Space Station, can coordinate and build the green economy we need.
But to do it, we need to re-tool and re-empower the public service. For decades, the public service has been regulated to fail. Consecutive governments have piled more red tape, more regulations and more reporting requirements upon civil servants. Instead of a public service which innovates and builds, we now have a public service that fills out forms. Public servants — some of our best, brightest and most publicly-minded citizens — spend their time pushing paper instead of breaking ground.
Canadians are hurting, but the Bill 5s are not the antidote.
We need a politics of abundance. We have too little of what we need — good jobs, renewable energy, affordable housing — and too much of what we don't need which lines the pockets of corporations — cheap electronics, appliances designed to break and gas-guzzling cars.
Politics is about priorities. We need to use the precious non-renewable resources we have for the projects of the highest societal importance, not the most profitable corporate schemes.
But above all, we need to rediscover our belief in ourselves. To believe that we can accomplish more if we plan, build and design projects and the economy for the common good, than if we resign ourselves to what is profitable in the short-term. We need to believe in Canada, in Canadians, and build our common future together.