Feds Respond to Smith’s Remarks That ‘Just Transition’ Legislation Will Cut 2.7 Million Jobs: Report

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 20, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Patrick Doyle)

The federal Department of Natural Resources says the government’s proposed “just transition” legislation won’t eliminate jobs—as critics has said seemed to be implied by an internal briefing document—but will instead create more jobs, according to a media report.

“The federal government’s approach to sustainable jobs is about creating jobs, not eliminating them,” department press secretary Keean Nembhard told CBC News on Jan. 17.

The department was responding to media reports about a briefing note prepared for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson in June 2022, which said Ottawa’s planned “transition to a low-carbon economy will have an uneven impact across sectors, occupations, and regions, and create significant labour market disruptions.”

The note referred to five sectors where it said “we expect that larger scale transformation will take place.” The biggest are the building sector, which employs about 1.4 million workers; and transportation, which has about 642,000 workers. These were followed by the agriculture sector, 292,00o workers; energy, 202,000 workers; and manufacturing, 193,000 workers.

According to these figures, in total over 2.7 million Canadian workers would be affected.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said in a Jan. 17 Twitter post that this “should concern Albertans, & frankly all Canadians, that [Trudeau’s] ‘Just Transition’ plan will eliminate 2.7 million jobs- according to a Liberal memo.”

“Alberta’s energy industry & our workers are world-class,” she added.

However, Natural Resources Canada says that the numbers referenced in the briefing note had been misinterpreted and that they were pointing out the overall workforce sizes of various industries rather than expected job losses.

“Those industries are identified because global economic shifts could affect them,” said Nembhard.

‘New Opportunities’

The June 2022 briefing note posed a hypothetical question asking, “What sectors and regions will be most affected by a transition to a low-carbon economy?”

One of the responses said that certain regions in Canada—“particularly in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, where communities are more reliant on carbon intensive industries”—will “likely be disproportionally affected by the transition to a low carbon economy.”

“The oil and gas sector in particular is a large contributor to the GDP of Alberta and Newfoundland,” it said, noting that the sector accounts for over 27 percent of Alberta’s GDP and more than 36 percent of Newfoundland and Labrador’s.

“I want to help workers across Canada by providing them with training and skills development so they can take advantage of new opportunities for economic growth and job creation and fully participate in a low-carbon economy,” said one of the answers prepared for Wilkinson.

Wilkinson said in early January 2023 that the federal government plans on bringing its “just transition” legislation forward this year, which will aim to help workers in Canada’s oil and gas sector move into green energy jobs.

“I do not believe that the challenge we are going to face is that there are workers who are displaced that will not find other good-paying jobs,” Wilkinson told CBC News at the time. “I am actually quite worried that there are so many opportunities … we will not have enough workers to fill the jobs.”