At the 2025 Progress Summit hosted by the Broadbent Institute, a panel titled “A Stronger Canada: Building Our Economy in Uncertain Times” featured a discussion on the future of Canada’s energy infrastructure. There I argued that replacing fossil fuels will require Canada to double its electricity supply by 2050 — and that public ownership of the electricity sector is the most cost-effective way to achieve this. I made the case for prioritizing highly unionized, dispatchable hydro and nuclear power rather than relying on low-union, intermittent wind and solar. But beneath the technical questions lies a deeper political challenge: the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) must rethink its electrification policy in the wake of its disastrous results in Canada’s recent election.

The NDP’s collapse was not just the product of international headwinds or shifting personalities. Postelection analysis confirms a long-running trend: the party has lost the support of rural and suburban blue-collar workers. Its base now lies mostly among urban, white-collar professionals. This shift is electorally disastrous. These two groups — blue-collar and white-collar workers — have different outlooks and class interests. The NDP has increasingly tailored its policies to the latter, further alienating its traditional working-class base. As blue-collar workers abandon the party, their perspectives disappear from NDP priorities, creating a vicious cycle of decline.

Public ownership of electricity was once a signature achievement of Canadian progressivism. Visionaries like Adam Beck in Ontario, Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, and René Lévesque in Quebec ensured Canadians had access to cheap, abundant, publicly provided power. This model, unlike the US system dominated by private utilities, or the UK’s post-Thatcher privatizations, delivered high union density and stable, well-paying jobs for generations of Canadian workers.

Yet this legacy is under attack from all sides. The Right has long served a privatization agenda. Since the 1990s, it has succeeded in privatizing Nova Scotia Power, selling off Ontario’s Hydro One, and deregulating Alberta’s electricity sector.

On the Left, the threat is more ambiguous. Influenced by a “small is beautiful” ethos from the 1970s, many progressives have grown suspicious of large Crown corporations — Canada’s version of state-owned utilities. Instead of defending public utilities, they’ve promoted “community” solutions, models that appeal only to a narrow band of urban professionals with the time and resources to participate in co-ops. These projects do little to meet the needs of most households or support the scale of electricity generation required for industrial and public infrastructure, from factories and mines to hospitals and, increasingly, transportation.

This ideological shift has reshaped the NDP itself. Once an industrially ambitious, technology-neutral party that embraced growth through Crown corporations and large-scale public works, the NDP now increasingly advocates for a low-energy, pastoralist vision — one of scattered rooftop solar panels and wind turbines. That aesthetic may resonate with urban professionals, but it offers little to the working class. The industrial model delivered construction and maintenance jobs on a growing grid, under public ownership and strong union representation. The newer vision lacks a material base — and, in many cases, lacks any appeal to the industrial working class at all.

Environmental movements have played a part in this transformation. NDP policy increasingly pushes for wind and solar while opposing nuclear and, at times, hydro. But wind and solar have the lowest rates of public ownership and unionization, while hydro and nuclear remain union strongholds. And thanks to hydro and nuclear providing more than 70 percent of its electricity, Canada has one of the least emission-intensive large grids on the globe, alongside France (nuclear), Sweden (hydro and nuclear), and Norway (hydro). In spite of this, the traditional environmentalist focus on conservation — “the best energy is the energy you don’t use” — has recently morphed, in some circles, into a “degrowth” ideology that calls for planned reductions in production and consumption. This vision is fundamentally at odds with the needs of working-class Canadians.

The retreat from modern industrial capacity has had political consequences. In ceding industrial ambition and energy development to the Right, the NDP has allowed the Conservative Party to claim the mantle of growth, jobs, and working-class representation — however distorted these claims may be in practice. A party once grounded in labor now risks permanent estrangement from the very people it was created to represent.

The path to NDP renewal is clear: Embrace a growth-oriented industrial strategy — one that delivers real material benefits to workers. Rebuild public power. Champion large-scale, unionized electrification. Reclaiming this tradition means more than policy correction; it’s a question of political survival. If the party continues to chase a narrow, urban professional base, it faces self-imposed electoral “degrowth” and irrelevance.

The NDP’s future depends on reclaiming its roots and fighting for the workers who built this country. The alternative is a slow fade into political obscurity.