Keep Canada's Wealth In Canadian Hands
For far too long, government after government has handed out billions in hard-earned taxpayer dollars to corporations. Over the last thirty years, corporate subsidies have ballooned from $3.8 billion in 1994 to more than $40.8 billion in 2025. Over that same period, we lost more than a quarter of all manufacturing jobs, nearly half a million of them, and nearly half of all forestry jobs.
These elites took our money, drained our resources, and siphoned the wealth out of our country, hollowing us out into a resource colony. Working people across Mission—Matsqui know what it looks like to watch their mill slow down, their plant close, or an entire industry collapse while the politicians who are supposed to protect them are busy taking meetings with the same elites hollowing out our country.
A renewed national industrial strategy means creating good family-supporting union jobs, and ensuring Canada’s wealth and resources remain in Canadian hands. It means young workers entering the job market knowing those jobs will still be here in ten or twenty years, and older workers knowing the job they get at 45 is the one they can retire from. Canada's wealth belongs to Canadians. It's time we took it back.
Keeping Our Mills Open:
A National Forestry Corporation
Canada's forests are a national treasure and a source of good, family-supporting jobs, but too often, raw logs are exported and processed abroad while Canadian mill workers lose their livelihoods to decisions made in distant corporate boardrooms. New Democrats believe in discouraging bulk exports of our unprocessed natural resources and developing value-added jobs in Canada instead. British Columbia lost more than 30 sawmills and 13,000 forestry jobs between 2015 and 2023, while raw log exports from B.C. increased by more than 50 per cent. Canadian-owned corporations like Island Timberlands, TimberWest, Western Forest Products, and Interfor ship millions of cubic metres of raw logs out of the province every year. Most of B.C.'s wood is still processed here, by companies like Canfor, the single largest holder of timber harvesting rights in B.C., whose majority shareholder is Jim Pattison's Great Pacific Capital Corp, and companies like West Fraser Timber, whose largest shareholder is also the Jim Pattison Group at 11.4 per cent of shares, along with Tolko Industries, Mercer International, and Mosaic Forest Management, all majority Canadian owned. However, while being Canadian-owned, these corporations sell most of our wood products, 66 per cent, to global markets, much of which goes to the US. Rather than using the logs felled in our forests, processed in our mills, and made by Canadian hands, these logs instead profit the very corporations ripping us off, like the Jim Pattison Group. We could be using the logs felled and milled here to build our homes and address the housing crisis we’re facing, but instead they’re used to profit foreign elites, while they look for every opportunity to cut as many Canadian jobs as they can. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Harrop-Procter Forest Products, a mill in the Kootenay Lake region, is run by the Harrop-Procter Community Co-op. The mill provides good, family-supporting jobs while milling lumber. Co-ops like the Cowichan Lake Community Forest Co-op give the workers actually milling our lumber a chance to own the business, while cutting out the middle-man profiteering off of our resources. With a National Worker Ownership Fund, the federal government can step up and ensure logging operations as well as lumber mills keep running here in B.C., providing good, family-supporting jobs, while ensuring the wealth created by workers remains in their hands. However, when workers cannot buy out closing mills themselves, we must ensure these mills keep running, and we keep producing logs for the province and the country. That’s why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are calling for the establishment of a National Forestry Corporation. We’re calling for the lumber produced by this corporation to be sold to Canadian developers and homebuilders at subsidized rates, driving down the cost of home construction, and ensuring our forests serve working Canadians rather than the elites.
A National Railway Corporation
Two corporations control 95 per cent of freight tonnes that move by rail across this country. CN and CP answer to their shareholders, not to the farmers of the Fraser Valley, the manufacturers trying to compete, or the small businesses across our riding paying whatever rate the duopoly sets. It wasn't always this way. The Canadian National Railway was publicly owned for over seven decades, and it helped build the stable, prosperous Canada that working people could actually rely on. Then, in 1995, Chrétien’s Liberal government privatized it. In the years immediately following privatization, CN cut nearly 10,000 jobs and dramatically reduced maintenance on rural branch lines, abandoning service to communities that had no alternative. Since privatization, freight rates for staples like grain have shot up, further squeezing Canadian farmers, while CN rakes in billions in profit. A 2018 federal audit found systemic problems with railway service reliability and rate practices that cost grain farmers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. For farmers in the Fraser Valley, CN and CP's pricing power affects the cost of getting product to market and importing supplies. That’s why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are calling for the establishment of a National Railway Corporation, a publicly owned freight railway that keeps transportation costs low for farmers, manufacturers, and all working Canadians. A public railway isn't just about moving goods; it's about ensuring that the more than a million small businesses and half a million farmers across our country can compete without being gouged by a duopoly that answers only to its shareholders, thereby freeing up these businesses to invest more throughout our economy. This is how we rebuild Canada’s middle class, and restore the prosperity, security and stability working Canadians could once rely on.
A National Mining Corporation
Canada sits on some of the most significant deposits of critical minerals in the world: lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper that will power the next economy. And yet, we dig them up and ship them out raw, while the wealth, the processing, the manufacturing, and the good family-supporting jobs they create go with them. Canada is home to more than 4.4 per cent of the world's lithium deposits, the sixth largest on earth, alongside significant reserves of cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, the materials that EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines require. In 2023, Canada exported more than $13 billion in unprocessed critical minerals, while importing the finished products back at a premium. The processing and manufacturing that should be happening here, that would create thousands of skilled, well-paying jobs, is happening in China, the United States, and Europe, because decades of resource policy have treated Canadian minerals as raw materials to be extracted and exported rather than as the foundation of a domestic industrial strategy. The Fraser Valley sits at the nexus of transport corridors connecting B.C.'s Interior mining regions to Pacific ports; there is no geographic reason why this processing cannot happen here. Yet our country is being hollowed out into a resource colony by foreign elites, who extract our wealth and siphon it out of Canada. New Democrats believe Canada's wealth should remain in Canadian hands. That's why we're fighting to end the raw bulk export of Canada's critical minerals, using federal trade powers to mandate domestic processing before export, so that the wealth created by Canada's resources builds Canadian manufacturing, Canadian construction, and Canadian energy infrastructure. But you can't mandate domestic processing without building the capacity to deliver it: that's why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are calling for the establishment of a National Mining Corporation, operating on federal Crown lands and in Canada's territories, to ensure the processing capacity exists here, the jobs are here, and the profit stays here, in public hands, for the public good. The minerals that will power the next economy are sitting in Canadian ground. They belong to all of us. It is time the jobs, the wealth, and the future they represent remain in Canadian hands.
Turning Old Factories Into New Jobs
Communities across the country are watching old factories sit empty while the equipment for the next economy, solar panels, batteries, energy-efficient building components, gets built somewhere else, by someone else's workers. That's why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are fighting for a National Renewable Factories Corporation, to purchase and repurpose idle industrial sites for the production of renewable energy components and energy-efficient infrastructure. Instead of watching our industrial capacity rust away, we can put it back to work, and put people back on the job, building what this country needs with Canadian hands.
An East-West Energy Grid
Working families in Mission—Matsqui know what it’s like to watch energy bills rise and fall with global oil prices they can't control. The chaotic boom-and-bust cycle of fossil fuel dependence doesn't serve working people. It serves the elites that profit from price volatility while families struggle to heat their homes and fill their gas tanks. New Democrats are calling for the creation of a true east-west clean energy grid, investing in interprovincial transmission corridors using Canadian steel and raw materials that will allow provinces to share and export clean energy to each other before sending it south of the border. This grid will revitalize Northern and rural economies dependent on expensive diesel, make energy bills more stable and affordable across the country, create tens of thousands of good, family-supporting, union jobs in construction and operation, and reduce our dependence on American energy markets. Affordable, predictable energy is the foundation of the stability and security working families deserve.
Keep Canada’s Resources In Canadian Hands
For far too long, elites have been permitted to extract our natural resources, export them raw, process them abroad, and sell finished products back to us, while the jobs, wealth, and economic activity that should belong to Canadian workers and communities go elsewhere. New Democrats believe in keeping Canadian resources in Canada, processed by Canadian workers, for Canadian benefit. New Democrats are fighting against bulk exports of our unprocessed natural resources and for the value-added processing capacity that creates skilled, well-paying jobs here at home. New Democrats are calling for the oil and gas companies that have profited from Canadian resources to pay their fair share, through a windfall profits tax on excess profits and the polluter pays principle that requires them to fund the cleanup of aging and inactive wells, restoring watersheds and putting thousands of Canadians to work in the process. Canada's wealth belongs to Canadians. It's time to start treating it that way.
A National Renewable Energy Corporation
Canada's transition to renewable energy is going to happen one way or another. The only question is who ends up owning it. Left to the market alone, it'll be corporations and private investors who own the wind farms, the solar arrays, and the transmission lines, collecting profits generated in no small part by taxpayers’ dollars. That's why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are demanding the creation of a National Renewable Energy Corporation, to finance and take public ownership stakes in renewable energy generation projects across the country. If public dollars are building the next energy economy, the public should own a piece of it, not just pay for it and watch the profits walk out the door.