Passive House Canada Conference Keynote Speaker Seth Klein on what Canada’s wartime mobilization can teach us about climate, housing, and acting at scale.
In an age of a constant stream of unfolding and overlapping emergencies, author, adjunct professor, and keynote speaker at the 8th annual Passive House Canada Conference, Seth Klein is asking the question to politicians, business leaders and the Passive House community: Where are the heroes fighting for Canada today?
We have intertwined climate, housing, and affordability emergencies, and increasingly geo-political and economic chaos with the collapsing rules-based international order and economic warfare from our closest ally and trading partner. The times seem increasingly bleak. During another dark period in Canadian history, Klein sees a potential blueprint for today.
During the Second World War, Canada was facing an existential threat and moved quickly to build out its industrial capacity. A central figure in that mobilization was C.D. Howe, an engineer and an industrialist. He had built his fortune constructing grain elevators and transportation infrastructure. As a senior minister in the Mackenzie King government, he became the architect of Canada’s wartime production effort. During that emergency, he also recruited his peers to help him deliver for the nation.
Hon. C.D. Howe speaks with a workman at an aircraft factory, Mar. 1941. Image courtesy of Library & Archives Canada.
“The principal way in which many private sector leaders in Canada served during the Second World War emergency was that they actually abandoned their private sector posts,” said Klein. “They became C.D. Howe’s dollar-a-year men; they headed up these crown enterprises and they served as controllers of the supply chain.”
When private industry could deliver, Howe contracted it. When it could not, he created new Crown corporations to fill the gap. Over the course of the war, Howe established 28 Crown enterprises, spanning shipbuilding, aircraft, munitions, and supply-chain coordination, effectively creating a military manufacturing sector from scratch.
Negotiate from strength
Today, Canada has invested heavily in an energy system that has brought in export dollars while poisoning the environment. It has spent decades deeply integrating its economy with a neighbour to the south that is increasingly willing to weaponize that dependence, Prime Minister Mark Carney recently described in his Davos speech as a threat where “integration becomes the source of your subordination.” At the same time, Canada has chronically underbuilt its housing supply, driving scarcity and unaffordability.
To emerge from this morass, Klein argues Canada must act more like Howe. That means contracting the private sector where it can deliver, but not hesitating to underpin those efforts with a public option when it cannot. Without that capacity, governments negotiate from weakness. With it, Canada regains the leverage needed to respond to today’s overlapping emergencies from a position of strength.
“He [Howe] always had one crown enterprise in each major area of military manufacturing, in ship building, in planes, in munitions. Why? So he would know the cost of things, so that in his private contracts, he wasn’t going to get bilked by people telling him what things cost,” said Klein.
Wartime logic confronts peacetime politics
This wartime mobilization argument, originally applied to the climate crisis and increasingly relevant to today’s broader polycrisis, underpins Klein’s book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, published in 2020. Shortly after its release, Klein helped launch the Climate Emergency Unit and served as Team Lead and Director of Strategy for the five-year project housed at the David Suzuki Institute. The goal was to operationalize the lessons of the book by persuading governments, organization, and industry to coalesce around a wartime-scale response.
As with most environmental campaigns, the results were mixed. There were incremental gains alongside failures. One partial win came in the most recent federal budget, which allocated $40 million over two years for a Youth Climate Corps. In the context of an austerity budget where climate spending was broadly cut, Klein describes the funding as a victory, even if it represents only a small fraction of what is required to meet the scale of the challenge.
The Youth Climate Corps was pitched as a national paid service program to train young people to deliver climate-critical work, including retrofits, low-carbon construction, conservation, and resilience projects. It was a winning policy idea, said Klein, addressing emissions reduction, labour shortages in skilled labour, and youth disengagement at the same time.
“We thought we were offering basically a perfect policy for this moment; you need to train the next generation,” said Klein. “Yet, we could not break through; we couldn’t get them to think like C.D. Howe.”
National polling during the campaign showed broad support for the Youth Climate Corps. Among Canadians under 35, 65 percent said they would consider enrolling in a two-year program and 15 percent said they were ready to sign up immediately. With roughly nine million Canadians aged 18 to 35, that signaled more than 1.3 million young people with near-term interest – a similar number that signed up to fight in the second World War, notes Klein
Support among young men exceeded that of young women, pointing to an opportunity to mobilize a demographic increasingly targeted by right-wing populism.
“Let’s make them a goddamn offer before somebody else does,” said Klein about how he pitched his proposal to decision makers, leveraging his skills in policy analysis from leading the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for over two decades, and the narrative-based storytelling he developed while writing A Good War.
“I’m talking to their heads, but I’m equally talking to their hearts, and I’m talking with them about their legacy,” said Klein.
Mobilizing after the campaign
With the Climate Emergency Unit now concluded, Klein is assessing his next move. The throughline in his work has not changed. He was raised on stories of union organizing and political struggle. That inheritance continues to shape Klein’s work today. It also underpins his collaborations with his sister, author Naomi Klein, and his public support for her husband, Avi Lewis, who is currently running for the leadership of the federal NDP. Klein is clear-eyed about the road ahead. The fight for affordable housing or climate justice is uncertain and he does not assume the fight will be successful, but that was the same for the heroes of the past.
“We know in the rearview mirror how their story ended, but they didn’t, and there was a good chunk of the war in which the outcome was far from certain. That’s the thing about emergencies, you don’t do them because you’re certain of success.”
For Klein, the heroes are not waiting to be discovered. They are being asked to decide.
