900,000 Canadian Job Losses Over 30 years

Canada's manufacturing sector took a brutal hit over the past 30 years, companies in Canada closed over 900,000 jobs thanks to a mix of free-trade policies and a broader pivot toward digging up and shipping out raw Canadian materials instead of making products.

It really started with the 1988 free-trade deal with the US. Between 1988 and 1995, roughly one in five Canadian manufacturing plants simply vanished. By 1997, economists were pegging the damage at around 300,000 jobs lost, interestingly, free trade was supposed to make Canadian manufacturing sharper and more efficient, but it just didn't deliver on that promise. There were over 300,000 jobs lost in that 10 year period, no thanks to the Federal Conservative Party in charge.

Liberal Party did not make anything better.

Things got even rougher in the 2000s, when Canada turned into what people now call a textbook example of the "resource curse." As oil prices climbed, the Canadian dollar climbed right along with it, and that stronger dollar made Canadian-made goods a tougher sell on the world stage. The fallout was brutal, with nearly 600,000 more manufacturing jobs disappearing during that decade alone.

Zoom out, and you can see this wasn't just bad luck, it was a structural political and economic integration shift.

Canada's economy essentially got flipped from an east-west orientation to a north-south one, leaving the country increasingly reliant on shipping raw, unprocessed materials down to the United States rather than building a self-sufficient industrial base. The Federal Government and all the federal political parties, basically created Canada as an informal 51st State of USA. by signing onto things like the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a deal that leaned hard into ramping up oil sands output for American markets, often at the expense of protecting domestic manufacturing and industrial independence. Now, the Carney Liberal Party, guided by the leadership of the PM and economist Dr. Carney trying to figure out how to decouple or reduce American economic dependency.

This might be an impossible political and economic task.