The world that made Canada prosperous is gone.

To our south, the United States is using tariffs, economic pressure and threats to our sovereignty to advance its own interests.

Across the Pacific, China has capitalized on the West's abandonment of domestic manufacturing. The jobs that once sustained middle-class Canadian families have fuelled China’s economic rise. 

At home, climate change is ripping through our communities, choking our cities with wildfire smoke, destroying infrastructure and costing billions of dollars every year.

As we face all of these challenges, Canada needs to rediscover something we once understood: national prosperity depends on national production.

We need a new industrial strategy on a scale not seen since the Second World War.

In 1939, Canada declared war against Nazi Germany. We lacked the industrial capacity to produce the weapons modern warfare required. We did not have factories turning out tanks, aircraft, naval vessels or military trucks on anything near the scale our allies required. 

Few believed a rural country of just 11 million people could become one of the great manufacturing nations of the democratic world.

Yet within months, Canada made a national decision that changed everything.

The government stopped thinking in election cycles and started thinking in generations. 

28 Crown corporations were created where markets alone could not deliver. 

Victory Aircraft expanded into one of the Commonwealth's largest aircraft manufacturers, producing Lancaster bombers by the hundreds. 

Polymer Corporation was built from scratch to secure Canada's supply of synthetic........

© National Observer