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In October, General Motors announced it would cease production of BrightDrop electric delivery vans at its assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ont. For workers who had already endured periodic layoffs during the plant’s long retooling process, it was yet another, but even more devastating, blow.
The experience of this community of about 13,700 people in southwestern Ontario shows the risks of relying on a single major employer and offers important lessons on the challenges of managing a workforce transition to either new jobs within the same industry or to new industries.
Ingersoll is not alone in facing challenges in an era of shifts in trade policies, the global energy transition, rapid advances in artificial intelligence and automation, and other economic changes that are shaping local jobs and industries. Communities associated with sectors such as lumber and steel are feeling these pressures as well.
International lessons
But there are approaches that can help all these communities.
A new series of research publications, International Approaches in Place-Based Skills Development, from the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) and the Future Skills Centre explores how proactive, targeted place-based strategies – focused on the needs and assets of specific communities – can help workers adapt without having to leave their communities, as well as help sectors and regions adjust to economic transformations.
Drawing on eight international experiences with the net-zero transition, the research identifies four concrete measures that Canada can adapt: proactive, co-ordinated skills development, community-led and co-designed economic planning, tailored social supports and place-based industrial policies.
Re-skilling and up-skilling opportunities that are delivered close to home, short in duration and linked to local employers, could help workers stay in their communities and move into new employment opportunities there rather than looking somewhere else or remaining where they are with dwindling prospects.
Major closures and curtailments such as what happened in Ingersoll, and more recently in Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Ontario, can ripple through communities, impacting supply chains, local service providers and municipal revenues.
Finding ways to proactively build resilience in the face of such events will become increasingly important as economic disruption from whatever cause becomes more frequent.
Some communities – especially smaller, rural or remote areas with significant employment in susceptible sectors – will feel the impacts sooner and more sharply.
Place matters when it comes to skills development
Canada’s workforce challenges are not evenly distributed. For example, about 10 per cent of Canadians live in communities susceptible to workforce disruption as the world moves toward a net-zero economy.
National programs such as Employment Insurance or broad skills-training subsidies play an important role but are not designed to respond to the specific needs of individual communities. Place-based approaches, by contrast, recognize that different communities have unique characteristics and challenges that require tailored, localized interventions.
International lessons for Canada
In our study of international approaches, we found that skills training is most effective when co-ordinated with broader economic development plans and when communities themselves are central to decision-making. Building resilience to workforce disruption in Canada will require communities to have access to four critical forms of support:
- Proactive, co-ordinated skills development that builds on local strengths and assets, and opens pathways to new and growing industries;
- Community-led and co-designed economic planning that involves local partnerships, Indigenous empowerment and collaboration across governments, industry, labour and community organizations;
- Tailored social supports such as child care, mental health services, financial counselling and other day-to-day assistance such as transportation stipends to reduce barriers to participation and enable workers to fully take up training and new opportunities;
- Place-based industrial policies that attract new investment and support economic diversification.
A Canadian framework for net-zero resilience
For Canada, the path forward involves three practical steps that move beyond one-size-fits-all programming and centre locally grounded strategies.
Identify susceptible communities with transparent indicators: For example, the IRPP has developed a methodology to determine which Canadian communities are likely to experience workforce disruption in the years to come.
Layer targeted interventions proportionally: Support for community-led transition planning, paired with proactive, co-ordinated skills development and place-based incentives for investments, should be scaled to each community’s level of risk and readiness.
Ensure robust co-ordination across governments and stakeholders: The forthcoming sustainable jobs action plan, mandated by the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act, offers a vehicle to embed these lessons.
The broader picture
The international case studies reviewed in our research span a wide range of geographies and approaches: Denmark’s offshore academy, which retrains oil and gas workers for jobs in offshore wind; Spain’s just transition program, which pairs a national strategy with local job banks and investment incentives; Australia’s Net Zero Economy Authority, which supports transitioning communities alongside industrial policy investments; New Zealand’s community-led Taranaki 2050 Roadmap; France’s portable training credits; the United Kingdom’s electric and hybrid vehicle training centre; and U.S. initiatives in Michigan and across distressed rural regions.
Each highlight different facets of place-based workforce development.
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The global energy transition could disrupt 10 per cent of Canadians
Together, they show how governments and communities are experimenting with diverse tools including vocational training, social supports, employer incentives and participatory planning – all in a bid to help workers stay rooted in their communities while adapting to economic transformations.
Without co-ordinated proactive, place-based skills development, communities risk losing workers, families and the social fabric that sustains them.
Canada should invest in community resilience, so that every region – no matter how small or remote – has the tools to adapt and thrive. Canada’s resilience is only as strong as the resilience of its communities.
