Canadian National Government’s Journey – Back To The Future

It’s now clear that Canadians will soon be voting in a new federal government. This new government must lead by listening much more to its citizens.

It’s now clear that Canadians will soon be voting in a new federal government. This new government must lead by listening much more to its citizens and be far more concerned about “how they are doing” and far less about telling them “Who they are”.

The new national leadership must be far more concerned about prosperity by improving productivity, as well as setting new policies that have a far greater control of foreign trade and in concert with the USMCA partners plan the reshoring of trade to improve economic value and prosperity inside the USMCA trade bloc.

They must encourage our businesses to refocus on LEAN and Industry 4.0 to gain back productivity, and they must solve the industrial investment challenge by gathering total support and commitment from the financial sector.

They must undertake a reduction and redeployment of the bloated public sector back to a more productive and expanded private sector, and this will demand the implementation of an Integrated Industrial Learning System for both youth and mature workers so that they can fully participate in an enhanced and modern industrialized society, and this will reduce the need for further mass immigration. 

The approach to climate change and the adoption of NetZero and its impact on prosperity will require a significant debate and policy review.

In many ways the future will mean going back to the pre-globalization era of less global trade and a much more integrated and localized industrial environment organized into a well managed USMCA trade Bloc!  This will reverse the mistake of long, wasteful, and ecologically dangerous global supply chains, and enable citizens to grow, mine, and make, much more of what they consume, using their own local resources, so they to add much more value to there own economies.  

My TBM book talks about how this recovery of our industrial base in the western world can be undertaken and how this is an imperative for recovering citizen prosperity. It’s clear that the notion of the western nations moving to a post industrialized society via globalized manufacturing was a huge mistake, which we will now have to reverse and recover from.

Reshoring has started in the USA with the 2022 Report from Thomas Industries reporting that 85% of Corporations are pursuing a Reshoring Strategy with reshoring trends showing an average 50% year over year growth rate. However, we still have much more to do.

This direction is now being supported by economists that are talking about a major reorientation toward a new economic-policy framework called “Productivism” that is rooted in production, work, and localism, instead of finance, consumerism, and globalism. 

Further... If we listen to the geo-political expert predictions, we may not have any choice but to Take Back Manufacturing, as Globalization may just not work anymore, due to a breakdown in Global trade security and a deterioration in east-west relationships that may fracture the “New World Order” and dis-enable global free trade.

Also, and even more important, future global demographics will mean that the USMCA trade bloc will become the largest consumer market and best labor pool, and this certainly reinforces the need to Take Back Manufacturing.

Canada has lost a lot of ground in the last decade in terms of productivity and prosperity, and many citizens have voiced concerns about the view that the nation is broken and needs fixing, and this view appears to be shared by other nations in the western world.

Let’s hope that these new governments will have the correct policy focus to take its citizens... back to the future!

Nigel Southway, Take Back Manufacturing Author

Nigel Southway, is based in Toronto Canada and is an independent business consultant and the author of Take Back Manufacturing: An Imperative for Western Economies, and Cycle Time Management: The Fast Track to Time-Based Productivity Improvement, an early LEAN thinking textbook. 

He consults and educates worldwide on Business Productivity Improvement, LEAN business practices, Advanced Manufacturing Engineering, Future Supply Chain Management, Industry 4.0, National Sustainability, Global technology transfer projects and joint ventures and more. 

He is a past chair of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the leading advocate and spokesperson for the Take Back Manufacturing Forum, and the North American Reshoring initiative in Canada.