Canada’s green jobs strategy needs more than good intentions

Published in The Hill Times.

Imagine a pipeline of workers laid off from one sector, discarded like old parts, while next door a booming green industry sits idle, struggling to hire. That mismatch is more than inefficient—it is a warning that Canada is heading into the energy transition without the tools required to match real workers with real opportunities.

The scale of the challenge is enormous. The Royal Bank of Canada estimates that about 3.1 million workers—roughly 15 per cent of the labour force—will see their jobs disrupted over the next decade as industries adapt to net zero. Yet, Canada’s workforce-planning systems still behave as though this shift can be managed through a mix of generic retraining and optimism. They cannot. The country needs a way to understand which workers, with which skills, can realistically move into emerging green roles and where the skill gaps are too large to be bridged without significant investment.

This is the challenge I address in my new report for the C.D. Howe Institute. Canada’s green-jobs strategy suffers from a fundamental shortcoming: it lacks a data-driven method for identifying how workers in legacy sectors can transition into clean-economy jobs, and where the real gaps lie. Policymakers frequently speak about the promise of “green jobs,” but most strategies stop at high-level forecasts. They can tell us how many workers might be needed in battery manufacturing, solar installation, or hydrogen production, but they cannot tell us who will fill those jobs—or how feasible those transitions actually are.

Without that grounding, even well-funded programs risk missing the mark. Workers can be retrained for jobs that do not match demand. Employers in growing sectors may continue to face shortages. And workers in declining industries may be left without clear pathways—not because opportunities don’t exist, but because no one has mapped how to get them there. 

The Matching Skills model provides that foundation by comparing occupations on standardized measures of skills, knowledge, and education to show how easily workers can move from one job to another. It also validates those findings through real cases of training programs in Canada and Europe. 

What emerges is a clearer picture of which transitions are viable, which are challenging, and which are unrealistic. This is the kind of labour-market intelligence Canada has been missing: a map of where workers are today, where they can plausibly go tomorrow, and how difficult that journey will be.

This matters for competitiveness as much as for workers themselves. Europe continues to invest in clean-energy industries and in the workforce systems needed to support them, and the United States still retains significant clean-tech momentum and a strong strategic position, even as recent federal policy shifts introduce uncertainty. If Canada continues to rely on fragmented provincial initiatives and outdated data, it risks falling behind even with substantial clean-tech spending. 

A credible workforce strategy for any major transition—whether driven by decarbonization, automation, digitization, or demographic change—requires more than new training programs. It requires investment in the data infrastructure behind them: updated occupational skill databases, reliable crosswalks between taxonomies, and ongoing monitoring of job transitions. It also requires co-ordination among governments, employers, educators, and unions so that training capacity aligns with actual demand. Without this foundation, Canada will continue to operate with blind spots that leave workers uncertain and employers short of talent. 

The energy transition will happen regardless of whether Canada is ready. The question is whether this country will treat its workforce as a strategic asset or continue navigating with incomplete information. A methodology like the Matching Skills model provides the clarity needed to link existing strengths with future needs and ensure workers are not left behind as the economy shifts.

Canada has the talent to lead in clean-economy industries. What it needs now is the operational rigour to match that ambition. Building a national skills-mapping system must become the backbone of Canada’s green-jobs strategy. Without it, millions of workers and billions in investment risk being stranded when they could instead be powering Canada’s future. 

Lin Al-Akkad is a public policy analyst, and an author of a new report for the C.D. Howe Institute: Future-Ready Workforce Strategies and Matching Skills Model.