Juno News - A ＂Made In Canada＂ Approach

00:00:00.000 We've got to talk more about manufacturing in Canada, about how the status quo isn't working

00:00:10.840 and how we need to go in a different direction. Canadians are starting to ask questions about

00:00:17.280 our approach to manufacturing after a lot of the events we've had this year. So we had the

00:00:21.820 lockdowns, the pandemic, and we saw a number of things happen there. Our discretionary consumer

00:00:26.820 spending, some of that was kind of put in interesting directions. There were holdups,

00:00:31.220 there were products we couldn't necessarily get because of that. That left people going,

00:00:35.140 oh, hold on a second. Could we be sourcing these goods from a different country? Could we be making

00:00:40.240 them here in Canada? And then there were the goods that we rely on to support our loved ones, the

00:00:45.860 basic medical supplies and goods we need, and we saw countries scrapping over them, fighting over

00:00:50.660 them. Why don't we make more of that here? Why don't we come up with some sort of action plan

00:00:54.940 or list of important items, important goods that are basically national security threats if they

00:01:01.060 are not made here? To rely on another country for things you need to survive, that is a national

00:01:07.280 security threat. What if you get into some sort of conflict with them? There's some sort of brewing

00:01:10.740 cold war between you and that country. You don't want to be caught needing them for vital goods,

00:01:16.100 which brings me to the next item that has seen a lot of Canadians start to ask questions about

00:01:20.820 manufacturing. Our relationship with China. You know, we had masks that were shipped here from

00:01:26.440 China and then we heard, oh, they were no good. They were faulty masks. Well, hold on a second.

00:01:30.500 What about other cheap goods from China? How trustworthy should we consider these? How much should we rely

00:01:35.800 on them? Are there alternatives? Yes, we get a lot of cheaper goods from China. If we made them here,

00:01:41.540 we'd have to be willing to pay more. Maybe we should be willing to pay more for Canadian manufacturing

00:01:46.940 and Canadian goods. And we need to have that conversation. Maybe we need to start making

00:01:51.900 choices about which products we really want to support having a homegrown, made in Canada approach

00:01:57.420 so we can begin to turn away and pivot away from the Chinese economy. Look, there's a lot of ground

00:02:03.240 to cover here on different sectors, different goods, and it's going to require a lot of putting

00:02:08.540 heads together. And we need to see that start to happen. The Conservative leadership campaign

00:02:12.500 candidates, they need to talk more about manufacturing. The Liberal government,

00:02:16.920 they need to also get creative about this. And we need to hear more from industry as well,

00:02:21.400 people in the think tanks. We need to hear from academics on all of it. Because the status quo,

00:02:25.540 that old idea, oh, manufacturing, it's gone out of North America. It's never coming back.

00:02:30.960 We just can't accept that anymore. We've seen what happens when you are too reliant on other countries,

00:02:36.780 other economies for the goods you need. And we're going to have to start having a conversation.

00:02:42.500 about going in a new direction.

Juno News - July 05, 2020