Building a just transition means listening to women in the trades |
Oil sands company Noralta’s 3,000 room camp near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Jason Woodhead/Flickr
The following article is a response to “The federal NDP’s ‘basket of deplorables’ moment,” by Leigh Phillips, published in Canadian Dimension on March 10, 2026.
In the final stretch of the NDP’s federal leadership race, there is no doubt that one of the big questions facing the party is its approach to resource extraction across Canada. Which resources should be developed, where, under what conditions, with whose funding, and to whose benefit. Equally important are the impacts on nearby communities—and who will ultimately pay for the clean-up.
Decades of Liberal and Conservative governments have refused to take steps to meaningfully reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions or move our national economy away from an over-reliance on fossil fuel exports. The question now feels existential from all sides.
On one hand, we are experiencing unprecedented, climate change-driven wildfires, landslides, storms, floods, deep freezes, droughts and heat waves—all of which have already devastated communities and ecosystems, and led to the loss of human and animal life. There is no doubt that if life as we know it is to continue on planet Earth, we need to dramatically reduce our extraction and use of fossil fuels.
On the other hand, we are in an economic crisis. The costs of food, housing, and fuel keep rising. We are seeing major job losses across sectors, as companies and governments alike cut positions and funding. More and more families are struggling to make ends meet. Resource extraction jobs, for those who earn their livelihoods from them, offer good pay and a sense of economic security.
For years, climate justice movements have pushed for a just transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy—one that ensures that the people currently earning their livelihoods from the extractive sector are not left out to dry. Many also suggest that a larger renewable energy sector could have important benefits for workers themselves—those jobs may offer greater stability than ones affected by shifting global fuel and mineral prices, and renewable energy projects can be closer to existing communities, reducing the need for workers to be far from home.
And, as NDP leadership hopeful Avi Lewis recently stated, there may also be fewer of the negative impacts often experienced by communities near resource extraction projects, such as the violence faced by Indigenous women in and around worksites dominated by men.
However, a recent piece by Leigh Phillips in Canadian Dimension, “The federal NDP’s ‘basket of deplorables’ moment,” suggests that Lewis’ comments about gender-based violence in and around so-called “man camps” are, in fact, a betrayal of working-class men.
Phillips makes two arguments in his piece. One is that some resource extraction will still be needed in the transition toward greater renewable energy use, and that it is unrealistic for Lewis to act as though that isn’t the case. His second argument seems to be that because there is limited research showing that resource extraction leads to higher levels of gender-based violence in surrounding regions than in other settings, perhaps that isn’t actually true. He implies that the people who wrote the final report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls should not be trusted in their conclusions about some of the causes of violence against Indigenous women.
It’s notable that Phillips’ piece doesn’t include much engagement with women who are in close proximity to resource extraction. For those of us who are committed to fighting for gender equity alongside economic justice, it’s very possible to read Phillips’ argument as implying: “Don’t believe women, for fear of alienating some men.”
I am a woman who trained as a millwright and worked in industrial equipment operation and maintenance for most of the last 20 years. I also have long-standing connections to the NDP, organized labour, the feminist movement and the climate justice movement.
Despite my privilege as a white woman, and despite not ever having worked in mining camps, I am very familiar sexism in industrial environments. In trade school, I pushed back against misogyny from my older white male instructors, succeeding only because I built solidarity with the racialized men in my program who were experiencing racism from the same sources. In my first post–trade-school production job, I overheard one male co-worker joking with a regular delivery driver about whether the driver’s wife or daughter was better-looking. I’ve met other women in the trades who ended up leaving positions they loved—not because they couldn’t do the work, but because the men around them made it impossible to succeed. I’ve also heard from women and gender-diverse people working in mining who were turned down for jobs not because they weren’t qualified for the role, but because their potential employers couldn’t guarantee their safety in a worksite full of men.
These experiences are not isolated. The report Never Until Now: Indigenous and Racialized Women’s Experiences Working in Yukon and Northern British Columbia Mine Camps, by the Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society and the Yukon Status of Women Council, found that over 70 percent of women interviewed had faced race- and/or gender-based harassment, discrimination, and violence.
That being said, there are also many of us working in these sectors who are doing our best to make those spaces safer and more welcoming for all. Phillips’ piece does a real disservice to these efforts, implying that the industrial working class in Canada is not already made up of people who are doing the courageous work of naming these problems and seeking to address them.
I don’t dispute Phillips’ point that Lewis’ comments alienated some men, and that perhaps they could have been more nuanced. I also don’t dispute that we will indeed still need mineral resources as we transition away from fossil fuels.
And yet, there’s a version of Phillips’ piece that could have taken the issue of gender-based violence more seriously. One that could welcome the fact that Lewis isn’t afraid to talk openly about what is discussed in whisper networks across the country and around the world. One that could talk about how there are people of all genders working to change the culture in resource extraction to one that promotes greater respect—but that there is still more work to be done.
We all deserve an economy that treats us fairly. As NDP supporters, let’s face the effort required to make that a reality.
Robin Reid-Fraser is a tradeswoman who has lived most of her life in the Yukon, on the territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwach’an Council.
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