Mélanie Joly likes to talk tough. Now she has to deliver

In Joly’s view — and in her reply to the prime minister on how she would act to meet the priorities Mark Carney listed in a single mandate letter to all of cabinet — her main job and Canada’s industrial strategy is simple.

“The plan is to do three things. First is to protect jobs. Second is to create jobs, and third is to attract talent and investment,” she said in a year-end interview with the Star.

Yet there are clear downside risks to all Joly’s tough talk.

If she doesn’t deliver results, protect or create jobs, or she doesn’t follow through on all those threats, it could make Canada look weak, not strong. It could trigger a Canadian backlash against the companies and brands built here and make matters worse. It could sway decision-makers, for example in the U.S.-based headquarters of some of Canada’s biggest automakers as they weigh future investment decisions in President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

It could further anger the Trump administration that is already suspicious about whether Canada is a fair and reliable defence and trading partner.

On all of those, it’s safe to say the jury is still out. But Joly is adamant her approach is geared to results.

She issued a notice of default to Stellantis — the latest escalation in a dispute over what the minister says are legally binding commitments to maintain production at Brampton in exchange for Ottawa’s contribution to the joint Stellantis and Korea-owned LG electric vehicle battery plant in Windsor.

The notice kick-started another 30-day period in which the company and Ottawa continue to talk. And the government revoked a break on counter-tariffs for Stellantis and GM.

Meanwhile, Joly is setting out Ottawa’s expectations to other companies too. In mid-December she summoned leading car industry executives and representatives to a meeting in the nation’s capital.

“She was very plain spoken, (delivered) straight talk about what she understood to be everybody’s obligations to each other and to the Canadian sector. I had never heard such straight talk from an industry minister to industry to this point,” said Flavio Volpe, head of the Canadian Auto Parts Manufacturers Association.

However, as Volpe points out, “we are actually in a moment where the market that we’re all geared to supplying is pushing us back. And there isn’t an easy pivot to ‘oh by the way, we’ll just sell to Canadians tomorrow.’”

Nevertheless, Joly seems to have weighed the risk of possibly triggering a consumer backlash against those very companies “against the risk of de-investment,” said Volpe. She is not prepared to simply talk tough in public then turn around and be “backslapping and winking when off-camera,” he said.

Brian Kingston, head of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, said the thing Joly must grasp is that tariffs and the government-imposed EV sales mandates have put the auto manufacturing industry “in a very challenging position right now.”

“We’ve had some pretty strong statements made about the companies, but we cannot forget the bigger picture. These companies have been operating in Canada for over a 100 years,” he said, and Ottawa should trust they are here to stay.

“Stellantis just announced hiring of 1,000 people en route to 1,500 for a third shift in Windsor. There’s a long commitment from these companies to Canada and a long history of manufacturing here. We need to be working closely with government to get through this period. The industry will persist.”

In the end, when it came to Anglo American’s bid to buy Canada’s Teck Resources Ltd., the Competition Bureau quietly okayed it, and Joly cleared the so-called “merger of equals” just before the holidays, with mixed reviews on whether she actually gained much more than was originally on the table.

Joly insists that securing Vancouver as the global headquarters for the merged company was a “major win for our country,” inspired by Australia’s dealings with BHP.

“We’re in competition with China. Lots of capital in China is there to develop their own critical minerals sector, and we can decide to actually support this (Anglo Teck) transaction, get the right investments from a company actually that is a merger between a Canadian and an UK-based company, or be overexposed to either investments coming from China or coming from the US, where we’re too dependent.”

“And so it was actually the best of all scenarios, because we’re able to anchor a Canadian giant in Vancouver, where it’s going to be the biggest employer in Vancouver, 4,000 jobs protected, nearly 3,000 jobs created,” Joly said.

Pierre Gratton, head of the Mining Association of Canada, wouldn’t comment on the deal involving two of his association’s members. But he did acknowledge that Vancouver as the headquarters of the combined company “made a lot of sense, given where most of the core assets are located.

The mining industry is clearly a whole lot happier these days under a Carney government than it was with the Trudeau government because of the new-found push to accelerate mining approvals, particularly in the critical minerals sector, he said.

However, Gratton notes that a lot of the investment tax credits in place to drive those investments were put in place under Trudeau. He does credit Carney, Joly and her predecessor now finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, as well as the energy minister Tim Hodgson for a lot.

The government has put in place new funding, for example, for first- and last-mile infrastructure and tweaked rules to expand eligibility for the tax credits.

Overall, Gratton says this government appears serious about building the critical minerals industry. But more is needed, he said, to ensure that Canada cannot just get ore out of the ground but do the smelting, refining and processing here to truly diversify its industry.

Then there are those fighter jets.

In the past week, Swedish manufacturer Saab has presented Joly with an industrial benefits analysis that says if it were to make Gripen fighter planes and the GlobalEye surveillance plane in Canada, together they would create some 12,600 direct jobs, with indirect spinoffs in research and development and intellectual property, Joly said.

“It’s one of the biggest industrial projects that we’ve had in decades,” Joly said. “It’s building the fighter jets in Canada, not only for us, but for Ukraine and for export markets. So it’s actually between 150 to 200 planes. It is a major project.”

Joly’s statements are intended to convey Ottawa is not bluffing when it says it is reconsidering its purchase plan for the full order of 88 F-35 fighter planes made by Lockheed Martin. The Liberal government has committed to buying the first 16, and one of Carney’s first acts as prime minister was to order a review of the plan for the rest.

Weeks after Joly first said she expected more from the F-35 project, Joly says the offer hasn’t been sweetened, and reiterated her concern.

“I think that we didn’t get enough from the F-35 in terms of industrial benefits, and I think we need to have more,” she said. “This is the biggest contract of any contract the federal government is offering to any company in Canada, in the world. So we will use taxpayers money to create jobs in our country. Period.”

In mid-January, Joly will head to the U.S. to meet with Lockheed Martin and its F-35 developers, just as she did when she travelled to Sweden recently to visit Saab.

David Perry, head of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a defence expert, is baffled by those declarations.

For starters, the F-35 was picked by a Liberal government that was “immensely skeptical about the F-35,” had campaigned on not buying it, spent a few years trying to pursue an alternative, bought Boeing Super Hornets on an interim basis, only to decide after running an open competition that the F-35 was the clear winner. And the idea that the F-35 doesn’t offer enough benefits makes no sense, said Perry.

Canada signed on as one of the founding members of the international government-led consortium to a partnership agreement which allows Canadian companies to bid on a portion of all F-35 development work, specifically in relation to the ratio of fighter jets it will purchase.

It could have opted to buy a flat number of jets and negotiated industrial benefits to go along with that purchase, but it didn’t, said Perry. Instead, Ottawa opted for ensuring Canadian companies could get a portion of the work in building every single F-35 produced.

“It’s not a big amount of work on each plane, but it’s a meaningful amount of work on thousands of aircraft sold globally. And it’s work that has gotten Canadian companies into the supply chain of the world’s largest production run of the world’s largest volume export market of a modern fighter aircraft. So there’s a scale, as well as a qualitative uniqueness of being part of the most cutting edge globally sold fighter aircraft.”

That’s a huge benefit, he said.

Now, if Canada “revises downward the number of planes it’s going to purchase, then the share of work for which we’d be eligible would presumably also be revised downward as well,” he said. “So I am not really clear about what our ability to talk tough is,” he said, adding that “it’s not up to Lockheed Martin to make a decision about how much additional work share Canada would get through the partnership agreement because … it’s controlled by government partners, of which the United States is the lead one.”

And Perry says, for all the talk about diversifying Canada’s sources of defence purchase and diversifying sources of export, Ottawa must recognize Canada’s had since the 1950s “really unique internationally privileged access to the U.S. defence market” under what’s called the defence production sharing agreement. Its provisions mean “that Canadian firms are considered to be American when the Pentagon is making purchases. It’s a huge advantage for Canadian companies,” he adds.

“I just worry that we’re taking for granted, more than we should, the fact that we can keep making the same kind of sales and having the same kind of relationship with the United States as we make such a point of diversifying where we’re buying some of our other defence products from.”

For her part, Joly is thrilled to be part of that diversification effort. She says she asked Carney to give her the industry portfolio when the Liberals won the election last spring, and has embraced her new role after opting not to contest Carney for the federal leadership.

“I decided to choose my country rather than my party,” she said.

Joly also opted in the third week of December not to quit the industry job to vie for the troubled Quebec Liberal party’s leadership, although some had hoped the effortlessly bilingual Oxford-trained lawyer would return to Quebec. She says she has no regrets, and is laser focused on “being able to build our economy and build industries.”