Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

A 2021 Canadian federal election?

I am hearing rumours and media speculation about a Canadian federal election this year, and my response to the state of Canadian politics remains weary disappointment blending into anger.

Trudeau and the Liberals are objectively a poor government. If they succeed in their policy preferences, they will be among the villains rightly condemned for the rest of history as knowing climate arsonists who chose to threaten and impoverish humanity indefinitely to protect the short-term profits of their status quo supporters.

The Conservatives would be objectively worse, but they are the other plausible party of government. The NDP might theoretically be better, but I have no confidence in that. If they ever pull off the unprecedented and form a government, it’s not clear to me that fossil fuel abolition and climate change mitigation would be their priorities — especially with some unions supportive of new fossil fuel projects.

People don’t like to believe that they’re governed by incompetents who are making choices that will destroy their societies (and/or pure panderers with little interest in what’s true), so many people I know socially leap to defend Trudeau’s Liberals. Broadly I would say this is indicative of our society-wide denial about how bad the choices we’re making are and how severe the long-term consequences will be. People are psychologically unwilling to believe that, so they conjure instead a fictional but comforting reality where their choices make sense and Trudeau’s nonsense about needing new oil pipeline revenue to abolish fossil fuels is anything but politically expedient incoherence.

Media attention to the case for divestment

I was heartened yesterday to see the CBC publishing an article about one of the scholars behind the case for divestment which was made successfully at Cambridge: Academic from Saskatoon plays key role in Cambridge University divesting from fossil fuels.

The report they link — Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge by Ellen Quigley, Emily Bugden, and Anthony Odgers — is particularly notable for its inclusion of a broad range of scholarly work on divestment from a range of fields.

Belliveau on the CFFD movement

Having missed its importance after putting it on a to do list back in May 2019, I have printed off Emilia Belliveau’s 2018 master’s thesis from UVic about the fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada, and particularly how it has affected the movement’s organizers.

That’s my main research question as well, making it surprising that I didn’t see the extent of this document’s overlap until I rediscovered it.

I will have a few different responses in my dissertation once it is published, but it’s a relief to say that this document hasn’t called attention to anything massive which I have missed. Incorporating it, therefore, it mostly a matter of adding additional references in the lit review and footnotes.

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British Columbia’s 2020 election

I’m not celebrating NDP premier John Horgan’s successful gamble on an election to secure a majority government. For one thing, I think minority governments which sometimes seek support from the Greens are likely to enact more responsible climate change policies. For another, I have been consistently frustrated by the NDP’s inconsistent and inadequate positions on climate change.

Both federally and provincially I think it would be desirable for the left-wing parties (Liberals, NDP, and Greens) to adopt a Pact for Humanity in which they pledge to at least keep in place their predecessors’ climate change mitigation policies. That would help give some certainty to industries, municipalities, and individuals who are deciding whether to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure or alternatives. Of course, there would still be uncertainty from possible future Conservative governments which will roll everything back, but it’s better than having the left remain split on what approach to take and left-wing parties competing with each other about whether to support industry at the expense of the environment, keep tightening carbon restrictions in line with the best scientific and economic advice, or keep jumping unproductively between one approach to GHG regulation and another.

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COVID in winter

Toronto is returning to a partial COVID lockdown because of rising case numbers.

It has limited practical effect on me since I have been in isolation anyway since early March, only going out for groceries and socially distanced walks for exercise.

I suppose the pandemic and the public policy response will always be subject to multiple interpretations. I can’t recall any comparable disease control measures in my lifetime, so you could say that the world has responded with unprecedented energy. At the same time, the pandemic is a constant reminder of how many people put their own comparatively unimportant preferences (like for entertainment and variety) ahead of protecting themselves and others, limiting the effectiveness of public health measures and extending this entire unpleasant experience for everyone. Like climate change, the pandemic provides endless examples of people who begin with what they want to do and then choose beliefs which are compatible.

All told, the behaviour of governments and populations highlights how poorly human beings respond to slow and generalized threats, as opposed to the fast and personal kind. That’s not an encouraging precedent at a time when the future of humanity is in jeopardy if we cannot cooperate, moderate our selfish desires, and do what’s necessary to control the problem.

Morneau’s deficit comments

If finance minister Bill Morneau believes that Canada’s budget deficit “the challenge of our lifetime” he’s either tragically ill-informed, delusional, or disabled by finance-industry-insider blinders. Russia and Argentina, among others, show how states can default on their external debts and suffer relatively little consequence, as investors race back in within years. Even the worst economic outcomes, like interwar hyperinflation in Germany, are nothing compared to what catastrophic climate change would involve — and that’s where we’re on track to end up if the world just keeps doing what it is doing now.

The quote shows how deeply our highest-level leaders are failing to understand what climate change will mean for humanity and life on Earth if we don’t begin a dramatic program of cutting fossil fuel production and use. When you’re facing the plausible risk of extinction as a civilization or a species, having leaders who think a line on a spreadsheet is the greatest challenge is demonstrative of actively harmful leadership and underscores the degree to which existing politicians and institutions are incapable of accepting the most severe consequences of their choices.

Dismal pipeline news

If the countries which have created the most total climate pollution up to this point continue to believe that they can build new fossil fuel projects which will operate decades into the future it calls into question how we are ever going to get the world as a whole to keep enough carbon underground to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Trudeau’s climate failure

In closing, a few words can be said about other aspects of the PCF [Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change]. The complete ignoring of the 2020 target illustrates the power of the Canadian dynamic of policy failure set out in chapter 1. Disguising the lack of will and effort needed to achieve an international commitment by focusing on a new target, some years distant, was done in 1997, in 2010 and again in 2015. It provides the government in question with environmental legitimacy by allowing it to appear committed to policy action while avoiding the conflicts and costs the must be borne to actually achieve a target. Unless things change, there is a very real chance it will be done again in the years leading up to 2030, regardless of which government is in power. Because we are so willing to push action off into the future, we are able to avoid the regional conflict inherent to the allocation issue. The Justin Trudeau government’s focus on the easy challenge (which, as events turned out, has not been so easy) of ensuring carbon pricing throughout Canada when the big four emitting provinces already had pricing in place, rather than the much more difficult task of convincing those four to do more than they had already themselves decided on, is a continuation of the dynamic first seen with the easy challenge of the 1995 voluntary program. At that time, as discussed, a voluntary program was all that could realistically have been hoped for. In 2015, however, with very different public attitudes, foreign and domestic examples, and a majority government eager to act, the PCF was a missed opportunity. Taking advantage of that opportunity would have required facing the challenges that are the subject of this book, in particular vastly different western and eastern energy interests. That was not done because the Canadian dynamic of favouring peaceful relations over effective policy was exerting its usual force.

As of the spring of 2019, the Pan-Canadian Framework program, so completely a product of this dynamic that has brought only policy failure since 1990, was providing the worst of both worlds. It did not have the programs in place capable of meeting the stated goal, while a major element of the program, federal construction of a pipeline, will if implemented increase emissions. While providing no guarantees of achieving its goal, the PCF is causing considerable damage to national unity and the possibilities of constructive federal-provincial engagement. The outcome of the 2019 Alberta election made that situation even worse since by then a supposedly national program was opposed by half the provinces, representing more than half the population, and three-quarters of total emissions.

Macdonald, Douglas. Carbon Province, Hydro Province: The Challenge of Canadian Energy and Climate Federalism. University of Toronto Press, 2020. p. 232–3

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Guelph divests

The Guelph University board of governors committed to divest from fossil fuels on Wednesday, after a sub-committee of their finance committee concluded that doing so was compatible with fiduciary duty and that a divested portfolio would have performed as well or better in the past. I was a guest on the board’s call, and it was remarkable to hear administrators making they key legal and financial arguments in favour of divestment. It shows how at least some administrators have internalized some of the central arguments of the divestment movement.

This follows divestment by Laval, Concordia, and UBC.