Places you will never find Stephen Harper…

The title might suggest I am about to point out you’ll never find him at the Saturday Farmer’s Market on Salt Spring Island or the Galiano Island Literary Festival, where I happen to be at the moment. But this blog is not intended to be the event equivalent of Yann Martel’s reading list for the ...

Why no MP should vote for the budget

On second thought, this blog should be titled, “Why no self-respecting MP should vote for the budget.” And it’s not because it’s a “do nothing budget,” as the approved NDP messaging has it.  Nor because it fails the middle class, as the Liberal messaging has it.  Not even because it has some good things and ...

I didn’t know I was a dissident

“I saw you in the news!” a co-worker told me yesterday. “Pardon me?” “In the news, in a bee costume.” The front page of this week’s Embassy, Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly has a story: “Little-known federal monitoring centre tracked bee protest.” Apparently, “Canada’s little-known global monitoring nerve centre, which has moved to share more data ...

That was the year that was…2013’s highs and lows

I have been over the last few days, like most Canadians, getting the deluge of retrospectives on 2013.  Rob Ford’s name looms large in these reviews, along with Duffy and Wallin, Senate expenses and shenanigans. This review will not mention those names. The highs and lows of 2013 as I saw them: The “Lows” Greenhouse ...

Fiddling with the ‘firewall’ while Earth burns – making sense of COP19

Special blog by Kennedy Graham, New Zealand Green MP. – Elizabeth The 19th conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ended in Warsaw on Saturday.   Last-minute concessions produced a limp agreement.  A Copenhagen-style train-wreck has been avoided. It is 21 years since the Framework Convention undertook to stabilise global emissions ...

The COP that would not die…

As I wrote my Friday blog Saturday morning from the Warsaw airport, it seems only right that my Saturday blog should be written on Sunday on VIA Rail as I complete the last leg of the (too) long trip back to Parliament from Poland. I am sure you know that I would have much rather ...

We are into serious over-time…

I am writing this from the Warsaw airport in the wee hours of almost Saturday morning.  I left the ADP interactive process after 3 AM when the co-chairs adjourned, sending the weary negotiators away for a few hours rest, while the co-chairs and their team prepare a new text. This will be the 5th version. ...

Today’s question: is this the worst COP ever?

Well, that’s not quite a fair question.  Copenhagen, COP15, will, hopefully for all time, represent the low point in the effort to achieve meaningful action to avert disaster, but for in-between COPs, this one is vying for runner-up to Copenhagen. Today is the second to last day of negotiations.  No progress has been made in ...

Hello from Poland and COP19

This week I am in Warsaw, Poland, for what is called the “High Level Segment” of the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP19) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. You can get up-to-date information on all of the events happening at COP 19 by going to greenparty.ca/cop19. The Harper administration continues its outrageous ...

COP19 – Wednesday Blog

I thought the working session I was in last night had run late – after midnight. But in turns out, that was an early COP evening. The buzz in the morning was that the group working on “loss and damage” had gone til 4 AM, abruptly ending when the delegations from developing countries all walked ...