On Being Canadian: With Elbows Up, and Arms Outstretched

I am Canadian because my parents embraced the country’s values

By Elizabeth May

June 30, 2025

The core pride Canadians feel in our identity is often derived from comparison to the United States. We are proud of universal health care, even when the system is under strain. We are proud of a legacy of embracing difference and of, no doubt, an air-brushed version of our own history.

Donald Trump’s outrageous assertion that Canada should be the 51st state has brought out the best in us. We are more unified in response.

This moment gives us a chance to embrace our love of country —not defined by what we are not, but by embracing the best of what and who we are.

We are not comfortable with jingoistic bravado. I remember the late Ottawa Mayor Marion Dewar remarking how thrilled she was to see Canadian athletes on the podium, Olympic medals planted on their chests while O Canada! played. What delighted her was how few of them knew all the words.

Another national trait is self-deprecation. I first noticed this aspect of Canadian identity when I was still an American kid, before my family moved from the US.

I was watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite reporting on a White House press conference with President Lyndon Johnson and Lester B. Pearson. It was 1964, more than a year before their famous Camp David confrontation over Vietnam.

In the clip I recall so vividly, LBJ referred to Pearson as “Prime Minister Macmillan.” Rather than look offended or take umbrage, Pearson had a good laugh. It made an impression on me. I think Walter Cronkite made a comment about the graciousness of Canadian Prime Minister Pearson.
I am constantly grateful that I am Canadian. I was born in the United States of a British father and a New Yorker mom. My parents settled in Hartford Connecticut, but they never really agreed on which country attracted their fealty.

My dad disliked almost everything about the US and my mum found the UK sexist and hidebound. Still, as she became ever more of an activist than a conventional 1950s housewife, she found the politics of the US increasingly unlivable.

She had played a key role in the movement to end nuclear weapons testing, engaged in the civil rights movement and then fought the years of anguish of napalm and mangled lives protesting the war in Vietnam. She felt she did not fit in the land of her birth.

So, the notion that Canada is different — that it is more than an extension of the United States separated by an “artificial border” — isn’t an abstract one to me. It informed the event that made this country my home.

My parents discussed a move to New Zealand, where neither of them had ever been. What set in motion the impetuous move that uprooted our lives was less that my parents finally agreed on where to live than that they fell head over heels in love with Cape Breton Island.

Summer vacation 1972 made the decision for us. I was a Cape Bretoner before I was Canadian. I still find the best of what I love about Canada in my Cape Breton roots.

My daughter, Cate, and granddaughter, Lily, at Margaree Harbour beach, Cape Breton

To me, Canada is captured in the fact that my brother Geoffrey — now a fluent Gaelic speaker — and his wife host a Gaelic language radio programme on the community radio station, CKJM, run for an Acadian French audience in Cheticamp. The entrepreneurial station manager heard about government funding for community radio to be franchised internationally. So, the minority language component of Acadian radio is Gaelic and the voices of Cape Breton choirs are heard in the Scottish Highlands.

We are a country so very different from our southern neighbour, with characteristics that de Tocqueville noted hundreds of years ago. We are not an every-man-for-himself, dog-eat-dog kind of society. We embrace compassion and community. Grotesque wealth is not to be celebrated, though we are at risk of sliding in that direction.

There is a cynical notion of the “Canadian dream” that is a cartoon version of the “American dream”. It is a narrative that feels forced; that does not strike a chord for many Canadians — especially those who still miss the voice of Stuart McLean and his Dave and Morley stories as the epitome of a certain bedrock definition of Canadian values, beginning with a definition of success that has nothing to do with disposable income.

My favourite way to see Canada — from a train, with my husband, John Kidder.

I know this country now like I know myself. As a lover of train travel, I’ve criss-crossed Canada by Via Rail more times than I can count, mostly eschewing hotels for the spare rooms of friends and supporters and seeing the heart and soul of the country in its small-town backyards, inner cities, Prairie farms and gobsmacking Rockies. The Canadians I’ve met on the train, the unforgettable moments I’ve shared with people in every corner of this country — not just talking politics but talking jobs, kids, dreams, and tragedies — have given me a visceral sense of who we are.

We are a country that knows not to leave anyone behind. I think of the brave first responders and police of Fort McMurray facing that beast of a fire in 2016 who managed to keep hundreds of cars on the one highway moving south. If a car ran out of gas, it was pushed to the side and doors of other cars immediately opened to take more on board.
Meanwhile, in another climate disaster, Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 event that devastated New Orleans, hundreds of police left in advance, many of them taking their cars with them. An estimated 15% of the New Orleans police force left. And the poorest African American neighbourhoods were left to drown.

This time, there is a far greater American disaster looming and we cannot leave our American neighbours to their fate. We must be compassionate. We must be prepared to do more to save lives around the world; to end conflict with diplomacy, soft power and generosity. We cannot arm ourselves to a safer world. We need to open our doors to those in need, seeking refuge and rights.

I embrace the spirit of “Elbows Up!”, but I add “and arms outstretched.”

I am so grateful and blessed to be Canadian — as are we all. Happy Canada Day!

Policy Contributing Writer Elizabeth May is leader of the Green Party of Canada

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Link to pdf

Electrify everything!

We must combine our newly energized national pride in reforming our economy to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient with massively increasing our climate ambition.

Green Party Co-Leader Elizabeth May

My headline is the title of an encouraging analysis from Australian Saul Griffiths. From the Green Party point of view, we are more agnostic as to specific technologies, and we focus on how we—as a nation, and as an economy—can pull our fair share of the work to reduce the volume of warming gases to the atmosphere to avoid worst-case climate scenarios.

The consequences of runaway global warming—self-accelerating and unstoppable—pose the greatest threat to the survival of human civilization, other than a nuclear war. In fact, that was exactly the conclusion of the international scientific conference the Canadian government hosted in Toronto in June 1988. The consensus statement from the conference, “Our Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security,” opened with the following words: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war.”

Back in 2003, when Canada ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, I was executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. Looking at our economy, and the technological gaps where they existed to delivering on our Kyoto target—a six-per-cent cut from 1990 levels of carbon dioxide to be achieved between 2008 and 2012—we realized that Canada could achieve deep reductions by focusing on two things: stopping the burning of coal for electricity, and getting rid of the internal-combustion engine (ICE). There were, of course, thousands of policy options to choose from—carbon pricing to regulatory action requiring steep pollution cuts from individual sectors, to changes in our built infrastructure and transportation systems. But boiling it down to two things helped when we were talking to Canadians—two things are doable!

Here we are in 2025, with our emissions approximately 16 per cent above the 1990 levels. By the way, the other industrialized countries that committed to Kyoto hit or exceeded their targets with the European Union having cut more than 40 per cent below 1990 levels. In 2025, Nova Scotia is still primarily burning coal for electricity, and other provinces burn fracked natural gas with the same carbon footprint as coal. Our interprovincial trade barriers have prevented access to what Canada really needs to make the shift to 100-per-cent renewably sourced—cheaper—electricity: a functioning national electricity grid, east-west and north-south.

Back in 2003, it was not clear which emerging technology would replace the ICE—the hydrogen fuel cell, or the electric car. We were agnostic on which technology would cross the finish line first. At the moment, it is clear the electric vehicle (EV) is ahead with far greater penetration in the market, but the fuel cell and hydrogen could still play a big role. At the same time, Greens are concerned with equity. We do not assume a transportation system between large cities must be based on personal ownership of a car. The domination of urban spaces by personal automobiles was well canvassed by the late writer and activist Jane Jacobs. Greens will always push for a reliable, and affordable public transit system as called for in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Canada has a very long way to go. Not only are we the only nation—under then-prime minister Stephen Harper—to have legally withdrawn from Kyoto, but also, of all industrialized nations, we have grown our emissions above the 1990 baseline.

So yes, we need to move away from the ICE. But we have options: help people buy EVs, or more significantly revolutionize ground transportation systems to reduce the need to own a car. Otherwise, we remove the choice for Indigenous people and other poor people who are forced to hitchhike on roads where murder is a daily risk.

We could make EVs cheaper by accepting more vehicles from China, and reducing our tariffs. We could make solar energy cheaper and more available by removing the enormous tariffs we place on cheap and efficient solar panels from China. The 100-percent tariffs on Chinese solar panels make electricity more expensive for Canadians, with no domestic manufacturing of solar panels to explain our high tariffs.

As Greens, we promote “buy everything” from Canada, so the long-term economic strategy must be to increase our own manufacturing of solar panels and EVs, but the clock is running down. Canada is further behind than most. We have everything we need to be a renewable energy powerhouse, starting with seizing the momentum induced by United States President Donald Trump to break down interprovincial barriers. For now, that means keeping all options in mind, and not focusing on EV goals that may inadvertently get in the way of the big picture.

The atmosphere is full, and now overflowing, with dangerous levels of greenhouse gases, so we are running out of time to avoid those worst-case scenarios. We must combine our newly energized national pride in reforming our economy to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient with massively increasing our climate ambition.

Elizabeth May, O.C., is Member of Parliament for Saanich–Gulf Islands, B.C., and co-leader of the Green Party of Canada.

The Hill Times

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2024 was the year of climate crisis: so how did it fall off the political agenda? – The Hill Times

The World Meteorological Organization recently concluded that 2024 was the hottest year on record, globally.

The global climate system is complex. Ocean currents interact with massive atmospheric circulatory systems. The rapidly warming Arctic caused the northern polar vortex to collapse. What was once a barrier of rapidly moving winds holding the Arctic’s deep freeze over our polar north is now a wobbly system that has allowed cold air masses to move into what were once warmer areas. That has had the unanticipated side effect of interfering with what was once a predictable jet stream. The jet stream used to move at mid-latitudes, fast, solid, east west air currents have now deteriorated to deeply wobbly wavy slowly moving currents. It turns out what kept the jet streams reliably fast and horizontal at mid latitude was the differential between the heat at the equator and the deep cold at the poles. As the Arctic has warmed, deep and dangerous unpredictable extreme weather events are occurring nearly daily and nearly everywhere.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada is taking note.  Summer 2024 had a combined total of over $7 billion in insured losses – in Canada alone. Where our summer background soundtrack used to be the Beach Boys, it is increasingly a post-apocalyptic movie score – Mad Max on steroids.  Summer is now a season of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, killer storms and floods. We have not recovered in British Columbia from the traumatizing effects of 619 people dying in four days in the last weekend of June and Canada Day 2021. A heat dome is a deadly and lethal event. As the temperature hit 50 degrees C at my husband’s family farm in Ashcroft BC, 40 km away Lytton all but disappeared. The new fire truck burned in the fire station, the town was gone in 15 minutes.  My step daughter, a healthy young woman in her thirties, nearly died. Her story was recounted in The Tyee, One woman’s dance with death in the heat dome. https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/08/04/One-Woman-Dance-Heat-Dome-Death/

Fall 2021 delivered another crippling blow to BC with the atmospheric rivers. And we had wildfires all across BC.

As bad as 2021 was, the Insurance Bureau of Canada ranks summer 2024 as the single most destructive season in Canadian history.

In the Global South the climate crisis does even more damage as poorer countries are less able to protect the vulnerable. The 2024 floods in Afghanistan and Pakistan killed over one thousand people. The October 2014 floods in Spain killed over 200 people.

The killer heat waves of 2024 were particularly deadly in India, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines.

The US was also hit hard. The USA experienced 24 extreme weather events each of which had an impact of over $1 billion. Hurricanes Milton and Helene caused widespread property devastation and loss of life. Helene killed over 200 people in the southern US.

Yet the US presidential campaign led to the election of a climate ignoramus. Donald Trump still proclaims that Climate change is a hoax.

It is a source of angst beyond measure.

We just cannot connect the dots. The price of groceries goes up when harvests fail due to droughts and floods. The climate crisis increases the cost of living as it also drives up provincial debt and deficits as the costs of fire-fighting and of rebuilding the devastated infrastructure of community after community and province after province.

We hear a steady drum beat about “affordability” but the threat to the survival of human civilization – a real risk of the galloping climate crisis – is met with silence.

The April 4, 2022, report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was clear- to keep a habitable planet, to ensure the survival of human civilization greenhouse gas emissions must peak and begin to decline rapidly “at the latest before 2025.”

The clock is ticking, but politicians are not leaders. We look at polls and rush to distract the citizenry with shiny trinkets.

As a wish for the start of a new year, watch the 2009 film The Age of Stupid. The premise is that the last person on earth is an archivist, Pete Postlethwait, with vast records of human society, news reels and videos of how we ignored the climate crisis. He asks the most critical question:

“We could have saved ourselves, but we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?”

Fortunately, we still have time. We must take the actions, difficult as they are, to protect our children’s world.  What does it take for politicians to realize that when you are in free fall, you reach for the parachute- not the pocketbook.

Elizabeth May, O.C. is the Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands and Leader of the Green Party of Canada. She is an increasingly angry cranky activist and grandmother.

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OPINION | BY GREEN PARTY LEADER ELIZABETH MAY | May 27, 2024

The degree to which any fisheries minister is successful is in direct proportion to their ability to stare down officials and insist on conservation.

It’s time to fight for our fish – The Hill Times

—

Recent news articles have focused on the increased risk that last summer’s cabinet shuffle changing fisheries ministers from British Columbia’s Joyce Murray to Gaspé’s Diane Lebouthillier may undermine long-promised actions to get open-pen aquaculture out of B.C. waters. The issue of the threat to wild Pacific salmon from foreign-owned aquaculture operations growing a non-native species of Atlantic salmon is well known. It was the subject of extensive study back in the Harper years conducted by an independent commission chaired by Justice Bruce Cohen. It collected testimony from scientists, experts, fishers, Indigenous Peoples, and conservationists over a year and a half. Its final report, The Uncertain Future of the Fraser River Sockeye, was a roadmap for preserving our wild salmon. Following up on the Cohen inquiry’s recommendations, in their 2019 election platform, the Liberals pledged to transition from open-pen salmon farms to closed-containment systems on the West Coast by 2025.

Years ago, in one of my many town hall meetings, a constituent challenged me to stop calling aquaculture “fish farms.” “Call them what they are,” she urged: “toxic fish factories.” I have done so ever since.

In the House Fisheries Committee, we heard from many experts who detailed the ways in which Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officials have attempted to censor and squash the science that proved the damage of these toxic fish factories. DFO scientist Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders documented the dangerous viruses that reached wild salmon from the open pen operations. As The Globe and Mail reported, her work was buried by higher-ups in her department, and it took 10 years for her research to be published.

The willingness of DFO to suppress the science and mislead the minister makes sense when one examines the mandate of the department. It has a built-in conflict of interest. DFO is both in charge of regulating aquaculture, and of promoting growth in the aquaculture industry. DFO should have a mandate to protect coastal ecosystems and fish habitat. The Green Party believes that growing fish for food should be done on land and regulated by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

I am so grateful that former minister Murray is following up on the commitment to get open-pen toxic fish factories out of our waters. British Columbians are deeply committed to our wild salmon.

Over the years, British Columbian ministers of fisheries have really fought to protect our salmon. As a Progressive Conservative fisheries minister, the late John Fraser not only fought for Pacific salmon, but he also took DFO to task when he realized the data coming from the East Coast was deeply worrying. As an avid fisher and conservationist, he had noticed the size of the average cod landed was getting steadily smaller. DFO experts told Fraser not to worry, and that the total tonnage of the annual harvest was remaining constant. Fraser was even more alarmed, and he tried to warn subsequent ministers of DFO. If they had only listened, we would not have seen the commercial extinction of the cod, and the loss of 30,000 jobs overnight, as well-documented in Michael Harris’ 1998 book Lament for an Ocean.

It puts me in mind of the many fisheries ministers over decades who have been misled by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

In fact, the case can be made that the degree to which any minister of fisheries and oceans is successful in protecting our fisheries is in direct proportion to that minister’s ability to stare down officials and insist on conservation. Former minister Dominic LeBlanc did so to restore the Fisheries Act to what it had been before then-prime minister Stephen Harper gutted it in spring 2012 in omnibus Bill C-38.

Free advice to Lebouthillier: talk to former ministers LeBlanc and Murray, and fight for our salmon.

Wild Pacific salmon is at risk, just as are our whales, from the right whales on the East Coast to the southern resident killer whales that share the Pacific waters with our salmon. This is squarely federal jurisdiction. Fight for our natural ecosystems, protect fish habitat, and move the toxic fish factories to closed systems on land.

Elizabeth May is the MP for Saanich–Gulf Islands, B.C., and co-leader of the Green Party of Canada.

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OPINION | BY GREEN PARTY LEADER ELIZABETH MAY | December 26, 2023

We cannot re-negotiate the Paris Agreement, but we can move in the WTO to ensure all climate actions are protected to allow the use of trade sanctions, where appropriate, to insulate against decisions that penalize climate action as in restraint of trade, and to ensure the Paris Agreement will succeed where previous pacts have failed.

SAANICH GULF ISLANDS, B.C.–I am the only MP—maybe the only living Canadian—to have been involved in negotiations of the treaty that saved the ozone layer, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and the early negotiations of what became the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its signing at the Rio Earth Summit, and ratification in 1992, the negotiation that led to the Kyoto Protocol, and to be present at the negotiations that led to the Copenhagen proposal to replace Kyoto and in the negotiations in Paris at COP21 in 2015.

With this decades-long experience in global environmental treaties, I believe it is past time to compare the success of the Montreal Protocol protecting the ozone layer against the failure in climate treaties. It is time to see what differences can be identified. Why did one succeed so spectacularly while the other sputters?

Many will say that the big difference between Montreal and Kyoto is that fossil fuels are the engine of the whole economy while ozone depleting substances impact a relatively small slice of it. That is true, but it’s only a partial explanation.

I have come to believe that the more significant factor was timing and the rise of the increased power of multinational corporations, the sway of neoliberalism through the 1990s, and the creation of the World Trade Organization.

The extent to which the WTO has sabotaged global climate action has been barely examined.

The WTO was built on the post-war framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), greatly expanding the scope of international trade, and shifting the framework to increased corporate rights.

The GATT, upon which the WTO was built, had never set out such sweeping powers to privilege corporate profits over societal well-being. Indeed, GATT’s Article XX created exceptions for government policy measures that were deemed necessary to “protect human, animal or plant life, or the conservation of finite natural resources.” These provisions still exist, but they have been all but ignored by the WTO.

In 1997, shortly after the WTO was established, the Kyoto Protocol to protect climate stability was negotiated in Japan at COP3. Ten years earlier, the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer was successfully negotiated, using trade sanctions as an enforcement mechanism. The Montreal Protocol was spectacularly successful. Ozone-depleting substances were banned in increased force over a period of years. The ozone layer is now repairing itself.

In almost every respect, the Kyoto Protocol was based on the architecture of the ozone treaty. The concepts of “common but differentiated responsibility” of having industrialized countries cut emissions first with developing nations moving later were transported from ozone to climate.

The only missing piece was the use of trade sanctions as an effective enforcement mechanism. The WTO created a committee on trade and the environment. It never made a ruling on the issue, but it raised the question: “are environmental treaties obstructing trade?”

Somehow, in the decade between Montreal and Kyoto, the trade ministers of industrialized countries instructed the environment ministers that trade sanctions were not available to enforce climate agreements. Even Canada, which had led the way in the fight against chlorofluorocarbons, significantly changed our stance. Canada went to Kyoto with a clear message: “if trade sanctions are included, we will not sign.”  The result is that the Kyoto Protocol was left with no effective enforcement mechanism, and every subsequent climate treaty has similarly been deprived of the teeth to make the agreement work.

With the WTO’s creation, the exemptions under GATT’s Article XX have largely been assumed to be unavailable for global climate action. This is largely due to WTO appellate body rulings on two unrelated disputes.

The various efforts to use trade sanctions for conservation were ruled by the WTO appellate body to fall outside of Article XX exemptions. The two leading cases are known as “Tuna Dolphin” and “Shrimp Turtle.”

But in rejecting U.S. trade-sanctions in the interest of conserving dolphins and endangered sea turtles, the appellate body ruled: “we have not decided that sovereign states should not act together bilaterally, plurilaterally or multilaterally, either within the WTO or in other international fora, to protect… the environment. Clearly, they should and do.”

The climate crisis clearly meets the efforts the WTO singles out as allowable—strong multilateral action has been repeatedly attempted, from the 1992 UNFCCC, through to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement.  Every nation on earth is now legally bound to act.

But we have no mechanisms for enforcement.

We cannot re-negotiate the Paris Agreement and insert sanctions, but we can move in the WTO to ensure that all climate actions are protected under Article XX to allow the use of trade sanctions, where appropriate, to insulate against decisions that penalize climate action as in restraint of trade, and to ensure the Paris Agreement will be effective where previous agreements have failed.

Canada has an opportunity to move this forward at the upcoming 13th Ministerial Conference taking place Feb. 24-29, 2024, in Abu Dhabi, UAE. So the challenge is for International Trade Minister Mary Ng to make sure the 2023 “UAE consensus” on climate from COP28 is operationalized in the UAE in 2024.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich Gulf Islands, B.C.

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By Elizabeth May

December 9, 2023

As we begin the second week of negotiations here in Dubai, it is fair to ask “how is it going?” Which puts me in mind of a conversation I once had with my late British father-in-law after he’d spent a full day at the Derby county cricket match.

“Who won?” I asked, unfamiliar with the sometimes drawn-out nature of the game the late, great Robin Williams dubbed baseball on Valium.

“Not over yet,” he replied. “The match continues tomorrow.”

“Well, who’s winning?” I asked.

“Too soon to tell.”

And, so it goes with every COP.

At mid-point in this quite controversial COP28 Dubai, who is winning?

First, score a few points for the fossil fuel lobby. Canada’s cap on emissions has been announced. It is a framework to develop a cap that will start having effect by 2026 and has a goal of reducing emissions by 2030, but by less than previous promises, and carefully designed to allow an increase in production.

In good news for the climate, Canada and many other nations have committed to serious action to reduce methane emissions. Canada also announced a $31 million replenishment of the Montreal Protocol fund to continue to drive down emissions of both ozone depleting and warming gases under the Kigali amendment to the Protocol. As announced early in this COP, we also have positive news in commitments to the new Loss and Damage Fund, now up to $700 million.

So far, the biggest win on the climate side of the ledger so far is the pledge to triple investments in renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030 – now endorsed by 125 nations, including Canada. The EU has put maximum pressure on China to sign on. We will see. 

Meanwhile, Canada has been more energetically shilling for the nuclear industry, one of 22 countries pledging to invest and build nuclear reactors, to triple by 2030.

As I run into parliamentarians from other countries, there is a level of disbelief in the idea that anyone would build new nuclear reactors. While the federal Liberals and a number of provincial governments seem to have fallen for the idea that there is something new and magical about Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) with very little skepticism from the Canadian media, the reality is far different. The recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023 — not a report hostile to the industry — concluded:

“Small Modular Reactors, by virtue of the fact that they are designed to generate less electricity than standard reactor designs, will necessarily face greater economic challenges. When compared to large reactors, SMRs will be more expensive per unit of installed capacity and produce more costly power. The trend of SMR designers to move towards larger design outputs — South Korea moving from a 100 MW design to a 170 MW design, Rolls-Royce proposing a 470 MW design — offers evidence for the continued importance of economies of scale. However, even after increasing output power, SMRs remain uneconomical. The case of NuScale, with a cost estimate of around US$20,000 per kW of installed capacity, illustrates how expensive SMRs could be. All SMR designs are being developed with large amounts of public money. The puzzle remains why governments continue to invest in a suite of technologies that appear doomed to commercial failure.”

So far, the biggest win on the climate side of the ledger is the pledge to triple investments in renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030 – now endorsed by 125 nations, including Canada. 

In fact, shortly after this report was issued the planned NuScale SMR to be built in Utah, the furthest along in approvals in the United States, was cancelled.

“The termination of NuScale’s contract signals the broader challenges of developing nuclear energy in the United States,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Placing excessive reliance on untested technologies without adequate consideration of economic viability, practicality, and safety concerns is irresponsible and clearly won’t work.”

The German MPs, both Greens and more Conservative, whom I have met here in Dubai, are very pleased with unexpectedly good results in removing all nuclear-generated electricity from their grid. It has reduced electricity costs and boosted renewables. “The steep climb in electricity generation from solar and wind sources,” per Reuters last April, “up 19.5% and 10% respectively in 2022 — helped lift Germany’s total electricity generation by 0.2% last year, despite a 50% drop in nuclear output due to earlier reactor shutdowns, and an 11% fall in hydropower output due to drought.”

As one German MP explained it to me, nuclear is so inflexible, you cannot crank it up or down, so it acts as a block for accessible and available renewables. Wind power had to be kept off grid to leave the space nuclear electricity needed.

As negotiations continue for the final text of the “Global Stock-taking”, nuclear lobbyists hope to get a call for increased nuclear energy in the text. Meanwhile, with more than  125 countries now signed up for tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency, that language is in current drafts.

We are now down to “crunch time” and negotiations will start pushing into the round-the-clock sessions that COPs have become famous for. The president of this COP, as all presidents do, says we will end on time, December 12.

For now, the debates and arm-twisting continue, but mostly in hallways and closed rooms, with the usual negotiation truism applying that nothing is settled until everything is settled. In addition, of course, to that other truism from the great Yankees batsman: “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

Contributing Writer Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, is the Leader of the Green Party of Canada.

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By Elizabeth May

December 13, 2023

As I sit in the Dubai airport awaiting my 14-hour flight to Toronto, I am reading reactions (reactions in emails or in the media? If media, can we cite sources so I can link to them?) to COP28 from friends and colleagues around the world. Friend and fellow British Columbian, Tzeporah Berman, founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, saw the commitment to tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency as positive, “But”, she writes on Twitter/X, “without a clear commitment for it to displace fossil fuels it won’t work. The atmosphere does not care how much renewable energy we build. It cares about how much fossil fuels we don’t.”

UK Green colleague and founder of Extinction Rebellion Rupert Reed, is scathing. “The real danger of the final Cop28 ‘positive’ outcome is that it makes it seem as if something has been achieved. Whereas all that has been achieved after 28 years is a toothless statement of the obvious: that we need to transition away from fossil fuels.”

Hard to disagree, and yet I do. I think the real danger will be in a lessening of the pressure for transformational change and fast. Headlines about a deal to save the world often lead to a collective sense of relief, and a diminution of public pressure. A COP decision does not deliver changes in capitals around the world — only public mobilization back home can do that.

Still, the language in the final decision document does represent a major shift. Nearly two hundred countries have now agreed that we have to move away from fossil fuels, and fast.

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Simon Stiell, proclaimed within minutes of the approval of the key text by 197 nations present, “This is the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.”

What was the COP28 debate really about? News coverage is rarely detailed in terms of how these treaties and pledges intersect, but they do build on each other. The Rio agreement of 1992, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), remains the legal treaty within which every COP occurs. That treaty was ratified in the US Senate by the ¾ vote required for the USA to be legally bound to any international agreement. That was done under the late US President, George H.W. Bush, 41^st President and father of #43. Thank heavens he managed that post-Rio feat or none of the subsequent global climate treaties would have any clout in international law. Similarly, the Kyoto Protocol of COP3, and the Copenhagen agreement of COP15 are all products of the multilateral process under UNFCCC.

The language in the final decision document does represent a major shift. Nearly two hundred countries have now agreed that we have to move away from fossil fuels, and fast.

As the COPs limp along and we fail to avert the kind of climate events — whether killer storms, or fires, floods or heat domes — we could have avoided had we acted in the 1990s, it is easy to regard the process itself as pointless and flawed beyond redemption.

This COP had a level of desperate urgency precisely because governments have made promises and then done the opposite. Since 1992, when the largest gathering of world leaders to that point in history agreed to the UNFCCC promising to reduce emissions of Greenhouse gases to avoid dangerous changes to the climate, the world’s economies have emitted more GHG than between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that Rio Earth Summit.

For COP28, the key agenda item was to fulfill a requirement of the 2015 Paris Agreement, negotiated at COP21. In the Paris Agreement, it was established that in 2023 there would be a full and comprehensive review of whether the world was on track to meet key Paris goals. In order to safeguard life on Earth, the Paris agreement set out that all nations cooperate to ensure that global average temperature increase due to human-caused (anthropogenic) climate change be held to as far below 2 degrees C as possible and to make every effort to avoid warming of 1.5 degrees C.

Even though the Paris Agreement, like the UNFCCC, is considered “legally binding” under United Nations rules, unlike the most successful environmental treaty ever — the Montreal Protocol that saved the ozone layer — it lacks any enforcement mechanism. The comprehensive review called the Global Stocktake will be revisited every five years through the COP process.

In a real sense. this Global Stocktake is the treaty’s only method of enforcement, and this first Global Stocktake was a critical reality check. Could the world face the truth of the rapidly dwindling chances of holding to 1.5 degrees C? And more importantly could it chart a course to hold to 1.5.?

The Stocktake confirmed that collectively the world is not on track to meet our commitments. In a nearly 200-paragraph text, it reiterated that to keep any hope alive of holding to 1.5, much more must be done and fast.

Key elements of the agreement, to which Canada is now committed include:

• Limits global warming to 1.5 °C with no or limited overshoot and requires deep, rapid and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 percent by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2035 relative to the 2019 level.
• Calls for significant increases in both adaptation and mitigation financing.
• Calls on parties to triple renewable energy capacity globally and double the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030;
• Accelerates efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power and towards net zero emission energy systems
• Transitions away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050
• Reduces emissions of methane, itself a more powerful GHG than carbon dioxide, but shorter lived in the atmosphere.

All these commitments must be acted on with urgency. Canada’s announced emissions cap has a timeline that does not suggest urgency. We finally have a framework within which regulations will be developed. And the cap is targeting a smaller level of cuts than was initially promised.

No one fully informed about the climate crisis and its galloping levels of unfairness in impacts to the most vulnerable, enormous gaps between rhetoric and reality through decades of climate promises could be jubilant at this critical moment. But the COP28 global decision is a lifeline. We have to grab it!

Contributing Writer Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, is the Leader of the Green Party of Canada.

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Measures for greater transparency and development of a new taxonomy for climate finance made up a small and unambitious section of the Fall Economic Statement.

OPINION | BY GREEN PARTY LEADER ELIZABETH MAY | December 11, 2023

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES—Here at COP28, one of the hot topics is climate finance.

The innovations under discussion remind me of the kind of globally re-organizational changes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference than of the changes inked at Conferences of the Parties (COPs).

In our Parliament, the most forward-looking work on climate finance is ISG Senator Rosa Galvez’s Bill S-243, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act. Bill S-243 is the gold standard for the rules and regulations one would want to align actions of banks, insurance companies, pension plans, and other financial institutions with climate goals. One would wish the government to not only adopt and support S-243, but also to reintroduce it as government legislation in the House, and advance it to royal assent.

We are seeing snail’s-pace progress in Canada with such things as the adoption of Guideline B-15 on Climate Risk Management by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. Measures for greater transparency and development of a new taxonomy for climate finance made up a small and unambitious section of the fall economic statement.

Meanwhile, “climate finance” at COPs tend to be one-off announcements of financial commitments to the various funds opened in connection to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We already have an “Adaptation Fund,” and Global Environmental Facility, the Global Climate Fund, and the dwindling funds of the Kyoto’s now-mothballed Clean Development Mechanism. At COP27 last year, the long-debated Fund for Loss and Damage was finally put in place. COP28 opened with funding pledges to start implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund with real dollars. But even with $100-million from the United Arab Emirates, $100-million from the United States, and a similar amount from the European Union, the amount in the fund hovers at around $400-million. As one World Bank representative put it in a gathering of parliamentarians: two major storms will wipe out all the commitments made at COP28.

Other big amounts that move the needle on financing were announced at COP28. ALTÉRRA, a US$30-billion catalytic climate vehicle, has been trumpeted as promoting international efforts to create a fairer climate finance system with an emphasis on improving access to funding for the Global South. This program has Mark Carney’s fingerprints all over it. Carney has been designated the UN special envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and co-chair for the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. ALTÉRRA will aim to mobilize US$250-billion globally by 2030, steering private markets towards climate investments with a focus on transforming emerging markets and developing economies.

Also announced here in Dubai is a collaboration involving the UAE government with members forming a who’s who of global capital: ADQ, Blackrock, HSBC, Masdar, Ninety One, and the World Bank Group. Abu Dhabi will host the Global Climate Finance Centre (GCFC) to accelerate the development of climate finance frameworks and skills, and champion best practices both in the UAE and globally. The GCFC aims to address key barriers linked to financial frameworks that hinder investment flows, to help make climate finance available, affordable, and accessible as a COP28 legacy for action.

But even these new institutions are not close to the kind of reshaping of global financial flows advocated by a growing list of countries. Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, herself a graduate from the London School of Economics, backed by no less than Lord Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist, is calling for systems of global governance over new revenue flows. A small levy on travel, a carbon price on global shipping, and the transaction tax known as the Tobin tax could provide the sustainable funding at scale that will be required, both in addressing economic losses due to climate events and funding the rapid and massive investment needed for the shift to renewable energy. At COP28, the call for reforming the multilateral development banks such that they be fit for purpose in a polycrises world is frequently heard.

All of this suggests we urgently need a new Bretton Woods to put in place rules and institutions to ensure human society can navigate and survive the coming storms.

Elizabeth May is the Green leader and MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.

Read the article on The Hill Times website here: Canada needs to up its game on climate finance – The Hill Times

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Meta (formerly Facebook) is playing hardball on Bill C-18 (the Online News Act). It is clear that the digital giants require regulation in more ways than one. They are pushing against it, slow-walking while they continue to reap obscene profits and scrape our personal data for re-sale to advertisers. The same goes for Google, although they seem open to a reasonable compromise as opposed to Meta who are willing to starve Canadian news media into submission. It has come down to brass tacks: the CRTC draft regulations. We think there is a way forward that can mitigate our apparent dependency on these social media giants who are doing so much to damage our information ecology (Bell, Postmedia and Torstar have recently eliminated many positions in their news divisions and we have lost 482 local newspapers). Meta made a deal with Australia but it seems that Canada is too close to home what with the FCC in the United States is breathing down their neck they have drawn a red line. We Greens think it is incumbent on Canada to show some grit and cross it. The world is definitely watching.

The proposed regulations will see approximately $230 (CDN) million of the big tech ad revenues redistributed annually to Canadian news media through a formula based on the number of journalists they employ. This is pocket change for these tech giants. Ad spending in the digital advertising market is projected to reach $14.91 Billion (USD) in 2023. The largest market is search advertising with a market volume of $7.34 Billion (USD) in 2023. We think most Canadians will agree that requiring these companies to support Canadian journalism in this context is reasonable.

That said, the GPC does see the need for a major adjustment to the proposed regulations. We suggest that the CBC/Radio Canada be removed as recipients. This would free up a good percentage of the funds to be allocated to private sector news media including local non-profit newspapers and community broadcasters and web sites that are so vital to the informed decisions of Canadians on all kinds of issues including their safety when wildfires and floods occur which, alas, have become more frequent with the advent of climate change.

This removal of CBC/Radio Canada must be accompanied by an additional allocation of federal funding to the public broadcaster that will allow our public broadcaster to forgo ad revenue. This would be a boon to our private sector media. We suggest that the CRTC develop a formula that is weighted in favour of the truly independent press as opposed to the large corporate media players, several of whom already have deals with Meta and Google.

Fully public, advertising-free ,news services from Radio Canada and CBC, radio and television, should expand their local and regional coverage to increase Canadians’ access to information.

A properly funded CBC/Radio Canada will also provide public bulletin board functions as in the past to strengthen communities outside the major urban centres. The goal should be to provide Canadians with an alternative to what FaceBook, now Meta has offered, one that does not operate to steal private information, capitalize on that invasion of privacy nor undermine local journalism.

C-18 is not a panacea to the social ills that the tech giants have exacerbated. We are eager to see the government’s long promised bill to confront on-line hate. Likewise the promised copyright reform.

In the mean time, let’s keep working in the public interest to protect Canadian journalism.

Elizabeth May is an MP and GPC co- leader.

Sandy Crawley is the GPC shadow cabinet co-critic for Heritage, Arts & Culture

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