My point of privilege was (I think) well delivered. I had worked hard all long weekend digging up precedents from other Speaker’s rulings and debates going back to 1963 when they invented this whole idea of recognized parties and unrecognized parties. Amazingly, Canada is the only country among those using Westminster parliamentary democracy to have this absurd rule that bigger parties have more procedural rights than smaller parties. It all stemmed from a 1963 change in the law so that parties with more than 12 MPs would receive public funding for their parliamentary work. (Funding has now risen to about $2 million/party as soon as they get 12 MPs). Rights were nowhere mentioned in the 1963 bill, but – over time- it became customary to keep MPs from smaller parties off committees and to never allow them to put forward Opposition Day motions. But no one has ever suggested we have no rights to ask a question in QP, even though the slot for smaller parties is the last question – with no supplementary questions – ever.

The YouTube video of my argument runs 13 minutes and is included here:

Elizabeth May: Blocking Greens from asking questions during QP is antidemocratic

The Speaker has not yet ruled, so I wait in hopeful anticipation.

I really wish I had the chance to put a question forward in Question Period this week. I have been trying to get up to speed on an issue of which I was dimly aware and which I am now convinced needs a lot more attention. So, lacking a question in QP, at least I can tell you about it.

One of the most extraordinary resource conflicts in Canada is playing out so far north that we hear little of it in southern Canada. A group of Inuit hunters, widely supported in their community, set up a protest camp that blocked access to the airstrip serving an iron mine on Baffin Island. The mining company, Baffinland Iron Mines Corp, calls itself a Canadian corporation, but is owned by Texas based Energy and Minerals Group and Luxembourg corporation, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel maker.

After many years of technological and financial hurdles for developers, the open pit mine began operations in 2014. While initially welcomed locally, the mine now wants to double the size of its operations at Mary River from six million tonnes to 12 million. Incredibly, the company has been acting as though it had permission to proceed, even before hearings opened. It has drawn down a billion dollars in financing and, according to the Inuit protesters, has already begun construction.

The doubling of production will involve building a railway and increasing shipping with an additional quay at Milne Inlet. The ore is shipped to Europe along routes that cut through narwhal habitat. As well, the iron ore dust is contaminating the landscape and has been detected in Arctic char, a key food source for the Inuit and other animals that are part of their traditional diet – like narwhal.

The Nuluujaaq Land Guardians set up a camp in early February in peaceful protest against the mine expansion. The camp shut down the airstrip – blocking access to supplies for the mine and its 700 workers. I just cannot help but be inspired by the protest by Inuit land defenders in minus 33 degree weather. In 24 hour darkness. In an outdoor camp.

The company received a temporary injunction against the protest that ended February 10th. The hearing for a permanent injunction has been taking place in Iqaluit. The environmental assessment hearings are to resume in April. Meanwhile, the Nuluujaaq Land Guardians are calling on the federal ministers of Fisheries and Oceans, Natural Resources and Northern Affairs to step up to support their rights and for the RCMP to launch a criminal investigation into Baffinland’s actions.

In another issue pitting resource extraction against Indigenous peoples, I am trying to create some leverage for concerned Canadians to act to stop and appalling project in Namibia. Vancouver-based ReconAfrica has gained rights to frack in very sensitive areas along the border with Botswana. Threatened by the fracking is the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO world heritage site that straddles Botswana and Namibia. The SAN people of the area are protesting the violation of their rights.

In order to launch an investigation, I have written the newly created CORE – Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise – Sheri Meyerhoffer. The CORE office was supposed to have more robust powers than ultimately were established. My letter and call for an inquiry into ReconAfrica is something of a test case. I will keep you posted as we create a petition and other tools for Canadians to protest this outrageous assault on indigenous rights, biodiversity and climate. This link has a very good briefing on the issue: Open Letter: Save the Okavango Delta — HowNow Magazine

So, we enter the last week of February. My personal COVID counter, like marking the walls in an imaginary prison cell called COVID, started with Monday, March 9, 2020. That was the day we recorded the first COVID death in Canada. So we approach a full year of this. The threat that the variants will outrun the vaccines, creating a far worse third wave, is never far from my thoughts.

Be very careful. Stay safe.

Sending love and hopes for happier days – soon!

Elizabeth

PS more links for parliamentary interventions:

Elizabeth May: Can Canada meaningfully commit to obtaining the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples?
Elizabeth May: Tabling a Private Members’ Bill is not the time to make a partisan speech
Elizabeth May: How much sovereignty has Canada lost under the Canada China FIPPA?

To subscribe to Good Sunday Morning, visit the Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens:
http://www.sgigreenparty.ca/

The post Good Sunday Morning – February 21 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

And a very Happy Valentine’s Day!

Here on Vancouver Island, we had an uncommonly large snowfall yesterday after a deep chill from the Polar Vortex that has gripped much of Canada. Another reminder of the climate emergency generally missed by our nightly news and weather reports.

How the warming of the globe impacts the Arctic – and vice versa- is still being researched. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic! The warming waters that melt the ice, that reduce the albedo effect that result in a positive feedback to faster warming and more loss of ice also impacts global climate. The jet stream used to move in a strong horizontal flow at mid latitude. It helped keep a sort of ring of wind at the poles, keeping the Arctic cold. As the temperature differential between cold Arctic and warmer equator begins to shrink, the jet stream wobbles. Arctic blasts reach southern Canada, while the Arctic is far warmer than southern Canada. I found this fairly clear explainer on the NOAA website of the US government. Good graphs and clear communication if you want to dive in.

Parliament did not sit this week, but first thing on Tuesday, I am going to be asking the Speaker for help. The larger parties are preventing Green MPs from having any questions ever to the prime minister.

When I was first elected in 2011, I had a question a week. The questions for those of us not in one of the larger parties are always at the end of Question Period (QP), and we rotated through the week days. I never knew it was lucky that in 2011 the MPs not part of the larger parties were exactly five in number. A great number – one for every day of the week.

The ebb and flow of questions changed with additional Bloc members in 2015, still shy of the required 12 MPs to be considered a “recognized party,” but I still got a question a week.

All that changed after the 2019 election. With only about 100,000 more votes than the Greens, the Bloc jumped to 32 seats. (We really do need to get rid of First Past the Post!) And the Conservatives, Liberals, Bloc and NDP met secretly and decided that since Justin Trudeau had adopted the practice of answering all the questions asked on Wednesdays, no Greens should ever have a Wednesday question. Ditto no questions for Jody Wilson-Raybould on Wednesdays. For more than a year, I have been asking for an explanation from the Speaker – who says – go ask the other parties. So I make the rounds of in-person chats – when that was possible – with each of the party house leaders. No one will take responsibility or provide an explanation. We have written all of them. No reply.

On January 27th, we held a press conference by zoom to make the situation public.

And some media began to ask questions of the other parties. Althia Raj from HuffPost got an answer from Jagmeet Singh. To my deep shock, he claimed there was a rule and the rule was fair and that MPs from smaller parties should not be able to ask questions in QP. Of course, just like the Bloc, back in the day when the NDP was below 12 seats, they argued for more questions in QP. But never in the history of our parliament has anyone suggested some MPs d not get questions in QP.

Considering we had just shy of 1.2 million votes in 2019 and elected three members of parliament, the idea that our limited rights of participation should be further reduced by the bigger parties strikes me as profoundly anti-democratic. My last question in QP was on February 4th. My next one is not until March 8th. With Wednesdays pulled from the roster for questions for MPs who are independent or in non-recognized parties, there are only four days to divvy up. And every time an MP gets booted from their caucus, they get a slot in the rotation. So with Derek Sloan being given the heave-ho from the Conservative benches, Paul Manly, Jenica Atwin and I have less opportunity to ask a question. What was four MPs a year ago – 3 Greens and Jody – is now eight as MPs face discipline in their own party. Please keep your fingers crossed the Speaker will agree that we have the right to ask the prime minister a question – now and again.

I have a request that I hope you can take on board. In addition to the notices in the post-script, I wanted to draw a government consultation to your attention. The issue is very well explained in this article from FOCUS magazine:

Getting arsenic out of your garden – Earthrise – Focus on Victoria

The issue is of posts treated with a very nasty arsenic mixture called chromated copper arsenate (CCA). CCA treated posts are still being sold in places like Rona, Slegg, and Buckerfields. The arsenic can leach into soils and contaminate the veggies we eat. And some people do not know how such treated wood products must never – ever – be burned. Thanks to Allan Galambos, who contacted me about this a few years ago, I have been pressuring the government to act. Now there is a consultation with the Canadian Standards Association that ends on February 18. So please do send your comments and a call for tighter regulation to Kat Crew, Project Manager with the CSA, kat.crew@csagroup.org.

Enjoy your valentine today – whatever it might be!! Cuddle with your favourite human, dog, cat, or if stuck alone in this awful pandemic – have some fair-trade chocolate and watch a schlocky romance on TV!

Tomorrow is family day! So zoom it is!

Much love and thanks for all you do!

Elizabeth

P.S.

Amazing true story – the new leader of the Green Party of Alberta, Jordan Wilkie is the grandson of the legendary founder of Wardair, Max Ward. Max Ward passed away in November and Jordan has a petition to have the Edmonton airport renamed in his honour. Please sign!

DEADLINE FOR COMMENT TO BC GOVERNMENT!

BC Government’s Trans Mountain Expansion Reconsideration Engagement by the MARCH 1st deadline. You may already be aware of the above, but wanted to share this link to their webpage with the details just in case.

“Trees in the Wild” ZOOM event on the Great Bear Rainforest on Sunday, 07 March 2021 2:00 p.m. (pst)…….registration is available on EventBrite.

Go to Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens to subscribe to Good Sunday Morning.

The post Good Sunday Morning – February 14 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Stephen Harper’s branding of the Arctic has been a key part of his remaking of the Canadian identity. According to Paul Wells in his analysis of how Harper worked his way to a majority (The Longer I’m Prime Minister), Stephen Harper set out to re-make Canada’s identity by spinning traditional symbols into Conservative emblems. The insertion of “royal” into the military titles, the revisionist history that inspired spending $28 million on the bicentennial of the War of 1812, and any other homage to war dead while ignoring the plight of those living with the wounds of war, and the re-branding of the Arctic.

The Prime Minister has made it an annual summer ritual to travel to our North. His core messages are about protecting Canadian sovereignty, although the enduring visual may be his jumping on an all-terrain vehicle while declaring he “make(s) the rules.”

The prime minister’s Arctic is muscular. No “fragile North” for him.     Harper declared “use it or lose it.”   “Use it” is not a call to greater eco-tourism.  The prime minister’s vision is linked to opening up resources in oil, gas and minerals.

Yet, his promises for deep sea ports, ice breakers and new research stations are now more noted as absent than fulfilled.

For example, the ice-breakers were promised in 2005 and again in 2008, and have been delayed once again.  China, with no Arctic coastline at all, now has icebreakers in Canada’s waters while our Coast Guard’s Amundsen is in dry dock.

The construction of the deepwater port naval port in Nanisivik promised in 2007 has yet to be begun, despite promises it would begin two years ago.   Also two years ago, the Prime Minister announced a major new satellite project, the Radarstat Constellation Mission.  It now appears to be mired in budgetary delays.

The other aspect of Harper’s vision is of a militarized Arctic.  In February 2009, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and the prime minister crowed about an alleged incident involving Russian aircraft.  Their version of events was that two Russian jets violated Canadian airspace, that the CF-18s were scrambled to instruct the Russians to stay out of our airspace – or as MacKay put it – to “turn tail and head back to its own airspace,”

The Russians painted a far more banal version of events describing the Canadian reaction as “farce.”

Every trip to the Arctic involves promises of deep sea ports, a satellite project, ice breakers and new research stations.

Meanwhile, there is a very different picture of the Arctic.  It is of a canary in a coal mine: a global warning sign of dangerous levels of climate change. Ironically those very policies with which Stephen Harper is most identified – rapid exploitation of fossil fuels – speeds the rate of change in Canada’s Arctic.

My sense is that globally, it is the image of a stranded polar bear on an ice floe that says “Arctic” to the world.  A politician on an ATV riding through a sensitive eco-system will not be an image that comes to mind.

The CBC series on the search for the Franklin Expedition was more of the re-branding of how we think of the Arctic. It was more Harperization of the North.  Chris Turner, award winning journalist, got into a twitter debate with Peter Mansbridge over the coverage.  Turner’s classic line was that sending a CBC film crew to the Arctic in the summer of 2013 to investigate the fate of the Franklin expedition, without mentioning climate change, was like sending a network team of journalists to Syria, as the civil war raged, to find the exact spot on the Road to Damascus where St. Paul turned around.  Mansbridge, of course, disagreed, saying the flagship CBC news show, “The National,” covers the climate issue.

For anyone who understands the extent of the threat and the urgency of a rapid shift away from dependence on fossil fuels, it is clear that the Canadian media overall is doing a lamentable job. Coverage of climate issue in Canada is far more limited than even in the United States and much less than in European media.

Canadians need a crash course in climate science.  And understanding what is happening to the Arctic is a key place to begin.

The rate of climate change in the Arctic is galloping.  It is warming approximately three times faster than the global average.  It drives up the global average.

The melting of Arctic ice had been an anticipated climate change impact for decades, but the pace at which the ice is melting exceeds earlier projections.

When I first learned about the threat of climate change, it was 1986 and I was Senior Policy Advisor to the federal Minister of the Environment, Tom McMillan.  I was fortunate to be serving a minister of the environment who was committed to progressive environmental policies; McMillan was fortunate to be serving under a prime minister who still operated a Cabinet government.  McMillan could take his concerns to Brian Mulroney, and the prime minister actually listened.  Public policy was based on sound science, ground through the lens of a highly competent, non-partisan civil service.  So when Tom McMillan learned about the climate crisis, Mulroney agreed to position Canada in the lead.

What the Environment Canada scientists told us back in the 1980s was based on modelling the impact of trapping more greenhouse gases near the earth’s surface.  There was no debate about the science. The industry-funded campaigns to create doubt had not yet begun.  The doubt that existed was about the regional impacts. There was no uncertainty about the basics – dumping millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would destabilize the climate system and could wreak havoc.

Globally, we were told, that unless our economies started using less fossil fuels we would experience more frequent and more severe weather events, that the sea ice could melt, and glaciers could retreat.

I remember clearly that Environment Canada scientists thought the glaciers would begin to retreat by 2030.  That the melt started decades sooner has to do with two things. Firstly, we have not, in Canada or globally, reduced our use of fossil fuels.  On the contrary, the emissions of greenhouse gases have climbed due to the increased use of dirty energy.  Secondly, the impacts have been accelerating through positive feedback loops.

We are rapidly losing sea ice and permafrost.  Each of these phenomena contains feedback loops which accelerate the rate of change.

Understanding positive feed-back loops is key to understanding why we must rapidly reverse course. Positive feed-back loops create more serious impacts and a potential runaway global warming process that we could be helpless to address.

Here’s the core notion of a feedback loop.  Human action in burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that put in motion a change that itself serves to increase global warming.

An easy example is hotter, drier conditions increasing the risk of forest fires.  A burning forest releases the carbon dioxide that had been stored, through the initial transformational miracle of photosynthesis, from sunshine to released oxygen and sequestered carbon.  A bit more complex example of a feedback loop is that experienced by the interior forests of British Columbia.  Warmer winters allowed the pine beetle to grow into a devastating epidemic.  The usual winter cold snaps simply did not happen. Those cold snaps killed off most of the pine beetle population season to season.  Warmer winters spelled an economic catastrophe for the forest industry as the interior lodgepole pine forest was killed off by ravaging beetles.  We lost a forest twice the size of Sweden.  And here’s the feedback loop: the dying forest gave up its carbon.  The amount of carbon from the dead forest is larger than all the fossil fuel emissions from all the cars and trucks on British Columbia’s highways, from all the natural gas burned in our furnaces, from all industry and all human activity in the whole province.

There are two very pronounced feedback loops occurring in the Arctic: loss of ice and loss of permafrost.

As the Arctic warms, permafrost melts.  Permafrost is, as the name suggests, ground that has been – or was – permanently frozen.  As it melts, whole communities can be destabilized.

The ground that was frozen was largely muskeg – or bog.  It has a lot of methane frozen and kept out of the atmosphere.  Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.  Molecule for molecule, it packs twenty times the warming punch of carbon dioxide.  The reason the focus of the danger is so much on carbon dioxide is that there is just so much more CO2, and, that it is much longer lived in the atmosphere.  Released methane loses its warming impact in ten years; CO2 holds its warming impact in the atmosphere for one hundred years.

Back to the permafrost feedback loop: as the permafrost melts, it releases vast quantities of methane.  The released methane warms the atmosphere driving more permafrost melt.

As sea ice melts it also triggers a dangerous feedback loop.  The loss of ice compromises the albedo effect, a cooling effect.  The white ice bounces the sun’s heat back to space, whereas the dark ocean water absorbs it, speeding the warming. Less ice equals warmer waters, melting more ice.

The warming Arctic has devastating impacts on the entire planet.  Research at Rutgers University identified a plausible mechanism by which the melting Arctic has impacted areas far to the south, causing increasingly serious extreme weather events. It turns out the difference between Arctic cold and Equatorial heat has kept the jet stream moving fast and relatively horizontal over mid-latitudes.  With the warming Arctic, the difference in temperature is lessened.  As a result, the jet stream has gone wobbly.

Fires, floods and droughts have increased globally as the jet stream slows down due to a warming Arctic. Moving more slowly, it lies in lazy loops, leaving high pressure and low pressure zones in place for unusually long periods. It is too early to diagnose the causes of the ferocity of Hurricane Sandy, but clearly the melting of the Arctic is implicated.

There is not much harm in letting Stephen Harper play cowboys and Indians every summer using the Arctic as his stage. However, there is serious and long-term damage in ignoring what is really going on in our North.   Arctic sovereignty, if it means nothing else, means– if we can no longer arrest the decline in summer ice — keeping, at least, the winter ice intact. It requires that we arrest the galloping increase in greenhouse gases and meet the commitment Harper pretends to have embraced – stopping global average temperature increase from rising above 2 degrees C. This must become our central focus.

Originally published in Policy Magazine.

The post Competing Images of the Arctic appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Today, June 5, is World Environment Day, and June 8 is World Oceans Day, with the full week marked in Canada by legislation as Environment Week.

Under other prime ministers, Environment Week was a big deal. When I worked for Tom McMillan, environment minister under former prime minister Brian Mulroney, Environment Canada distributed $1 million in funding to community and environmental groups across Canada for community awareness-raising activities during Environment Week. This effort to give very small grants to groups across Canada for Environment Week continued under prime ministers Chrétien and Martin. No more.

The focus on June 8 on our oceans is a rare time when we actually turn our attention to the source of life on earth. As terrestrial creatures, we tend to forget that life on dry land is not possible without life in our oceans. Our survival is intimately connected to the oceansfor the protein we consume from the fisheries, for the role played by oceans in carbon sequestration and moderating climate, among other essential functions.

The threats to the health of our oceans are growing as never before. As the excellent report from Justice Bruce Cohen on the fate of the wild British Columbia salmon pointed out, the threats are multiple and complex. The Cohen report enumerated the threats to salmon, closely mirroring the threats throughout the oceans: land-based sources of marine pollution, over-fishing, climate change, aquaculture operations, loss of habitat, to name a few. The fact that the federal fisheries minister has still not responded to this landmark report does not bode well.

Warming waters

Among the many threats, as Justice Cohen noted, the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the greatest threat of all. The impacts of climate change on the ocean are as complex as the myriad interconnected threats from all the other reckless actions of humanity.

Warmer water has immediate negative impacts on some critical ecosystems. In the tropics, warmer water triggers bleaching of coral reefsending the life in those extraordinarily biologically diverse bits of paradise.

In Canada, warmer inland waters, particularly in critical salmon habitat in rivers and streams, essentially eliminate salmon habitat. Salmon are entirely dependent on cool waters for spawning and for the new fry to travel safely out to sea.

And, of course, in our Arctic waters, global warming is causing dramatic and dangerous loss of Arctic ice. The impacts on ecosystems are profound. The loss of ice has local effects, such as threatening the survival of polar bears and the Inuit traditional way of life. It also has global effects, such as driving the climate into new extremes of life-threatening intense storms, heat waves, and droughts.

Ocean acidification

Perhaps the most devastating threat created by our collective failure to effectively limit the growth in greenhouse gas emissions is that of ocean acidification. The increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is transferring carbon to our oceans. The gases in the atmosphere and water mix. Carbon moves from atmosphere to ocean. Most of this transfer has been beneficial in playing a critical role in pulling carbon from the atmosphere.

Over the last 200 years, it is estimated that the oceans have absorbed about one-third of all the greenhouse gases released through human activity. Certainly, the climate crisis would be more aggressive and dangerous if the oceans had not been providing this key “netting out” effect.

However, as that carbon loading has continued unabated, the carbon in the ocean is changing the chemistry of ocean water. Generally, ocean water is alkaline (or basic). However, as carbon mixes and changes in its chemistry, it becomes carbonic acid. Over time, the ocean is becoming acidified.

The impact of ocean acidification is already having measurable impacts in weakening the shells of crustaceans. All crustaceans need carbonate in order to build shells, but carbonic acid is corrosive to crustacean shells.

The potential assault on all crustaceans would have a devastating impact on the food chainultimately threatening all life in the ocean. As the head of the NOAA (the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), Jane Lubchenco, told the National Geographic, ocean acidification is the “equally evil twin” of the climate crisis.

As a society, we are failing to confront even those manageable and local impacts of treating the oceans as a resource so abundant that we make the mistake of assuming it to be infinite. As we cannot manage the conventional threats, little wonder we turn a blind eye to the threat posed by our use of the atmosphere as a free dump for fossil fuel pollution to the life in our oceans.

Originally published in Embassy News.

The post Oceans at risk like never before appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Well, of course, that isn’t true in real life. In real life, we have both a fiscal deficit and an infrastructure deficit (not to mention the more pressing ecological deficit), and none of them are subject to a plausible plan leading to elimination.

In Montreal, some of the water pipes that run under the city are so old that they are made of wood. Across Canada, water works are antiquated and designed for a climate we no longer haveas increased and more intense deluges lead to raw sewage bypassing treatment to enter rivers and seas, untreated. We have bridges that are shut down for repairs, in Saskatchewan and Quebec.

In six Western Canadian cities alone, (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg), the Canada West Foundation puts the infrastructure deficit in 2003 at $543-million. That critical weakness in infrastructure is in roads and bridges, water-works, lack of efficient public transit, lighting, waste disposal and on and on.

The most recent figures I could find come from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in its January 2013 report. According to the CCPA, the extent of gap between safe and modern infrastructure and our current situation is $145-billion worth of missing investment. To address the threat posed by crumbling infrastructure, CCPA says we need an additional $20-billion to $30-billion a year.

We know that kind of money is not going to come from the coffers of municipal governments. Of every dollar paid in taxes, only eight cents goes to municipal governments. Yet it is in municipalities that we experience our closest relationship with any level of government.

The current Conservative administration has done some good things in this area. The gas tax fund is now specifically tied to municipal infrastructure funding, but that is only approximately $3-billion per year. The overblown announcement, particularly in the leaks in advance of the 2013 budget, claimed that the Harper administration had committed a new high in commitment to infrastructure of $53-billion. Why not call it a $530-billion announcement? The big number comes from taking virtually status quo spending and multiplying it out by 10 years? Why not 100 years? It is no more helpful to municipalities. Worse, the spending, ($32.2-billion existing from gas tax fund and the implementation of the GST tax rebate, $14-billion in support of major infrastructure, including $4-billion for federal infrastructure spending, and $1.25-billion to renew the P3 Canada Fund) will not kick in with any funding increases until after the next election and the 2015 due date for getting to balanced budgets.

While the infrastructure deficit that exists today presents a $20-billion to 30-billion annual shortfall, the climate crisis will raise the stakes considerably. The Insurance Bureau of Canada has recommended that the federal government increase support for municipal infrastructure in response to the increased risk to assets due to the manmade destabilization of climate. Global warming is leading to increased severity and increased frequency of extreme weather events.

The U.S. General Accounting Office has determined that the threat to U.S. federal assets qualifies climate change as “high risk” to the health of U.S. government finances. Yet, here in Canada, we have no carbon reduction plan and no adaptation plan. Without both we are headed for new and unprecedented threats to our future, our economy and our infrastructure.

If anyone doubts that profound impacts of the changes brought on by global warming, review the costs of the brief burst of heavy rainfall that caused the collapse of Finch Avenue in Toronto in July 2009. This one event cost Toronto millions of dollars to repair. Warmer atmosphere contains more moisture than colder air and, as a result of global warming, Canada’s rainfall patterns have already changed. The impact is severe on infrastructure built for a different climate. This applies to roads, waterworks, and developments in floodplains.

Meanwhile, northern infrastructure is severely impacted by melting permafrost and buildings along tornado alleys requires significant adaptation investment. None of this is currently budgeted within announced funds.

Let’s agree it is time to take The High Road, make like a group of Angus McLintocks, and start funding our shared, common and public servicesroads, bridges, water-works, public transit, common spaces. It is time dedicate the resolve and funds necessary to eliminate the infrastructure deficit.

Originally published in the Hill Times.

The post U.S. says climate change high risk’ to federal assets, Canada has no infrastructure adaptation plan appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On April 18^th 2013 the Committee met in camera to continue its study of Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy. The committee continued consideration of a draft report and dealt with matters related to Committee business.

The post Weekly Review – Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development appeared first on Elizabeth May.

These town halls are an opportunity for Elizabeth to meet her constituents and hear about their concerns and priorities. As well, she updates constituents about her actions and work in the House of Commons on their behalf.

These clips are from Elizabeth’s town hall on Mayne Island in January 2013.

Arctic Ice Melt

[GZhOp07IDhc]

FIPA

[_6Tb2cfOOsg]

Marine Conservation

[zLE5oLp4tHQ]

Omnibus Amendments

[4LW7vzfzIXs]

Kinder Morgan Pipeline

[dtyEqFgjqIQ]

Resource Development

[6kut_Ub6ti4]

The post Mayne Island Town Hall Videos appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The thing that shocks me most about the budget is that I cannot find any tables that tell us, department by department, where the money will be spent. I have never in my life seen a budget that did not include the budget.

I wonder if my colleague has any comments.

Francis Scarpaleggia: Mr. Speaker, when I worked on my speech this the weekend, I looked furiously for some numbers and some comparative tables that would allow us to get some kind of an historical perspective on what was being done and noticed the exact same thing.

There seems to be an effort of subterfuge, to basically hide the realities of this budget in an historical context. I find that quite ironic. While the government is hiding what it is doing, it is spending large sums of money promoting itself and its supposed good works on television. Even a small portion of that advertising money could have been used to keep the ELA going, which is known as the best freshwater laboratory in the world. It is a travesty that it is being shut down.

The post The Budget appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On March 21^st, 2013, the committee heard testimony from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The first witness was David Burden Regional Director General of Central and Arctic Region, Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Mr. Burden provided evidence concerning the fishing industry in the Central and Arctic Region. The second witness was Renee Sauve, Director of Global Marine and Northern Affairs, International Affairs Directorate, with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Ms. Sauvé provided evidence about the future of commercial fishing in the Central Arctic. She also discussed the possible necessity of an international fisheries management organization to manage fishing in the Central Arctic. The second hour of the meeting was in camera. Among other things, it was agreed that, in relation to the study of the Organization of American States (OAS) and Canada’s Engagement in the Americas, the proposed budget in the amount of $50,804.10, for the committee’s travel to Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America, in the spring 2013, be adopted.  The Minutes for this meeting can be found here.

The post Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE) appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On February 26th, 2013, the committee heard testimony from Ted McDormand, an international law professor from the University of Victoria about his expertise on international law of the sea. The committee also heard evidence from representatives the Governments of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Yukon.  The delegates from the territories discussed the importance to northerners of Canada becoming chairperson of the Arctic Council in May 2013 as well as the impact of development on Arctic Canada.  The impact of climate change, increasing shipping traffic and the overall development of infrastructure and resource development were issues discussed by all representatives from the territories.

On February 28th, 2013, the committee heard testimony from witnesses from the Department of Transport and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on icebreaking, search and rescue capabilities environmental disaster response capabilities and climate change adaptability of the Coast Guard and in the North.  A witness from Prolog Canada Inc. provided testimony on transportation in the north and demonstrated to the committee that while there is development in the north, a lack of infrastructure and transportation is hindering development.

The post Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE) appeared first on Elizabeth May.