Welcome to the first sitting week of 2021! This week started with two emergency debates. On Monday, parliamentarians sat until midnight to debate President Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline. Elizabeth was clear that the real emergency remains the climate emergency, and that Canada should respect the United States’ decision to cancel the pipeline. She also stated that subsidies to the fossil fuel industry must end to facilitate a just transition to a clean-energy economy for workers.

On Tuesday, MPs sat until midnight in another emergency debate on Canada’s vaccine rollout. Elizabeth asked the Minister whether Pfizer’s attempt to negotiate tax cuts would affect access to the vaccine for Canadians. Paul reminded the government that reintroducing publicly funded labs would help Canada face the next public health emergency.

In her question this week, Elizabeth drew attention to the plight of the ground transportation industry, which has been suffering during the pandemic. Coach bus companies such as Wilson’s on Vancouver Island, and Maritime Bus are essential services that are at risk of going under because of predatory banks. She called on the government to prevent banks from requiring immediate payments from these businesses so that they can continue to provide essential services to remote communities. CTV News covered the issue and Elizabeth’s question.

Paul called for more regulation in the housing market to crack down on money laundering and other market distortions. He noted that without strong regulation, rents are increasing, affordable housing is disappearing, and more Canadians than ever are becoming homeless.

Once again, Jenica asked the government to provide direct funding to community mental health organizations and to commit to national mental health standards. Canadians need more from their government than resource websites.

Jenica, Paul and Elizabeth held a press conference this week calling for a question to be allotted to the Green Caucus during Wednesday’s Question Period, when the Prime Minister is in attendance.

Earlier in January, in a vote between all MPs, Elizabeth and Jenica won Most Knowledgeable and Rising Star, respectively, in the Maclean’s magazine Parliamentarians of the Year Award.

Key Moments

• Elizabeth May: Essential ground transportation companies are in crisis
• Elizabeth May: Cancelling Keystone XL is not a crisis compared to the climate crisis
• Elizabeth May: The Emergencies Act could help address the crisis in Long Term Care Homes
• Elizabeth May: Canada must respect President Biden’s choice to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline
• Elizabeth May: Canada must stop subsidizing fossil fuels and transition to a clean energy economy
• Paul Manly: It’s time for a wealth tax in Canada
• Elizabeth May: The government should be wary of Pfizer trying to negotiate tax cuts
• Paul Manly: Should we use the Emergencies Act to prevent deaths in Long Term Care Homes?
• Paul Manly: Reintroduce public labs in Canada so that we can be ready to face the next pandemic
• Elizabeth May: Essential ground transportation services are being pushed into bankruptcy
• Elizabeth May: Banks profit off the pandemic while essential businesses are pushed into bankruptcy
• Elizabeth May: What became of the $200 million invested in antibody treatments for COVID-19?
• Paul Manly: UK TCA is another flawed trade deal

Question Period and Member’s Statements

• Paul Manly: Money laundering and lack of regulation is making Canada’s housing unaffordable
• Elizabeth May reacts to Bill C-14 and pushes the government to do more
• Paul Manly: CRA gave CERB applicants wrong information. The government must own their mistake.
• Paul Manly: Stand up against hate
• Elizabeth May: The ground transportation sector is in imminent danger of going under
• Jenica Atwin: Can the government commit to funding mental health service providers?

Press Conferences and Media Releases

• Press conference: Greens raise concerns with current Question Period allotment – Jan 27, 2021
• Press Conference: Greens join in multi-party press conference to mark the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons coming into force
• Greens go public with objections to anti-democratic actions by the larger parties
• Greens raising alarm on rapid erosion of public transportation across Canada
• Green Party urges focus and collaboration as MPs return to Parliament

In Their Own Words​ 

• Elizabeth May: Good Sunday Morning – January 24
• Paul Manly: Housing and Homelessness: The Crisis in Our Communities

Petitions

• e-3028 Accede to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (closes Feb 6)
• e-3037 Reject CP Logistics Park in Pitt Meadows (closes Feb 14)
• e-3071 Discontinue GDP measurement and shift to a wellbeing economy (closes Feb 27)
• e-3094 Reduce dependency on China (closes March 8)
• e-3058 Ban fracking, transition to renewable energy (closes March 21)
• e-3014 Modernize the complaints review panel of the Canadian Judicial Council (closes May 7)

The post Green Caucus Week in Review: January 25 – 29 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands)
2021-01-25 23:10

Mr. Speaker, it has been a long night of debate. The Green Party members never got a speaking slot, so I will try to be brief but there is so much to say.

My hon. colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands and we find ourselves at different ends of this discussion. The crisis that consumes my sleepless nights is the threat to my children and grandchildren of a galloping climate emergency. I do not think it is incompatible to protect workers in the fossil fuel sector, but it is incompatible to continue to press for growth in fossil fuel infrastructure and avoid the coming climate crisis.

My question for my hon. colleague is this. What would have made the Conservatives believe, and for that matter what made the Liberals believe, that the well-founded, evidence-based decision of former secretary of state, John Kerry, based on an extensive review, would be ignored when, for purely political reasons, former president Donald Trump overturned it? This was an evidence-based decision for which we ought to have some respect.

Jeremy Patzer (Cypress Hills—Grasslands)
2021-01-25 23:10

Mr. Speaker, one of the overall themes that we have routinely been hearing throughout the night here is this: If not Canadian oil and gas, where else is it going to come from? We know it is going to be replaced by Saudi Arabian and Venezuelan oil. The global demand is not going down; it is going up. That is a real fact, so we need it to be Canadian oil.

We can support Canadian jobs and it is being sourced in the most environmentally friendly way there is in the entire world. We have the highest standards here in Canada, so let us be proud of that and not vilify our industry.

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Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP): Madam Speaker, with the minister’s words, this is an existential crisis ringing in my ears. I will remind the minister that the only existential crisis being debated tonight is the threat of global warming becoming a run away, self-accelerating and unstoppable threat to our children’s future.

I would also remind him that it is extremely unfair to say to those who think this was a good and right decision that we are somehow joyous and not caring about workers losing their jobs. I would no more say that people who are supporting the oil sands are deliberately and consciously threatening my grandchildren’s future than I would say it was right to be celebrating as though it does not matter when people suffer an immediate downturn in their economic prospects. We must bring in a just transition act. We must ensure that workers have transferable skills, which they do. They are very resourceful. They are very willing and able to move to other industries.

I think I may be the only member in this place who actually read the entire state department environmental impact statement on the Keystone Pipeline when it was delivered to former secretary of state, John Kerry. Nothing about the project has changed in the fundamentals of why the Obama administration turned it down. We know the Trump administration approved it against all the evidence, and I suggest to my Conservative friends if they really wanted our current Prime Minister to help protect Keystone, the only thing he could have done was gone into the United States to campaign for Donald Trump, which is something I am sure—

Hon. Seamus O’Regan (St. John’s South—Mount Pearl)
2021-01-25 19:26

Madam Speaker, we are singularly focused on those workers because they are the ones who built this industry and the ones who will lower emissions. Ensuring they are part of the solution is extraordinarily important. In fact, we will not be able to reach net zero without these men and women.

Making sure they are okay is exactly what we attempted to do during the pandemic with the $1.7 billion to look after orphaned and inactive wells. Not only is that the right thing to do environmentally, but it will also make sure that these talented and experienced men and women are kept in the industry and kept in play as we look to the next few months and years, and in fact right now as we attempt to lower emissions in this country and achieve net zero by 2050. These are the men and women who will do it.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the nature of Canadian federation and the challenges, in so many areas of public policy, caused by jurisdictional boundaries and sensitivities.

In managing the COVID pandemic, it is very clear that we are ill-served by having divided responsibilities. For example, the federal government must contract and purchase vaccines. But delivering the vaccines is provincial jurisdiction.

So far the federal government has spent $1 billion on vaccines from seven different manufacturers for a total of 414 million doses. Two have been approved so far – Pfizer (for 76 million doses) and Moderna (for 56 million doses) – with more contracts from other companies once approved by Health Canada.

It is true we have committed contracts for more doses/capita than any other G7 country. But it is also true that the rate at which Canadians are being vaccinated lags behind many other countries. The best global vaccination rate is in Israel, which has set up 150 vaccination clinics. Compare that to Ontario which has set up 15 vaccination sites. (A quick note to forestall a flood of complaints. It is contrary to international law that Israel has not provided vaccinations to Palestinians in Occupied Territories. So I am not praising their record. And I agree with this finding from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights.

We watch as federal and provincial finger pointing seems to outpace vaccination rates.

Some provinces are doing a better job of protecting teachers in school than are others. I support BC Greens leader Sonia Furstenau (by the way, a former school teacher) in calling for the BC government to put in place a masks policy in schools (sign here! Masks in schools – BC Green Party)

Meanwhile, the death toll mounts in long term care (LTC). So far, of the nearly 19,000 deaths due to COVID across Canada, over 70% have been in LTC homes.

We know what must be done. Green Leader Annamie Paul held a brilliant expert panel on LTC setting out the necessary immediate steps to save lives.

But is it really down to the provinces to act? Is there nothing for the federal government to do to save lives? Well, there is an act expressly for this purpose. It is called the Emergencies Act.

Passed by Parliament in 1985, it replaced the War Measures Act. From the moment I pulled it off the government website and read it last March, I was convinced it was what we needed to deal with the pandemic. Have a look and see what you think.

Originally, the Trudeau Cabinet was looking at invoking it. Once invoked, parliament would have to meet within seven days to debate whether it was needed and Parliament would have rights of oversight over the temporary measures. If the government wanted to, it could limit the extent of its new emergency powers to getting inside LTC homes and taking over protection of staff and residents.

Back in the spring, as soon as provincial governments heard the Emergencies Act might be used, they pushed back and Trudeau dropped the idea. I asked Health Minister Patty Hajdu about it again last week. She may be right in saying that the government is making better progress in dealing with the pandemic by keeping relations with the provinces collaborative. But people are dying in LTC at higher rates in Canada than in any other OECD country. We know this is without a doubt the responsibility of the provinces. How many deaths are justified in order to maintain good relations with the provinces? (Personally, I would say “none.”)

Meanwhile, we have the same “blame game” in climate debates. The federal government pretends it cannot do much to limit GHG without provincial cooperation. It is true cooperation would be the best way forward, but it is not true that we can only move as fast as the least compliant province. There are many aspects of energy policy that are purely provincial, like regulation over electricity producing utilities. Some other areas have shared federal and provincial roles, such as development of fossil fuel resources. But the tools the federal government already has and does not use would be sufficient to drive much deeper cuts in emissions.

Since 2005, when former Environment Minister Stephane Dion changed the regulations, greenhouse gases have been a listed chemical under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. This means the federal minister already has the power to pass, by regulation, new levels of permissible emissions for GHG from every facility in Canada, just as the feds do for pollution levels from pulp and paper mills or refineries.

Then we have Jason Kenney in his mad flailing against the new US Administration for doing the right thing and canceling a pipeline that would have driven up Canada’s GHG emissions. We should be thanking him. The federal response? Pandering to Alberta once again and ensuring Trudeau’s first phone call with the incoming US president is to complain about Keystone being killed. How embarrassing.

We should be pressing for economic advantage for Alberta, and all of Canada, by setting in motion a bi-lateral set of economic plans for a post-COVID, post-carbon recovery.

Our federal-provincial sensitivities mean that Canada has done much less to deliver on shared climate commitments than have the 27 (post Brexit) separate sovereign nation states of the European Union. That’s right. One federal government, ten provinces and three territories are less capable of pulling together in a shared purpose than are 27 separate nations. The EU is currently 24% below 1990 levels in GHG emissions, while Canada is 21% ABOVE 1990 levels.

Never mind the absurdities of inter-provincial trade barriers on everything from wine to electricity.

Oh Canada!

Whether in a pandemic or a climate emergency, we are not prepared to use the tools we have to act in an emergency for fear of provoking a provincial premier. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were as concerned that we not offend indigenous governments?

Tomorrow, parliament reconvenes. I hope that there will be all-party agreement to reinstate the rules we had before Christmas to allow virtual debates and votes!

Stay well and stay safe!

Elizabeth

PS

Just a happy note that January 22 was the day that the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons became law- without Canada.

Read about my press conference here.

Here’s a lovely idea to plan for Valentine’s Day to cheer up a veteran!

This year, you can encourage Canadians to send a valentine to a Veteran by joining the conversation on social media.

For more information and to get involved, visit veterans.gc.ca

—

You can subscribe to Good Sunday Morning here: Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens

The post Good Sunday Morning – January 24 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The EIS was dense and lengthy. It was a policy wonkish document. When the NEB report on Enbridge came out I couldn’t help but to contrast the approach taken by two different nations and their regulators. The NEB produced a PR document — complete with pretty pictures, but with a dearth of evidence — to boost a foregone conclusion: the NEB would approve the Enbridge pipeline. As I plowed through the EPA advice to State Department on Keystone, it was equally clear that there was no foregone conclusion. Secretary of State John Kerry could go either way in his advice to the U.S. President.

Last year, Joe Oliver and Gary Doer should have read the EPA report before praising it. Had they done so, they might have noticed the finding that Keystone would not boost GHG only if the price of a barrel of oil remained above $100. If prices dropped to $80/barrel the report found that building Keystone would boost oil sands expansion and thus be a significant contributor to global warming. Gary Doer’s recent attack on the EPA was shockingly undiplomatic. Suddenly the same report he once praised, he attacked as dishonest. I wonder if being Canada’s Ambassador to the United States is really worth Gary Doer’s loss of personal integrity. It must be humiliating to berate the U.S. Secretary of State claiming the EPA “ignores a decade of Canadian achievement in cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” when the EPA report had not ignored the evidence. It cited Environment Canada statistics that confirmed Canada would entirely miss our Copenhagen target.

Meanwhile, some other energy prices are tumbling with less notice. For global energy watchers there is game-changing news in the plummeting price of wind and solar. Several international reports this fall analyzed the levelized cost of energy. Reports from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), investment bank Sanford Bernstein, and financial firm Lazard came to a remarkably similar conclusion: in some regions renewable energy is now competitive with fossil fuels.

The “levelized cost” is a measurement based on the ratio of the lifetime costs of a power plant to the amount of electricity it will generate. The levelized cost factors in all costs – construction, fuel, financing, etc. It does not include subsidies. The drastic drop in the price of renewable energy, particularly solar, is big news. The cost of solar has dropped as much as 60% in only the last five years. In parts of the U.S. solar is already competitive with fossil fuels.

There are caveats of course. It is still cheaper to keep an existing coal plant running than build a new solar or wind facility, but the fact remains that in some regions, including in South East Asia, the cost of solar is competitive with the cheapest and dirtiest of fossil fuels – coal.

The impact globally of cheap wind and solar is still relatively small. But the smart money is looking at what happens in a decade.

Bernstein explained, “…we have previously calculated how large the solar sector would need to be in order to become a material share of incremental energy supply each year and therefore begin to displace high-cost oil and gas supply and start to depress prices.”

“We estimate that the solar industry would need to be an order of magnitude larger than it is today to have this kind of impact. At the point where solar is displacing a material share of incremental oil and gas supply, global energy deflation would become inevitable: technology (with a falling cost structure) would be driving prices in the energy space. But even on an aggressive view, this could take the better part of a decade.”

Bernstein notes that within a decade, solar could drive down demand for LNG from China and the rest of Asia and depress demand for natural gas in the US, Europe and Australia. And he points out the obvious. When large energy multinationals see this shift as inevitable, they won’t wait until they are hemorrhaging profits from unwanted fossil fuel production: they will switch to cheaper renewables.

Last year was the first year in which global investment in renewable energy was larger than investment in fossil fuels. We are nearing the tipping point. So while our prime minister shills for a pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico to ship out unprocessed bitumen, global investors are shifting their bets. Canada is the only country on earth not a member of the International Renewable Energy Agency. Maybe Harper and company haven’t noticed these reports. Maybe Christy Clark hasn’t realized the long-term bet on LNG is a bad bet for BC. But Canadians better start noticing that betting on fossil fuels is not only stoking the furnace on future climate disasters; in purely economic terms, it’s stupid.

Originally published in the Hill Times.

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True, Canada rode out the 2008 financial meltdown better than most. Our prime minister was quick to take credit for that, but the credit should have gone to the previous administration for rejecting the banking industry’s demands for deregulation. Ironically, had Harper’s party succeeded in persuading the government of the day to accede in the banks’ demands, he would have had a much rougher ride.

He was lucky – lucky that our banks were regulated and unable to join in the high-risk global derivatives market, lucky that he had inherited large surpluses. Even before the financial crisis hit, Harper shifted our budget from surplus to deficit. That’s bound to happen if you slash revenues while spending more. Our first quarter in deficit arrived before we had spent a single cent in stimulus investments in response to the recession.

While the media, pundits and politicians focus on the relatively minor question of whether we’ll have a small surplus or small budgetary deficit this year, they’re ignoring the problem of the national debt. Stephen Harper – a person who likes to call himself a fiscal conservative – has increased the national debt to its highest level ever – over $600 billion.

Twenty-four per cent of that debt was accumulated by Stephen Harper as he borrowed money to give out economically foolish boutique tax cuts. It’s one thing to bribe voters with their own money. It’s a step beyond shameless to borrow money to do it. The interest payments on the debt will cost Canadians $29 billion this year alone.

One might imagine that Harper’s high-spending ways would come to an end in tough times. Not so: The current federal civil service is larger than it’s ever been before. While spending on environmental science and support for veterans was slashed, more bureaucrats were hired to audit environmental groups, to work in Corrections Canada and Canadian Border Services. One big growth area in federal employment has been in information officers; their numbers are up by 15 per cent as they work to control – and limit – our access to government information.

Since Harper became prime minister, productivity has fallen, innovation has grown stagnant and our exports have tilted back to what previous industrial strategies sought to avoid. For years, successive governments sought to move us away from relying on raw resource exports, to create wealth through value-added production. To use a Conservative-branded turn of phrase, Harper’s “laser-like focus” on putting all our eggs in the bitumen basket did not include processing the bitumen before shipping it out.

And now, it seems, his luck has run out. Maybe he didn’t see Saudi Arabia coming. But the OPEC oil shock of the early ’70’s was not that long ago. Of all global commodities, oil is the one that is most open to manipulation, creates the most security threats and launches the most wars.

Anyone who understands economics knows that an economy is more resilient to nasty shocks when it is diversified. Truth is, Canada was never all that dependent on the oil sands, which amount to only two per cent of GDP. It’s not that large a contributor to our national revenue. And many sectors of the Canadian economy will benefit from the lower dollar.

If I were prime minister right now, I would be finding every policy tool available to give those sectors that benefit from an 80 cent dollar some rapid ramping-up to expand their workforces. One prime example is tourism. For some inexplicable reason, Harper appears to hate tourism. Policy after policy has hurt the sector – from eliminating the GST-HST rebate for foreign visitors (a cheap goodwill gesture), to added visa requirements, to slashing the budget for tourism ads, to undermining seasonal employment through the EI system.

Over the last few years, not one penny was spent in the U.S. market to promote Canada as a dream vacation. Where ten years ago Canada was in the top seven for world tourism destinations, we’re now 18th.

The only spectacular photographs of Canadian wilderness paid for by the Government of Canada in the U.S. were used to promote the Keystone pipeline. Just one Keystone ad in the New Yorker last year cost over $200,000. Still, tourism employs over 600,000 Canadians and contributes over $30 billion to our economy.

It was announced recently that Harper is prepared to spend over $20 million for a major ad campaign targeting Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The international PR firm FleishmanHillard has won the contract. And the ads will promote the oil sands.

When will someone stand up to say “the economist is naked?”

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In a catalogue of alleged failings of the Green Party of Canada, (editorial July 30, 2014) the most absurd claim is that of moral relativism. We are the only party left in Canada to have principles and stick to them.

The Conservatives were once thought of as a party of fiscal responsibility, yet Stephen Harper has added to the national debt and expanded the size of government. His promises of accountability are buried under scandals of the culture of entitlement he once decried.

The New Democrats once championed the poor and down-trodden, but now clamor to appeal to the middle class calling not for guaranteed annual income, but for lower banking fees.

The Liberals stand less condemned, if only because their approach to principle was always pretty flexible – big tent and all. Still, the support for the Keystone and Kinder Morgan pipelines while opposing Enbridge suggests polling as a basis for position.

The Green Party of Canada, along with Green parties around the world, stand on six global green values: participatory democracy, social justice, ecological wisdom, non-violence, sustainability, and respect for diversity.

In the context of conflicts around the world, we are anything but moral relativists. The reason I was the only Member of Parliament in June 2011 to vote against the continued aerial bombardment of Libya was that Green principles of non-violence and promotion of a culture of peace made voting for bombing impossible. There were peace talks rejected as we joined the side of those calling for Gadafi’s head. It was clear when Parliament voted to keep up the bombing that the side we supported included al-Qaida-linked extremists. It was clear that warehouses full of munitions would flood into other countries and lead to greater instability, loss of life and chaos. It was clear that shifting our mission statement from Responsibility to Protect (R2P) innocent civilians to regime change would cost us down the road and remove the possibility of relying on the R2P doctrine to intervene in Syria.

In the case of the current Israel-Gaza conflict, it is critical that positions be based on international law. Pursuing peace cannot be discarded as unrealistic. It should be possible for all Canadian political parties to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization and to demand it cease its shelling of Israel. It should be possible for all other political leaders to continue to press for a two-state solution, one that defends the right of the State of Israel to exist, but equally calls for a secure Palestinian state. It is simply not credible to take the stance of all three other leaders (Messrs Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau) that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s siege of Gaza is legal and meets humanitarian standards. It does not. The death toll among Gaza’s civilians provokes the conscience of the world. Hamas is to blame for provocation, but to imagine that Israel is blameless is untenable.

We are the only party that bases our decisions on evidence. That is why we may take positions ahead of the “group-think” curve, calling for caution on newer technologies while others throw caution to the wind. We have been consistent about climate policies, while other parties treat the greatest threat to our children’s future as “flavour of the month.”

Our budgetary plans are based on a thorough examination of the sources of revenue, macro and micro-economic impact of policy. We are the only party to prepare election platforms that have been thoroughly costed over a three year horizon. We were the only party to submit our budget to the Parliamentary Budget Office to ask for verification that our numbers added up. (They did.)

We have been the most accountable in office of any MPs. I was the first MP to post all my expenses (original receipts) on line. Now Bruce Hyer, Green MP from Thunder Bay-Superior North does as well. We have pushed other parties to greater levels of accountability.

The biggest reason that Canada needs to Green Party is that we are the only party fighting to restore real democracy by reducing the power of political parties themselves. We need to tear down the bloated Prime Minister’s Office. We must reduce the unhealthy top-down control that turns good people, elected as MPs, into little more than ciphers. We are the only party that wants to eliminate the excessive hyper-partisanship of modern political debate and replace it with respectful dialogue to find common ground. We will make it a priority to replace the perverse first past the post voting system with fair proportional representation.

We will elect more Green MPs in the next federal election, forging consensus across party lines and working for the people who elected us. I appreciate that your editorialists would like it if all Canadian political parties kow-towed to “group think. We never will. And for that reason alone, more Canadians are turning to the Greens to give them reason to believe in the possibility of responsible government.

Elizabeth May, O.C., is the leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands. Her eighth book, “Who we are: Reflections on my life and Canada” (Greystone Books) will be released in October 2014.

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Yet, surprisingly the discussion of energy policy gets brushed under the carpet. My contention is that the reason the various energy debates are so unproductive is that we are operating in the absence of any over-arching strategy. Canada is the only country in the OECD without an energy policy. Canada is one of the only countries in the world not participating as a member of the International Renewable Energy Agency. Canada is the only country in the OECD without a comprehensive climate plan. Canada is the only country in the world to have ratified Kyoto and withdrawn. Canada is the only industrialized country without a national Transportation plan.

These are not small gaps. And their absence contributes to the nastiness of the debate. The debate tends to fall to regionalism. As a federal party leader, I find the province versus province aspect of the discussion the least productive and most damaging to our national interest. Energy decisions cannot be presented as binary choices in which for British Columbia to “win,” Alberta must “lose.”

What we need is to think like a country. We need to assess what set of policy tools best advance the multiple interests of all parts of the economy and all parts of the country. We need an energy strategy for Canada.
The idea that we need a national energy strategy was floated by former Premier of Alberta, Alison Redford. It was then immediately shot down by the prime minister.

That idea must be revisited. We need a national approach to our energy future. Our starting point should be to agree to some key national goals. I would suggest they would include:

1. Energy security – currently half of the oil consumed in Canada is imported from Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Norway and Venezuela. Meanwhile, the “plan” seems to be to boost production of the most greenhouse intensive fossil fuel, bitumen and ship it to China for refining. Unlike the U.S., Canada has no strategic petroleum reserve. There is no plan for domestic energy security.
2. Energy pricing – We need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and start pricing carbon.
3. An effective greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction plan for the needed transition to a low-carbon economy.
4. Full employment goals – we create more Canadian jobs by processing bitumen in Canada than by mixing it with toxic diluents and then shipping that dangerous product through pipelines to tankers heading overseas to other nations’ refineries and jobs there.
5. The promotion of innovation and competitiveness in Canada – Canada is falling behind the US in productivity and innovation. Part of the reason is shifting from relatively more value-added exports to raw resource exports (60% of all our exports were value-added in the late 1990s, falling to 40% recently, according to Statistics Canada.) Value-added not only creates more jobs, it attracts innovation, R and D and improves Canada’s productivity.
6. Social justice; ending energy poverty – “energy poverty” concerns must be part of any national energy strategy.
7. Any energy strategy needs to be premised on respect for First Nations right and title, as the recent Supreme Court of Canada language in the Tsilhqot’in decision makes clear is not optional; it’s mandatory;
8. Energy strategies for a resourceful and resilient Canada.

Taken separately, we could be fighting over these individual elements without resolution. Taken together in a grown-up conversation, they all fit together.

If we met around the same table and worked to achieve a consensus that respected the interests of all parts of Canada, demonstrated a responsible approach to the growing climate crisis and worked to create the kind of energy super-power we could be, one working to decrease dependence on fossil fuels, I am confident a realistic energy plan could emerge.

The first step is to start thinking like a country.

Originally published in the Hill Times.

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From his first words, “Recently, Green Party leader Elizabeth May orchestrated an open letter to United States Secretary of State John Kerry..,” it was pretty clear he didn’t grasp the concept of writing a letter. “Orchestrated?” “Open letter?”

Not quite. The U.S. State Department had a period for public comment on the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the proposed TransCanada pipeline to take unprocessed bitumen from Alberta to tidewater at the Gulf of Mexico. Having reviewed the submission and visited Washington D.C. in February, it was clear to me that some key points were ignored in the FEIS, while many useful findings of the report were being overwhelmed by popular misconceptions about the nature of the project. I thought it would be potentially helpful to Secretary Kerry to point out a few of these points. The letter was admittedly a bit complex as it assumed a general familiarity with the FEIS.

From reviewing Mr. Green’s piece, it seems he never actually read my letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. In an effort to draw interest to the letter, a simplified version was circulated by the Green Party as an email message, summarizing some of the points, but including the link to the full submission. Mr. Green seems to have only gotten as far as the short email.

Now to his critique of my main points.

1. In my letter I asked Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline in order to assist Canada’s long-term energy security and prosperity: “I urge that you do so as the most helpful decision to assist Canada avoid huge future economic losses when the carbon bubble bursts.”

I wrote this being certain that Secretary Kerry was familiar with the term “carbon bubble.” Mr. Green, apparently unfamiliar with the term, leapt to the conclusion that I was talking about Dutch Disease. He then proceeded to box me about the ears for something I had not claimed.

Canada has suffered from a mild case of Dutch Disease. This was the finding of the OECD report to Canada in 2008. However, in my letter to Secretary Kerry, I wasn’t talking about Dutch Disease at all.

Rather, I was referring to the “Carbon Bubble. This term has gained prominence ever since the International Energy Agency explained that of all known reserves of fossil fuels, the planet’s atmosphere cannot withstand the burning of more than one third of them prior to 2050. In other words, two thirds of all known reserves must stay in the ground till mid-century or we will sail right past the danger levels in the atmosphere and unleash truly catastrophic levels of climatic disruption. Other analysts then began to assess the stated value of many fossil fuel enterprises and realize that their assessed values drop precipitously when two thirds of their reserves are removed from valuation.

The other aspect of the term “carbon bubble” is that, just as in any commodity being over-valued, when the bubble bursts a smart investor hopes to have diversified the portfolio prior to the moment of implosion. This is more the point former CIBC Chief Economist Jeff Rubin makes when he talks about the folly of putting all our eggs in the bitumen basket.

The other key economic point is this: all the proposed pipeline projects on the drawing board right now are about shipping out unprocessed product. In other words, Canada’s current government is putting all its weight behind multinationals that want Canada to lose out on all the “value added” processes. Where upgraders in northern Alberta had been on the drawing board prior to the 2008 financial crisis, when the dust settled and investment began to flow once again to the oil sands, the upgraders — and the Alberta jobs they would create — had been replaced by pipelines transporting bitumen to processing in other countries. Shipping out raw bitumen is dumb.

I agree that there is a debate about the economic impact of the current bitumen-based policies. One would think that given the over-blown claims of Canada as an “energy super-power” we might, as citizens and as Parliamentarians, have expected to see a detailed cost-benefit review of the oil sands project. There is none. There is only a pile of assumptions buttressed by unquestioning repetition by most of our news media, fortified by millions of dollars in taxpayer funded propaganda.

2. The product to be shipped is not “crude” at all, neither is it a 100 per cent Canadian fossil fuel product.

There is a very weak level of understanding of the nature of the product to be shipped in the FEIS, as well as in Washington media. Again, my letter to Secretary Kerry adds the context which is a bit truncated in the email. My primary point was that the FEIS was deficient in describing the product as “crude.”

Here’s the excerpt from my letter:

“The State Department report makes the error of describing the Keystone project as being about the shipment of crude oil.

“There are many kinds of crude. Some will argue that bitumen is a form of crude. I ask you to rule that the whole report is deficient in failing to notice that bitumen is not crude.

“I ask you to find that, no matter how light or heavy crude oil may be, to be called ‘crude,’ it is at least required to be a liquid.

“Bitumen is essentially a solid.

“It will only move through proposed pipelines once it has been mixed 30-70 with ‘diluents.’ Diluent is not a term of science, but of industry usage. It has no precise chemical meaning. It is generally a fossil fuel condensate — an otherwise valuable product. It is usually naptha, with benzene added, and often butane as well. It is not produced in sufficient quantities in Canada to keep pace with the planned oil sands boom.

“It is imported to Canada. Enbridge stated in its submission to the NEB hearings that it planned to import its diluents from Saudi Arabia. So ‘dilbit’ is not a 100 per cent Canadian product at all; nor does it necessarily unplug the U.S. from Middle East dependency.”

As one of the sales pitches south of the border is that this is a friendly Canadian product, I thought it was worth pointing out that at least some of the diluents will be coming in from OPEC.

3. Rail versus pipeline.

In my February Washington meetings, I found that the multiple recent rail disasters, most tragically Lac Megantic, are being used as a pro-Keystone argument. My letter to Secretary Kerry made a few key points (well buttressed by research) that are relevant to this claim:

•  If you accept our Prime Minister’s stated goal of more than tripling production in the oil sands, then adding up all existing pipeline proposals – Enbridge, Kinder-Morgan, Keystone and Energy East — still mean the use of rail to get dilbit to market.
• The FEIS found that higher transportation costs would operate as a limiting factor on oil sands expansion. So saying “no” to Keystone would help limit growth in the oil sands because shipping by other means is more costly.
• And lastly, both Canada and the U.S. urgently need to regulate for greater rail safety by removing the DOT111 rail cars from our tracks.

4. I pointed out to Secretary Kerry that the Harper administration, having pledged in 2009 to meet the voluntary Copenhagen target also undertaken by the Obama administration, has utterly failed to make any progress towards it. To this Mr Green essentially argues that Canada is so small a contributor to global emissions, who cares if we never keep any promise we make?

The Obama administration itself claims to care. It was the U.S. administration that decided a key criterion in the Keystone decision will be whether approving Keystone would increase GHG emissions.

The larger point is that Canada has no credibility. Having repudiated legally binding commitments under Kyoto, ratified by Parliament, then legally withdrawn from Kyoto (without any debate or vote in Parliament), Stephen Harper took on the Copenhagen target. Obama’s administration will have reached its target while Canada blows right past ours. I really did not need to include this in my letter to Secretary Kerry as the FEIS reports in detail exactly how lamentable is Canada’s performance.

In the 1980s, when Brian Mulroney wanted to get the Reagan administration to stop polluting Canada with acid rain-causing sulphur dioxide, he adopted a Canadian policy of “clean hands.” We came to the U.S. to ask that they cut their sulphur dioxide emissions by 50 per cent once we were already on track to do so ourselves. And the U.S. did, because Canada had taken the moral high ground. We had done what we were asking the U.S. to do, in the interests of our shared environment.

Prime Minister Harper has turned this principle on its head. He has adopted the “dirty hands” policy. Create a record of callous disregard for the fate of the world faced with increasingly dangerous outcomes due to the profligate waste of fossil fuels. And then claim, as part of a sales pitch for oil sands bitumen exports, that we have robust environmental laws and a shared climate goal. This after eviscerating our laws and betraying every promise.

Mr. Harper is a smart man. The only way he could have the chutzpah to try such a tarry hands policy is if he presumes that Mr. Obama is just as disingenuous as himself on climate.

This may prove to be Mr. Harper’s undoing on Keystone. President Obama has disappointed over and over again, but he does appear to grasp the over-whelming significance of the climate crisis.

I am not a bit surprised that the Fraser Institute thinks it is irrelevant that Canada’s emissions are rising, nor that we will be essentially at the same level of emissions in 2020 as we were in 2005. If the Fraser Institute were interested in fact-checking against climate target claims, the place to look for whoppers is not in my letter to Secretary Kerry, but in the daily talking points of Conservative ministers.

In Question Period, they variously claim we are “on track,” “half way to Copenhagen,” or “130 MT less than we’d be under the Liberals. (That last one is really a desperate “hail Mary” pass of a whopper. It falls apart for anyone with a memory that extends to 2005 when there actually was, at long last, a viable Liberal plan that would have gotten us, if not all the way to our Kyoto pledge, at least below 1990 levels by 2012.)

This is how I summarized the issue to Secretary Kerry:

“In 2005, our emissions were 737 megatons (MT). In 2020, our emissions will be 734 MT. We promised 130 MT in reductions. Despite efforts by several provinces, notably a successful carbon tax in my home province of British Columbia, all progress at the provincial levels has been wiped out by growth in the oil sands.

“The most effective way to send a strong message that Canada must start behaving as a responsible participant in the global challenge to avoid exceeding a 2 degree C global average temperature increase, a pledge to which your administration and ours have committed, is to reject Keystone. It will be helpful to explain that part of the reason is that Canada has negotiated in bad faith at the climate table. There have been no sanctions created globally for neglecting climate obligations. The least that should be done is not to reward bad conduct.”

Lastly, I closed the letter to Secretary Kerry by pointing out that the U.S. has to get its own house in order. I challenged him to stop the State Department’s foot dragging in global summits and start to show leadership. I urged that the U.S. stop burning off flared gas from the Bakken fields, producing high-carbon natural gas from fracking and stop its dependence on coal.

All in all, I am glad I took the time to set out some of the less reported issues around Keystone. And in that spirit, I thank the Fraser Institute for ignoring my detailed letter so that I would have a chance to explain the range of concerns it contained.

Originally posted in the Huffington Post.

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The list of measures is impressive: new standards for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, investments in energy efficiency for residential, institutional and commercial buildings, more renewable energy projects on federal lands, plans to invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, adaptation planning to prepare for extreme weather events we can no longer avoid and, most importantly, a commitment to regulate carbon from coal-fired power plants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weakened Canada’s greenhouse gas target to the same 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 to which Mr. Obama committed the U.S. The difference is that the U.S. has a plan and is on track to meet that target. Canada, with a patchwork of some strong provincial actions and nothing federally to regulate the oil sands, has no plan and is nowhere near on track for anything but failure.

Elizabeth May, Leader, Green Party of Canada
Originally published in the Globe and Mail

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