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Canada’s Phony Climate Emergency Is Climate Delay Masquerading As Action

By Rolly Montpellier @Below2C_ – October 1, 2020

“Slow-walking action on climate has almost the same impact as outright denial,” writes Sara Hastings-Simon in a recent op-ed for the CBC News. Hastings-Simon is a senior researcher at both the Payne Institute for Public Policy and the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. She warns of developments that are, in fact, “a form of climate delay masquerading as action.”

Climate Delay Masquerading as Action

“Unlike outright climate denial, “climate delay” acknowledges the reality of a changing climate and the role of carbon emissions from human activity in climate change. But instead of actively working to deal with the issue…the end goal is to significantly delay action to reduce emissions.” — Sara Hastings-Simon

Hastings-Simon’s opinion piece is particularly relevant in light of the recent throne speech from the Trudeau government labelled as “the most progressive speech from the throne heard in a generation,” by Catherine Abreu of the Climate Action Network-Canada (CAN-Rac). Abreu “welcome[s] the news that the government will immediately release its plans for exceeding Canada’s 2030 climate goal, as well as move forward legislation to reach zero emissions by 2050.”

Many climate groups have been quick to applaud the Liberal government for its bold announcements on tackling the climate emergency—creating a million green jobs, developing a plan to exceed our 2030 climate goals, and legislating Canada’s climate targets—which was declared over 15 months ago in June of 2019. But Canadians must wait even longer before they see the emergency version of Canada’s climate plan.

From The Energy Mix – Globe and Mail columnist Adam Radwanski concluded there was relatively little new in a speech that still clarified the priorities the government will set on climate and energy. “For all the recent work of environmental policy experts to come up with ways to seize this moment of crisis to expedite the shift to a cleaner economy, the government’s imperative is mostly to get on with its old ones,” he wrote. “It will attempt to do so by underscoring economic benefits of climate policy more than it has previously, as part of a broader pledge to create a million new jobs.” And so, the emergency is now in a holding pattern.

The Phony Climate Emergency

Normally an emergency calls for immediate action but none followed the announcement, leading one to conclude that Trudeau’s Liberals were not serious about climate change in 2019. In fact, the complete opposite happened. Less than 24 hours after the emergency declaration, Trudeau approved the massive expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX).

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, Canada’s climate performance has been dismal—delay after delay and a litany of broken promises.

To this day, the Trudeau government is still stonewalling on the promised phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. In a March 2019 press release, then Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine Mckenna announced “consultations on eliminating inefficient non-tax fossil fuel subsidies.” However, these consultations have not led to any observable policy changes. In fact, a February 2020 report shows that fossil fuel subsidies were higher in 2019 than in 2018.

Canada has missed all its climate targets and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. We are less Paris-compliant now than we were when the Paris Accord was adopted in 2015. Recorded at 729 megatonnes of CO² equivalent in 2018, emissions are now the highest since 2007.

Climate Delay Masquerading as Action and Canada's Phony Climate Emergency, Below2C

A year ago, during a meeting with Greta Thunberg, Trudeau promised the planting of two billion trees by 2030. “Just under 600,000 trees should have been planted every day since September 2019, if the government was to reach its stated goal,” according to La Presse. To date, not a single tree has been planted. “So far, crickets,” reports the National Post.

The gap between promise and reality continues to taint this government’s climate intentions. Only a week after renewing its commitment to fight climate change in its Throne Speech, the federal government is urging the courts to throw out a case brought by a group of young Canadians—15 youths and teenagers from across Canada— claiming their right to a safe, stable climate has been violated.

6,000 Canadians send messages of support for La Rose youth climate plaintiffs in lead-up to Sep. 30 court hearing: https://t.co/A0oqyN0WNm pic.twitter.com/Xfori1T1Iu

— David Suzuki FDN (@DavidSuzukiFDN) September 29, 2020

And less than a week following the Throne Speech, which promised that climate action would be the cornerstone of our green recovery, “Canada has signed on to a G20 energy communiqué led by Saudi Arabia that endorses fossil industry bailouts,” reports Mitchell Beer of The Energy Mix. The communique “contains not a single use of the word “climate”, makes no reference to the G20’s now 11-year-old promise to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies,” writes Beer.

The COVID Factor

What did the government of Canada do when it became aware of the COVID-19 emergency? It recognized a public health emergency. It did not delay. It acted immediately as anyone of us would after hearing of a serious life-threatening medical diagnosis.

Many observers had seen the government’s handling of the corona crisis as a possible template for the battle plan needed to tackle the climate crisis. Prompt decisive actions and firm controls based on science have contributed to Canada’s success in dealing with the worst public health epidemic in generations.

“This was a key moment for Canada to show we have learned from experience and set the course for years to come,” but “the government has turned its back on the bold, green, and inclusive recovery that had been in preparation since June,” said outspoken Senator Rosa Galvez, appointed in 2016. “I fear this government is letting the transformational opportunity of this crisis go to waste, and that we will all pay for it for generations to come.”

It is far too soon for any of us involved in the climate movement in Canada to take a victory lap. “We need to see the Trudeau government match their words with bold action,” says 350 Canada campaigner Atiya Jaffar. “Words are not enough, we need to see action.’

In his recently-released book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, author Seth Klein writes that “the primary “enemy” or force we contront at this juncture is an insidious way of thinking and practice that plagues our politics and economic policy-making—a dynamic I call the new climate denialism…the result is the continuing sorry state of Canadian political non-leadership on the defining challenge of our time.”

It has now been 473 days since Canada’s declaration of a climate emergency. And counting!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Environmental leaders on post-COVID Canada: Greener future, or new climate denialism?

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Canada Gets A Lump of Coal For Christmas

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Floods and fires are the new normal

A heat wave thawed Siberia’s tundra and now, it’s on fire. By the end of August, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. There are numerous wildfires above the arctic circle. This is creating a massive climate transformation and as the north melts, the Arctic saw an ice decline of 1.1 million square kilometers (425,000 square miles) this year.

The oceans are warming up and aquatic species are unable to adapt. There have been numerous instances of whales, dolphins and other animals beaching themselves. They are starving, weak and can’t breathe. The oceans are losing oxygen as more C02 is absorbed from human activity.

Birds and animals across the continents are disappearing. Diseases, hunger and poverty are taking their toll on the human population. Many are dying from extreme heatwaves as the earth’s temperature rises.

There have been riots and protests worldwide demanding accountability from the government for aiding the corporations who are stripping natural resources from the land and replacing it with toxic environments that are poisoning us. The governments do nothing. They help fund the destruction.

On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the United Nations General Assembly, saying the world is in a climate crisis. Sixty-four leaders from 5 continents signed a pledge they wouldn’t allow their governments to destroy the world. Meanwhile, back home, Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson vowed that a series of five-year emissions targets through 2050 will be his top legislative priority this fall, while Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan unveiled a $320-million cash infusion for the struggling fossil industry in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Part of the promise included terminating subsidies that encourage wilful destruction of our resources. Bailing out Husky’s White Rose project shouldn’t even be considered They’re already looking for more saying it isn’t nearly enough.

A New Canadian Climate Accountability Act

Ecojustice reported last June that “Canada has missed every GHG target it has ever set. In 1997’s Kyoto Accord, Canada promised to lower its emissions to 576 Mt by 2012. We missed that target by 25 per cent. In 2009, in Copenhagen, Canada committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 620 Mt by 2020. As it stands, we are set to miss this target by a wide margin. In Paris, Canada promised to reduce its emissions 30 per cent below its 2005 levels. We’re making some headway, but it doesn’t look great.”

A paper published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration lists nine real ways the earth could end. Although the report was published seven years ago, a pandemic is the third possible way. It says, “New deadly pathogens crop up every year: Recent pandemics have included outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), bird flu, and, most recently, a coronavirus called MERS that originated in Saudi Arabia. And because of our highly interconnected, global economy, a deadly disease could spread like wildfire.

“The threat of a global pandemic is very real,” said Joseph Miller, co-author (along with Ken Miller) of the textbook “Biology” (Prentice Hall, 2010).

Some reasons seem a bit unlikely but a couple of them sound very likely. Very likely because governments claim we’re in the midst of a climate crisis but are doing practically nothing about it, other than spewing tired rhetoric that’s been preached to the masses the last ten years.

The government has access to a lot of information published by think tanks, like A New Canadian Climate Accountability Act which has been written by CANRac, Ecojustice, Environmental Defence, Équiterre, Pembina Institute and West Coast Environmental Law. We need our elected leaders to listen to the experts. Besides this collaboration being presented freely, each one of these groups have written numerous reports about their findings and how they see various scenarios playing out. Some, like the Pembina Institute, do specific research available for a fee. No doubt the fee would be considerably less expensive than fossil fuel subsidies.

Who does the federal government listen to?

All the provinces want a larger healthcare transfer. In Alberta, the government gave the province’s health care money to foreign-owned mega billionaires that own the oil and gas companies. In fact, he had to kick 46,000 off healthcare in order to do this. He drastically reduced funding for universities and schools, teacher aids, and doctors’ salaries. The federal government would understand this. They, too, have been bailing out oil and gas companies with billions of dollars.

The government claims its plans for climate change may have to be put on hold. The pandemic is the immediate threat. There isn’t any doubt that some money intended for climate change has been diverted to oil & gas. A good example of this is the promise made to 7-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019, that Canada would plant two billion trees in the next 10 years. None have been planted so far.

The speech from the throne on September 23, 2020, made some large promises. What the heck! Promises are easy enough to make.

Okay… back to the flooding and burning…

Link

Supreme Court case on carbon price is about climate change, not the Constitution

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Jason MacLean, University of New Brunswick and Nathalie Chalifour, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

The Supreme Court of Canada begins hearing appeals in three cases on Sept. 22 to determine whether Ottawa’s national carbon price is constitutional. Appellate courts in Saskatchewan and Ontario had previously upheld the law, but the Alberta Court of Appeal had ruled that it was unconstitutional and intruded on provincial powers.

Contrary to what critics of the federal carbon-pricing legislation say, neither the provinces’ authority to act on climate change nor the balance of the Canadian federation is in jeopardy.

But what is at stake is Canada’s ability to contribute to global climate action under the 2015 Paris Agreement. The agreement aims to limit global warming to 1.5 C above the pre-industrial norm, a goal increasingly on the public’s mind as wildfire smoke blows across the country.

In 2016, Ottawa obtained provincial and territorial consensus on a coordinated national approach in the Vancouver Declaration on Clean Growth and Climate Change. The Vancouver Declaration begat the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, a detailed action plan agreed to by all except Saskatchewan.

In 2018, Ottawa enacted the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act to implement the Pan-Canadian Framework. The act operates as a backstop — a national safety net — with two parts. The first imposes a charge on a broad range of greenhouse gas emitting fuels. The second establishes an “output-based performance system” that requires industrial facilities to pay for the emissions that exceed an annual limit.

Crucially, the backstop only applies in provinces or territories that request it or that have failed to price emissions through a direct price or cap-and-trade system at the minimum benchmark level established by Ottawa. Additionally, the backstop is “revenue neutral,” meaning that any money collected by Ottawa is returned to the jurisdiction. Provinces and territories are otherwise free to regulate within their borders, allowing them to impose even stronger limits on emissions.

Challenging co-ordinated climate action

With this co-ordinated national approach in place, Canada appeared poised to meaningfully contribute to global climate action, with both levels of government acting co-operatively.

Soon after, however, Ontario and Alberta adopted what’s been dubbed the “Saskatchewan strategy” of challenging the act on jurisdictional grounds. Each province asked its respective Court of Appeal for an advisory opinion on whether Ottawa has the jurisdiction to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Jason Kenney and Doug Ford clasp raised hands — United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford cheer with supporters at an anti-carbon tax rally in Calgary, Oct. 5, 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

In 2019, a majority of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal concluded that Ottawa has jurisdiction under the “national concern branch” of the federal government’s constitutional “peace, order and good government” power. Shortly thereafter, a majority of the Ontario Court of Appeal reached the same conclusion. In 2020, however, a majority of the Alberta Court of Appeal concluded Ottawa lacked jurisdiction to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. All three decisions are now before the Supreme Court of Canada.

The thrust of these provinces’ constitutional challenges is that affirming Ottawa’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would intrude too deeply into provincial jurisdiction and jeopardize the balance of the Canadian federation.

But the “Saskatchewan strategy” of challenging Ottawa’s jurisdiction was as much about continuing a public policy dispute by other means. Climate policy, the provinces and their supporters argue, should be considered a local matter best left to local governments consistent with the constitutional principle of subsidiarity, the idea that public policy issues should be addressed at the most effective level of government closest to the citizens affected.

Neither argument is sound.

Canadian federalism is flexible and co-operative

Recognizing the federal government’s jurisdiction to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a “national concern” won’t displace provincial climate regulations or alter the balance of federalism. The Supreme Court of Canada made this abundantly clear in R. vs. Crown Zellerbach Canada Ltd. more than 30 years ago.

That case concerned the federal government’s jurisdiction to regulate marine pollution, including dumping occurring entirely within the coastal waters of British Columbia. The court recognized federal jurisdiction to regulate marine pollution because it’s a transboundary issue reaching beyond both B.C.‘s and Canada’s borders.

A gas pump — In 2019, Doug Ford’s Ontario government required gas stations to display a sticker at the pumps that said, ‘the federal carbon tax will cost you.’ The Ontario court has since said the stickers were unconstitutional.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Since the Crown Zellerbach case, the Supreme Court of Canada has further clarified that where both provincial and federal laws apply to a regulatory problem, those laws may operate alongside one another. This overlap helps protect against the creation of legal vacuums where neither level of government acts, which would defeat the very purpose of a federal-provincial division of powers; it also recognizes the increasing complexity of Canadian society.

Only in cases where federal and provincial laws genuinely conflict — where it’s impossible to follow both laws or where a provincial law frustrates the purpose of a federal law — is federal law paramount. And courts will construe such potential conflicts narrowly to safeguard provincial jurisdiction and facilitate federal-provincial cooperation.

This is how effective environmental regulation works in Canada. The City of Victoria, for instance, regulates sewage discharge into the ocean alongside federal law. Ottawa regulates toxic pollution federally under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in conjunction with the provinces’ environmental pollution laws. Species at risk are protected in the same way: there’s a federal safety net to backstop provincial endangered species laws.

The urgent need for co-operative climate action

The principle of subsidiarity wisely advises that regulatory action should be taken by the level of government that’s most effective and closest to the citizens who are affected. Opponents of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act argue that this supports provincial authority over greenhouse gas emissions. But it equally supports the argument that the regulatory response must be global, because climate change affects everyone. In the absence of a global constitution, that means it requires a national response.

In the current Canadian context, there’s no evidence that the provinces alone can provide an effective level of climate governance. Rising emissions from the Alberta and Saskatchewan oilsands will hamper Canada’s efforts to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Ontario has withdrawn from the Québec-California carbon market, eliminated its renewable energy investment programs and implemented a less ambitious climate plan that’s estimated to increase carbon emissions by 30 million tonnes by 2030.

While the federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act isn’t sufficient to meet Canada’s initial — and notably unambitious — target under the Paris Agreement, to say nothing of Canada’s net-zero aspiration, this doesn’t strengthen the provinces’ argument for local regulatory authority. Instead, it further illustrates the urgent need for greater federal-provincial co-operation on climate action.

In 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on 1.5 C of global warming sounded a clarion call for “rapid,” “far-reaching” and “unprecedented” transitions to achieve “deep emissions reductions in all sectors.” We can ill-afford jurisdictional wrangling and the politicization of constitutional principle. Every moment of delay makes these transitions more difficult and costly, and reduces the likelihood that we’ll avert the devastating harms of climate destablization.

Jason MacLean, Assistant Professor of Law, University of New Brunswick and Nathalie Chalifour, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Not really surprised. I metioned in a forum post earlier that it looked like some provinces are trying to find some wiggle room.

Steve MacLellan

Ramble On

Tag Archives: canada

Canada’s Phony Climate Emergency Is Climate Delay Masquerading As Action

Environmental leaders on post-COVID Canada: Greener future, or new climate denialism?

Canada Gets A Lump of Coal For Christmas

Supreme Court case on carbon price is about climate change, not the Constitution