Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

‘Shut down the oil sands’ is not an extreme position

Rather, it is the endpoint of joined-up thinking about climate science and energy policy.

On Twitter the other day, Suzy Waldman said: “Trying to envision middle ground between idea coalsands ought 2b shuttered and idea Canada’s economic fate depends on them”.

I think this perspective risks perpetuating one of the big problems in Canadian climate and energy politics – namely, the assumption that the oil sands have a legitimate future part to play in Canada’s economy and that any position that questions that is ‘extreme’ and outside the political middle ground. This may be true in terms of opinion polls and the positions of politicians, but this is because people haven’t really accepted that our current trajectory ends with planetary catastrophe.

We now have very clear and credible evidence that warming the planet by more than 2°C virtually guarantees big trouble for humanity. Crossing that threshold can be achieved by burning a fraction of the conventional oil, gas, and coal available on the planet. In short, then, we have a dangerous amount of fossil fuel available without even tapping unconventional sources like the oil sands.

Stabilizing the climate at any level of temperature increase means cutting greenhouse gas pollution to the point where the amount produced each year is absorbed by natural systems and so there is no net change in the concentration. Achieving that requires very deep cuts – essentially, the global phaseout of fossil fuel use. Stabilizing below the 2°C limit requires that all this happen extremely quickly. In such a world, it simply makes no sense to be building bitumen mining and in situ extraction facilities intended to operate for decades. Nor does it make sense to keep building pipelines to export fuels that we cannot afford to burn, if we wish to maintain a livable planet capable of sustaining human prosperity indefinitely.

This connects to the biggest problem with the oil sands: the way in which they contribute to a vicious cycle. We build more fossil fuel production capacity, so naturally we need to have transport and export capacity to serve it. The availability of fossil fuels then encourages people to keep investing in vehicles, power plants, and other facilities and equipment that require them. And so fossil fuel dependence is perpetuated.

If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to rapidly reverse that cycle. We need to be shutting down production capacity, and transport capacity, and facilities and equipment that depend on fossil fuels. That will probably make some things a lot more expensive and change the ways in which people live, but the alternative of a planet with a permanently hostile climate is clearly much worse.

Shutting down the oil sands is an extreme idea politically in Canada, but that is simply evidence of how poor the scientific basis for Canada’s energy politics is.

Some thoughts on the civil service

More than a year has now passed since I left the public service. The most surprising thing about that is how I don’t feel like I have ever regretted the choice. There are individuals who I miss, and I certainly miss the regular paycheques, but there have seldom if ever been times when I would have exchanged my current situation as a student for a magical instant return to being a full-time civil servant.

This contrasts, for instance, with my choice of PhD program. Most of the time, I remain convinced that the University of Toronto was the best choice from among the schools that accepted me. That said, there have surely been times – living in an inhospitable city where the traffic makes me too afraid to cycle – when I ponder what it would have been like to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara – and with three times as much funding, to boot. Naturally, I have also felt open at many times to the appeal of being at the University of British Columbia and back in Vancouver.

By contrast, memories of the civil service never leave me feeling a desire for sudden transplantation. I am grateful for the time I spent there; it is certainly a good way to learn about how this country operates. Oftentimes, however, my strongest sense when thinking about the institution is about how sad and disturbing it is that our federal civil service is so inactive about climate change. Indeed, it is probably a net contributor to the growing severity of the problem, given how much priority advocating for oil pipelines and for scrapping rules and processes for environmental protection has gotten over the actual implementation of policies with real potential to substantially diminish Canada’s greenhouse gas contribution. I feel like people in fifty years will find it surprising to learn about how unconcerned our leaders were about the problem, how wilfully blind they were about the disjoint between the policies they supported and their supposed goal of avoiding dangerous climate change, and how ignorant and complacent the Canadian population at large was about the problem. The gap between our policies and what climate science shows to be necessary is so wide that it makes our present approach look like little more than a distracting facade, designed to sustain the public misperception about how insufficient our current approaches are.

As the above probably makes clear, my main feelings about the public service are anger, frustration, and sadness. Sadness because of the gap between what we are capable of, and what we are actually doing. The civil service is full of intelligent, dedicated people who are making a substantial and genuine effort to make Canada and the world a better place. At the same time, they are confronting the chasm between an elected government that has never been serious about curbing climate change and a situation in the world where the problem is increasingly evident and threatening. The full effects of today’s emissions won’t be felt for decades, so if we are to avoid truly terrible outcomes, global emissions need to start diving soon. Yet that is far from what’s on even the ambitious side of the political agenda. The real policy we are enacting is for a perpetuated status quo of ever-growing fossil fuel production, despite the clear scientific basis for seeing that status quo as suicidal.

Much can change politically if real and immediate disaster does come to pass. The general public might finally accept the argument that imposing climate change on future generations is an intolerable wrong; or they may simply perceive it happening quickly enough to seem like a threat to themselves. Politicians may finally accept that fossil fuel companies aren’t primarily generous tax-payers and contributors to election campaigns – but rather entities working hard to undermine the habitability of the planet. Something on par with a major war may blow up the issue enough psychologically for it to rise to an appropriate level of urgency.

Wherever the impulse for change comes from, it won’t be from the federal civil service, which is entirely too contented with continuing to support policies that propel us toward planetary catastrophe. It may well not be in academia either but, at least for the present moment, the latter seems a more promising place to dedicate my energy for now.

Toronto350 letter on Line 9

Toronto350.org has submitted a letter of comment on the proposed reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline.

Given the unwillingness of the Alberta and federal governments to take climate change seriously, the best strategy open to us at this stage seems to be doing what we can to reduce the scale of fossil fuel exports, particularly by stopping oil pipelines and coal export infrastructure.

Federalism and the French Canadians

As part of my preparation for my August comprehensive exam, I read Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 collection of essays: Federalism and the French Canadians. Compared to the other texts on the list, it is short, clear, and accessible. While some of the controversies addressed are too obscure to be intelligible to someone who has never closely studied the politics of Quebec at the time, the book does set out the general thrust of Trudeau’s thinking in areas ranging from the shortcomings of ethnic nationalism to the importance of bilingualism and federalism in Canada.

Written during the middle of what has subsequently been called Quebec’s ‘Quiet Revolution‘, Trudeau’s book argues that the constitutional structure of Canada’s federation, encompassing Quebec, arose appropriately from the historical circumstances of Canada’s founding. (197) Regarding the future of that province, he describes two alternatives: one in which isolation and ethnic nationalism lead to stagnation and an economy and society falling ever-farther below the world standard, and another in which federalism is renewed, particularly through the universal application of bilingualism across Canada. (32, 48)

Trudeau does an acute job of identifying the shortcomings in an ‘asymmetric’ approach to federalism, in which some provinces are granted special privileges or substantially more power than others. For one, how can provinces granted such rights be appropriately accorded equal influence within the federal government to provinces with lesser powers? Trudeau also discusses the contradictions involved in asserting national self-determination for Quebec. If it is a ‘people’ that holds the right to declare political independence, how can they bring with them an Anglophone minority that doesn’t want to come, or indigenous groups that would choose to remain part of the rest of Canada. Similarly, how can they leave behind Francophones in other provinces? (153) He concludes that a modern state must be polyethnic and that such a character actually empowers and enriches a society through openness, diversity, and tolerance. (156-8, 165)

Trudeau stresses the importance of the division of powers to democratic legitimacy – describing the importance of the electorate being able to identify which level of government bears responsibility for a particular policy. The book also describes Trudeau’s perspective on equalization payments as an essential part of a federation in Canada, justified on the basis that they will allow all provinces – regardless of economic circumstances – to provide the same basic standard of social support. (27, 72)

In one long chapter, Trudeau describes what he perceives as the obstacles to democracy in Quebec. These are chiefly the things which the Quiet Revolution arose against: an overmighty Catholic church, restrictions in speech and education, a parochial elite dominating society, and lingering feelings of historical inferiority and exploitation. (106) He highlights, for instance, the enduring alliance that emerged between the English Canadian elite that played a large role in the Quebecois economy and the Catholic Church which was permitted to operate largely unchanged after the Seven Years’ War and 1774 Quebec Act.

Trudeau frequently expounds on the importance of reason and the allure and inadequacy of emotion for making political arguments or justifying political institutions. He is largely dismissive of nationalism as a force for unity in Canada. He also refers frequently to the importance of expanding individual liberty, using this as the criteria for distinguishing between ‘genuine’ revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Trudeau’s view of constitutional politics is remarkably Burkean, with an emphasis on the idea that Canada’s constitution doesn’t merely reside in one or more constitutional documents, but also in precedents and traditions, and that the fact of standing the test of time is an endorsement of their merit. (20)

In places, the book seems to fall into some of the traps of which the author is wary. In particular, there are segments where close logical argument is abandoned in favour of something more like emotional or rhetorical hand-waving. Nonetheless this is an unusually interesting book. Indeed, it is probably a unique one in Canadian history insofar as it shows the thinking of a politically-minded academic who actually went on to make singular changes to how Canada is governed, via the patriation of the constitution and the Charter.

Pierre Trudeau on radical strategy

One passage from Pierre Trudeau’s Federalism and the French Canadians strikes me as especially relevant to climate change organizing:

In a non-revolutionary society and in non-revolutionary times, no manner of reform can be implanted with sudden universality. Democratic reformers must proceed step by step, convincing little bands of intellectuals here, rallying sections of the working class there, and appealing to the underprivileged in the next place. The drive towards power must begin with the establishment of bridgeheads, since at the outset it is obviously easier to convert specific groups or localities than to win over an absolute majority of the whole nation.

…

Consequently, radical strategy must be designed to operate under the present electoral system of one-man constituencies.

While all this seems plausible, it is also cause for special concern in the area of climate change. Political change may be necessarily incremental, but the time we have left in which to change the trajectory of future emissions is short. There is a long lag between when we produce greenhouse gas pollution and when we feel the full effects, and there is an enormous danger that by the time our politics has awoken to the reality of the permanent harm we are causing, we will have committed ourselves to an extreme quantity of harm.

Peter Russell on recent decades of Canadian constitutional politics

At the beginning of this book I introduced Burke and Locke as representing two different approaches to constitutionalism. For the Burkean, a constitution is thought of not as a single foundational document drawn up at a particular point in time containing all of a society’s rules and principles of government, but as a collection of laws, institutions, and political practices that have passed the test of time, and which have been found to serve the society’s interests tolerably well… From the Lockean perspective, however, the Constitution is understood as a foundational document expressing the will of the people, reached through a democratic agreement, on the nature of the political community they have formed and how that community is to be governed… The central argument of this book has been that up until the 1960s constitutional politics in Canada was basically Burkean, but for a generation – from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s – the prevailing constitutional aspiration in Canada and in Quebec was for a Lockean constitutional moment. That effort failed, for the now obvious reason that in neither Canada nor Quebec was there – or is there – a population capable of acting as a sovereign people in a positive Lockean way.

Russell, Peter. Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? (Third Edition). 2004 (first edition 1992). p. 247-8