Tag Archives: Environment

Roundup: Recession fear-mongering

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At an event at the Economic Club of Canada yesterday, Ontario premier Doug Ford asserted that the federal carbon price backstop – which will affect Ontario – will plunge the country into recession. That Ford wasn’t laughed out of the room is a bit more than curious, because that kind of assertion is beyond ridiculous. BC has had a carbon tax for ten years, and not only is not in recession, but is leading the country in economic growth. Quebec has a carbon price using cap-and-trade, and is also doing quite well in terms of its own economic growth. Alberta’s carbon tax didn’t cripple its economy either, and what fiscal troubles it has are related largely to the low world price of oil that stems from a global supply glut, the temporary price differential issue having pretty much been resolved before the production cut even went into effect, now that the American refineries are back in operation. “Oh, but there’s a report that says it’ll slow the economy!” Ford says – except that report says it’ll be about by 0.02 percent at a time when the economy is growing by two percent.

Ford’s environment minister later took to TV to try and falsely insist that the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer projected a hit to the economy from a carbon tax (he actually said that it would only have an impact if revenues weren’t recycled in an efficient manner), and that BC’s carbon tax didn’t stop its emissions from growing (also false, because the emissions are far lower than they would have been without the price, while their economy continued to grow). So Ford is relying on lies to feed his false narrative that is trying to get the population angry so that they’ll vote out Trudeau. And what was Catherine McKenna’s response? Her same line about Conservatives wanting to make pollution free, and that they have no plan for the environment. So, the lies stand on the official record. Slow clap, everyone.

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Roundup: Explaining the intractable

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Over at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative economics blog, Stephen Gordon grapples with the problem of how to explain carbon taxes to Canadians in a way that’s more meaningful and easier to comprehend rather than economics jargon. It’s a perplexing problem, and one that some economists on social media are trying to address – something made more difficult by the constant narrative of lies put forward by the likes of Andrew Scheer and his provincial conservative allies, for whom the verifiable benefits of pricing carbon are lied about and derided as making life unaffordable, or that rebates won’t change behaviours. Except that we have data that they do, but communicating those data is a challenge, and possibly an intractable one.

I would add that oftentimes, journalists don’t help because we largely have an allergy to anything that looks like math. If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, we immediately default to “it’s complicated” and shrugging, rather than figuring it out and communicating to people. I think we need to do better as well, and I try and to my part (for which I am rewarded with taunts that I am some kind of Liberal apologist, despite that carbon pricing is the favoured tool by virtually every single major economist and anyone who favours market solutions over government regulation), but it can be challenging, particularly when you are confronted by those who actively do not care about the truth. If we’re going to call out dishonesty in politics, we journalists need to do a better job of calling out these lies as we do with other false talking points – which means doing more than letting The Canadian Press write up a Baloney Meter™ article every now and again.

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Roundup: The data for the debunking

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I love a good takedown of some tired talking points, and lo, we have another doozy. You know how Andrew Scheer’s whole schtick and electoral campaign strategy is that carbon pricing makes life unaffordable for people because it drives up costs? This is the narrative he’s pinning his fortunes on, and lo, we find more data that it’s simply not true. Data from Alberta, which implemented its carbon tax two years ago, found that the inflation levels weren’t any different from other provinces, meaning that carbon taxes didn’t drive up prices. Mind you, having data won’t stop Scheer’s carousel of lies, because lying to people to make them angry is what he thinks is going to win him the election (and it might), but it’s still a lie, and we have yet more proof that it’s a lie.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the other side isn’t being sloppy with its own messaging. Rachel Notley is trying to go after Jason Kenney talking about tolls, but she undermines her own arguments for a carbon tax because it’s the logic works the same way. But that’s the attempt at populist messaging for you. Unfortunately.

Meanwhile the Yukon has come up with their carbon pricing system, which involves a certain level of rebates, with higher levels to those in remote areas – something that is of particular concern for those living in any of the Territories.

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Roundup: Brison’s long farewell

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It was a bit of a surprise yesterday morning, as Treasury Board president Scott Brison announced that he was resigning his cabinet position because he decided that after 22 years in elected politics, he had decided he wasn’t going to run again this fall. His reasons were mostly that it was time for something new, and the fact that he now has a young family – something that was largely inconceivable when he first got into politics, then as a Progressive Conservative – though that hasn’t stopped everyone from speculating that this has something to do with the upcoming trial of VADM Mark Norman, given that Norman’s lawyers are trying to insinuate that Brison had tried to politically interfere with the procurement process for the interim naval supply ship. (Brison denies this, and he’s not the one on trial, but here’s a thread on what this decision means on his ability to testify). One can’t also help but noting that this will be a bit of a blow for Trudeau as well, as one of his most experienced and competent ministers will be leaving the Cabinet table, and that will matter given the fact that there are still too many ministers that haven’t quite grown into their responsibilities yet.

This, of course, means that we’re now fully into Cabinet shuffle speculation, given that there is one coming on Monday to replace Brison. Every other member of Cabinet, save Jody Wilson-Raybould, has confirmed that they plan to run again in the next election (and Wilson-Raybould likely will as well – she was out of the country and didn’t respond to questions), so it’s unlikely that anyone else will be dropped at this point, particularly given the last shuffle wasn’t too long ago, so it’s an open question as to who will be tapped to replace Brison, and who will take the Treasury Board file.

On a personal note, Brison played a big part in my early days on the Hill, when I was writing primarily for LGBT outlets. When I was the Ottawa correspondent – and later political editor – for the now defunct Outlooks magazine, I had a monthly segment where I would ask Brison, Senator Nancy Ruth, and NDP MP Bill Siksay (later Randall Garrison after Siksay retired) a question every month to get queer perspectives from the three main parties, and that helped me to grow into the journalist that I am today. He was always generous with his time, and incredibly patient with my rookie status, and I will forever be grateful for that.

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Roundup: Dishonest blame-laying

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As this so-called convoy of “yellow vest” protesters moves eastward toward Ottawa, many of them demanding magic wands to expedite pipeline approvals that won’t actually happen (seriously, trying to fast track and cut corners is what got approvals thrown out in the courts before), I find it exceedingly curious – and a bit alarming – that Jason Kenney refuses to denounce some of the elements that have attached themselves to these “yellow vests,” most especially white nationalists and racists who are trying to use these rallies to agitate against immigration and asylum seekers. Kenney simply waves them off as a “handful” of people with “kooky ideas,” while he takes the intellectually dishonest route of blaming Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley for Alberta’s oil sector woes, never mind the global supply glut, the shale revolution, and market inertia, or the fact that capacity only became an issue in recent months when production increased – or the fact that when he was in federal cabinet, pipeline projects weren’t making any faster progress either.

Trudeau and Notley didn’t create the problems of consultations on Northern Gateway. They didn’t create the market condition problems for Energy East. They didn’t create the American regulatory issues around Keystone XL. Trudeau bears some responsibility for the consultation issues around the Trans Mountain expansion, but that also has to do with institutional inertia and how bureaucratic Ottawa and the NEB in Calgary thought of Section 35 consultations in spite of successive Supreme Court of Canada rulings. These are broad and, in some cases, intractable problems for which easy solutions don’t exist, no matter what Kenney or Andrew Scheer say. Putting the bulk of the blame on Trudeau and Notley is completely and utterly dishonest, and Kenney knows it. But why does truth matter when you’re trying to stoke anger to win points?

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Roundup: Foreign policy complacency

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There has been some musing of late about Canada’s place in the world, and a couple of things jumped out at me. First is Paul Wells’ most recent column, which responds to a Globe and Mailop-ed from a former trade negotiator that wrings its hands at the way the current government is handling China. As Wells points out, said former negotiator is all over the map in terms of contradictory advice, but most gallingly, suggests that we break our extradition treaty with our largest and closest ally in order to appease China. And Wells quite properly boggles at this suggestion we break our treaty, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on how there is a different way in which Ottawa seems to operate when it comes to these matters, particularly in an era where major corporations with investments in China are no longer calling the shots by way of political financing.

At the same time, Stephanie Carvin makes some particularly poignant observations about Canada’s foreign policy complacency in this era of the Americans retreating from their obligations on the world stage (never mind the Brexit-mired UK). We talk a good game, but have no follow-through, and in the past, she has quite rightly pointed to the fact that we won’t invest in the kinds of things we talk about the importance of globally (most especially “feminist” foreign aid). The government’s actions in Mali are another decent example – putting on a big song and dance about how important it is we go there, spend a few months there doing low-risk medevac, and then refuse to extend the mission for a few extra months so that our replacements can get properly established, meaning there will be a gap in services there.

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I do have to wonder about some of the crossover between what Wells and Carvin are talking about – that Wells points to the rise of crowd-pleasing populism freeing governments from the go-along-to-get-along complacency, but Carvin points to the fact that we are not actually free of that complacency, though perhaps there are different sorts of complacency that we are grappling with when it comes to our place on the world stage. Something to think about in any case.

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Roundup: New year, same lies

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It’s the New Year, and it’s an election year, and that means we’re about to be subjected to all kinds of performative nonsense, and most especially about carbon taxes. Like how Doug Ford has all of the Ontario PC caucus tweeting about lowering gas prices, despite the fact that Ontario didn’t have a carbon tax (cap-and-trade did affect gasoline prices, however), and there also just happens to be a major tumble in the world price of oil because of a global supply glut. Andrew Scheer, meanwhile, is claiming that the government plans to hike carbon taxes to $300/tonne if they get re-elected – which is patent nonsense. He’s also unable to pick a lane in that the he claims the proposed $50/tonne carbon tax (in three years) is too low to do anything, and that it’s the “experts” and “departments” who are encouraging him to raise it to $100/tonne, if not the $300/tonne figure that he’s citing as a secret plan. (But seriously – they might have modelled it, but that’s not a plan). But hey, way to stoke the “elites” versus “folks” narrative that Scheer thinks is going to win him votes. To that end, he’s continuing to shitpost blatant lies about the carbon pricing system, despite the fact that this particular lie has been called out again and again. But since when does truth matter when you’re trying to make people angry?

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Roundup: A victory for the status quo

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Christmas came a few days early, courtesy of British Columbia, which rejected the referendum to change their voting system. A decisive 61.3 percent of British Columbians voted to keep First Past the Post, which one hopes would shut up the proportional representation Kool-Aid drinkers for some time – not that it will. They’ve already begun the ritual grousing over Twitter about how a) the referendum was the problem and people rejected it and not PR; and b) that voters are just too stupid to get that “PR is lit,” to coin a phrase. The provincial Green Party leader, Andrew Weaver, says that he gets the message and that they won’t be raising it “anytime soon” – but he also didn’t want a referendum in the first place and wanted it imposed, so we’ll see how long before he starts agitating for that option.

Next up for attempts at electoral reform are Quebec – where François Legault promised it sans-referendum with the support of other party leaders – and PEI, where PR narrowly “won” a poorly attended plebiscite, on the late round of a ranked ballot, hence the government plans to run another referendum during the next provincial election.
But seriously, guys. We need to stop this mythmaking about the current system, and this belief that PR is the only “good” system. Most of the gripes about the current system stem from ignorance and disengagement with the process that has allowed bad actors to co-opt the system to their own ends (and this is especially because of the bastardised leadership selection system that we have gravitated toward despite is demonstrated toxic effect on our system). PR doesn’t solve these problems – if anything, most PR systems simply exacerbate them and create whole new problems. Time to focus our efforts toward civic literacy and using grassroots engagement to fix the problems that we’ve allowed to creep into our system. And hey, I wrote a book on this as a primer for you.

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Meanwhile, Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid institute breaks down the polling around the referendum, and should put to bed a few of the myths.

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Roundup: $1.6 Billion instead of a magic wand

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Yesterday, the federal government announced $1.6 billion in help for the Alberta energy sector – but insisted it’s not a subsidy. $1 billion of it was in loans for exporters to invest in technologies and address working capital needs or exploring new markets; $500 million from to help smaller oil and gas businesses weather the uncertainty, $50 million from the Clean Growth Program, and $100 million in economic diversification projects. It wasn’t something like federal funding for companies to remediate orphan wells, for example. And predictably, Rachel Notley and various other Conservatives immediately dismissed this as not asking for money but wanting “the handcuffs removed,” which seems to me to be code for waving a magic wand to get pipelines built immediately, despite the fact that unless they plan to bulldoze through the Indigenous consultation process, is something the government can’t do. And Andrew Scheer? He went full drama queen with a petulant press release that accused Trudeau of trying to destroy Alberta, sounding very much like a jealous suitor wailing “He can’t love you like I will!”

More to the point, the federal government can’t just ram through the approvals for Trans Mountain, given that the last time they tried to cut corners, the Federal Court of Appeal objected and rescinded their approvals and would do so again, hence why they’re going the route of doing what the court laid out, and that takes time. There is no magic wand. Killing Bill C-69 won’t solve anything because the current system isn’t working, and while the bill is flawed and open to amendment at the Senate, Conservative senators have not consented to any committee hearings before the Senate’s slated (late) return in February (and I have heard various reasons for this, both in opposition to the bill, and because they are pushing back against the committee chair, who they accuse of doing the bidding of Senator Peter Harder). The tanker ban on BC’s north coast? That’s demanded by many of the coastal First Nations. Scrapping the carbon tax? Won’t change anything because it has nothing to do with the oil price differential and oil companies have been asking for a carbon price so that they can have predictability when it comes to climate demands. And then there’s the bogeyman about foreign funded “paid protesters” that the Conservatives blame for everything, despite the fact that they don’t control the courts or the economics of projects. That won’t stop Scheer or Jason Kenney from offering the people of Alberta another vial of snake oil, promising quick approval on pipelines that they can’t actually deliver on.

Meanwhile, amidst more lies and grievance narratives around the federal equalisation programme, Trevor Tombe drops a reality bomb about how the system works and why. Because amidst the demands for magic wands and offering snake oil, the Jason Kenneys of this country will continue to lie about how equalisation works to keep people angry in the hopes of getting electoral advantage for it. We need more people to tell the truth about the system if we’re to keep a lid on the anger and try to do something meaningful to address it rather than simply bow to grievance culture and fabrications.

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Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

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This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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