Alberta companies, many involved in the oil and gas sector, contributed more than $2 million to Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party between 2006 and 2015.That’s according to a new online searchable database created by Progress Alberta, a progressive, non-profit government watchdog group, that compiles nine years worth of party donation disclosures.  Energy companies topped the list, including $126,923 from Crescent Point Energy, $83,347 from PennWest Petroleum and $68,108 from Cenovus Energy.  An additional $850,000 has flowed into the party’s coffers from other provinces, bumping the total of out-of-province donations to around $3 million since 2006 (banks and pharmaceutical companies from Ontario make up another significant chunk). Collectively, out-of-province corporate donations make up one-quarter of all recent corporate donations.

“No-one really dug into why he was actually there,” Kinney says. “It was a fundraising trip. Brad Wall can come to Alberta, talk directly to the oil and gas community and raise millions of dollars.”

New figures released by the Petroleum Services Association of Canada anticipate Saskatchewan will drill more oil and gas wells in 2017 than any other province.

No Cap on Corporate and Union, Out-of-Province Donations in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan’s campaign finance laws are regarded as some of the worst in Canada.

There isn’t any cap on contributions, or restrictions on corporate and union donations. In addition, out-of-province contributions — banned in Alberta in 1977 under Peter Lougheed — are sanctioned, as are out-of-country donations so long as the company has a Canadian presence of some kind.

“Obviously the fear is that corporations will use contributions to buy favourable policies or legislation, or at least buy access to these leaders,” says Simon Enoch, director of the Saskatchewan Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The CCPA’s Saskatchewan office published a report in December 2012 that arrived at many of the same conclusions as the Progress Alberta findings: contributions overwhelmingly funnel to the Saskatchewan Party and most out-of-province corporation donations come from Alberta (between 2008 and 2010, contributions from Alberta accounted for 42 per cent of the party’s top donations).

”The oil industry looms large as key contributors to the Sask Party,” Enoch says.

Many Alberta-based oil and gas companies have significant investments in Saskatchewan oil plays, with potential interests in reducing obligations around environmental assessments and “playing” royalty regimes off each other to keep rates as low as possible.

‘We Can All Agree That They Expect Something In Return For These Really Large Cash Donations’

Enoch said the last time the province had a serious conversation about campaign finance reform was during Erin Weir’s run for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP, which featured a policy proposal to ban all corporate and union donations.

A corporate lobbyist registry was launched in August, which is “pretty rudimentary and certainly not as good as some other provinces, but at least we have a picture of who’s meeting with the government and why.”

But there’s still no cap on donations, unlike in Alberta which sports limits of $15,000 in non-election years and $30,000 in election years. That means that in Saskatchewan politics, individuals, corporations and unions can donate as much as desired. Oddly enough, that’s resulted in sizable donations from Saskatchewan-based crown corporations, government agencies, municipalities, health regions and school boards.

Enoch’s quick to clarify that there’s no clear evidence of a “pay to play” relationship, but that we can “all agree that they expect something in return for these really large cash donations that they’re making.”

Wall Says He Has No Interest in Changing Election Finance Laws

That’s where a ban on corporate and union donations could come in. The very first bill the Alberta NDP passed, introduced in June 2015, implemented such a measure, although there were concerns of loopholes that allowed for corporations and unions to provide loan guarantees and donate the paid time of employees to ‘volunteer’ for political parties.

However, Wall told CBC News he has no interest in changing campaign financing laws. NDP interim leader Trent Wotherspoon has indicated that his party wants to see a ban on corporate and union donations.

A similar situation has taken shape in B.C. where the ruling BC Liberals have refused to update the province’s scant political donation laws. Both the B.C. Green Party and the provincial NDP have promised to overturn or review B.C.’s campaign finance laws if elected in the spring 2017 race.

“I think there’s an opportunity for opposition politicians as well as the general public in Saskatchewan to rise up and say that this is unacceptable and unneeded and that people in Saskatchewan should be the only ones who can donate to Saskatchewan politics,” Kinney concludes.

Image: Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. Photo: Canada 2020 via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has repeatedly argued that putting a price on carbon would be bad for the economy — but experts say Wall’s own climate change strategy will end up costing the province more per tonne than the federal government’s plan, while failing to be nearly as fair or effective as a carbon tax.   

Much of Saskatchewan’s climate strategy centres around the SaskPower Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, which cost $1.5 billion to build (funded mostly by SaskPower ratepayers and a $240 million investment from the federal government).

“When we think about how we can reduce emissions most cost-effectively, [Boundary Dam] probably stands out as an example of how not to do it,” says Dan Woynillowicz, policy director at Clean Energy Canada.

Choosing a preferential technology and using public dollars to subsidize it is “quite inconsistent with the approach that most conservative politicians and economists would take,” Woynillowicz added.

Indeed, even as oil companies and conservative politicians — such as Preston Manning, Jean Charest and Jim Dinning — have spoken in favour of putting a price on carbon, Wall has worked hard to establish himself as the major voice of opposition to a federal carbon tax.

Enter Saskatchewan’s 53-page “Climate Change White Paper,” released on October 18. Carbon nerds eagerly jumped into the paper head first, anxious to learn how Canada’s highest greenhouse gas emitter per capita planned to help Canada meet its climate commitments.  

Disappointingly, the paper essentially packaged up the policy actions Saskatchewan has already taken to date.

Off the Wall: #Saskatchewan @PremierBradWall's Bizarre, Contradictory #ClimatePlan https://t.co/sWJXdJzEFd #cdnpoli #skpoli #carbontax

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 25, 2016

Carbon Capture and Storage Far More Expensive Than Carbon Tax

The Boundary Dam CCS project is intended to reduce emissions from SaskPower’s largest coal-fired power plant by capturing smokestack emissions (in the range of one million tonnes of carbon per year).

However, because one-third of those captured emissions will be sold for use in oil extraction at Cenovus’ Weyburn site, the current estimate is that Boundary Dam will remove more like 600,000 tonnes per year from the atmosphere — if it can even manage that.

With that level of emissions recovery, the cost of CCS works out to about $100 or $110 per tonne, according to Trevor Tombe, assistant professor of economics at the University of Calgary.

Only four days prior to the release of Saskatchewan's plan, on the same day as Wall argued in the Globe and Mail that “carbon-capture technology works,” a report in Science concluded that negative-emission technologies such as carbon capture storage are an “unjust and high-stakes gamble” that “should not form the basis of the mitigation agenda.”

One of the reasons carbon pricing has attracted support from across the political spectrum is because it doesn’t pick winners and losers. It puts a price on pollution and then lets the market determine the best ways to reduce carbon emissions. The bizarre thing is that Saskatchewan’s gamble on CCS is the exact opposite of that.

Woynillowicz adds there’s little evidence that SaskPower has developed any plans for monetizing their experience and technology to sell it to other jurisdictions, or securing investments from the federal government for future projects.

The One New Thing In Saskatchewan’s Climate White Paper

The only major new announcement in those riveting 53 pages was the call to redeploy $2.65 billion in foreign aid to technology subsidies within Canada.

Tombe says that recommendation mixes two separate conversations —there’s no need to tie a case for additional government investment in research with foreign aid funding.

Experts Suggest Carbon Tax Required to Spark Investments in Renewables

A more consistent approach would be the establishment of a broad-based carbon price.

Such a mechanism — which will take the form of either a $50/tonne carbon tax or cap-and-trade system by 2022 due to the recent federal decision — would address the “market failure” of unpriced pollution, something that Tombe pointed out isn’t solved by providing subsidies for R&D.

It would also incentivize investments in renewable power sources, energy efficiency measures and perhaps even carbon capture and storage (although given the current price tag of the technology — between $75 and $100/tonne just for the “capture” part of it — such a carbon price would have to be significantly higher than currently proposed to justify it).

Yet Wall completely rules out the role of taxation: he argues British Columbia’s emissions are rising despite having a carbon tax, even though many acknowledge emissions are rising precisely because Premier Christy Clark has put a freeze on the tax, preventing its increase from $30/tonne since 2012.

In the White Paper, Wall strangely suggested that “we should be focusing our efforts on innovation and adaptation” and that “a carbon tax will harm Saskatchewan.”

But Woynillowicz says suggested innovations like “new crop varieties that are better able to withstand climate change and that effectively fix GHGs to the soil” would be incentivized in part via a price on carbon.

“You need either dollars to do that if it’s going to be the government making those strategic investments in R&D, or you need to send a price signal that creates the incentive for private sector actors to invest in R&D,” Woynillowicz says.

“You can do that through a price on carbon pollution.”

Climate Plan Quietly Recommits to Carbon Tax on Large Emitters Despite Premier’s Apparent Opposition

Even odder is the fact that Saskatchewan’s White Paper includes a commitment to “[move] ahead with plans for a fund supported by a levy on large emitters, with the fund’s expenditures limited to new technologies and innovation to reduce GHGs and not for general revenue” when the resource economy rebounds.

Tombe says that whether or not Wall likes to admit it, the notion of a “levy on large emitters” is indeed a tax, similar to what Alberta implemented with the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER) in 2007.

“Roughly speaking, that places that Saskatchewan carbon tax on about 50 per cent of what could be subject to a carbon tax,” he says. “It’s roughly the equivalent of half the coverage of Alberta and B.C.”

Carbon pricing can be designed in many different ways; Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan offers up a recent example of how to insulate low-income residents and “energy-intensive, trade-exposed” sectors from the economically damaging byproducts of a tax.

“That’s more what I’m disappointed with: that [Wall] sets up straw men and then knocks them down on the carbon tax front,” Tombe says.

“It’s fine: if he wants to have more costly action through the CCS or through the large-emitter levy and leave a lot of low-hanging fruit unpicked, that’s something that will be up to the Saskatchewan people to decide.”

Saskatchewan Has ‘Excellent Renewable Resources’  

Woynillowicz says the one bright spot of the White Paper was the re-commitment to double SaskPower’s generation capacity of renewables by 2030, although that announcement was already made in November 2015.

However, he emphasizes it’s a pledge for 50 per cent generation capacity, not actual generation, meaning it’s more in line with Alberta’s target of 30 per cent renewable generation by 2030 (for contrast, Iowa generated 31 per cent of its electricity from wind power in 2015).

Saskatchewan has “really excellent renewable resources,” Woynillowicz says.

As part of its plan, SaskPower intends to develop 1,600 megawatts of power between 2019 and 2030. But as mentioned, such a transition would be greatly accelerated by a commitment to a broad-based carbon price.

“Really, I’m just left scratching my head, wondering why Premier Wall has made this decision to oppose [carbon pricing] so vocally and aggressively,” Woynillowicz concludes.

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Canadians could be forgiven for being a bit confused about how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is doing on climate change these days.

Last week he approved one of the largest sources of carbon pollution in the country — the Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal in B.C.

The week before that his government announced it would stick with Harper-era emissions targets.

Now Trudeau has announced the creation of a pan-Canadian carbon-pricing framework, which means our country will have a carbon tax nation-wide for the first time ever.

So are we hurtling toward overshooting our climate targets or are we finally getting on track?

Let’s look first at the carbon price announcement.

The carbon price will begin at $10 in 2018 and will scale up $10 per year until 2022.

The announcement “sends a clear signal that we’re all in this together and that we need a federal approach to regulate carbon pollution,” said Amin Asadollahi, lead for climate change mitigation at the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

The timing seems right as well, with a new Nanos poll showing 77 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support Canada pursuing a national plan to meet international climate commitments. Additionally, 62 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support a national carbon price.

Under the new framework, provinces will have the autonomy to choose a carbon pricing mechanism that works for them, whether carbon tax or cap and trade, and all revenues generated in province will stay in province.

Having a pan-Canadian framework for pricing carbon creates incentive for businesses, Assadollahi said, and “harmonizes the approach rather than having patchwork policies across the country.”

However, critics have already come out against the price as too weak to be useful.

“I was very disappointed we were starting with $10 per tonne,” said Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party, “which is so low under British Columbia’s carbon tax of $30 per tonne. It was an obvious political calculation.”

And bringing the provinces together may be harder than Trudeau bargained for.

Already Premier Rachel Notley has announced Alberta will only support the plan in exchange for pipeline access to tidewater. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who has been a vocal opponent of carbon pricing for years, used the announcement to reiterate his position, saying the announcement wasn’t worth the carbon emissions it took to fly environment ministers to Ottawa.

May told DeSmog Canada the “recalcitrance of the provinces is very disconcerting.”

May said the environment ministers of Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, who were visiting a meeting of the ministers this morning, made a statement by walking out in response to Trudeau’s carbon price announcement.

“Ministers of provinces storming out of meetings is just childish,” May said, especially given the flexibility of the carbon price plan to suit individual provinces and territories.

Canada’s New Carbon Price: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly #carbontax #cdnpoli #climate https://t.co/g9nBo5m8d2

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 4, 2016

Matt Horne, senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, said the Prime Minister made a smart political move in considering differences among provinces in the plan.

“The feds were wise not to be too prescriptive here,” Horne told DeSmog Canada.

“The decision they made on the flexibility of the mechanism and revenue generated is interesting,” Horne said. “You have got to achieve this level of ambition but how you do it and how you use the revenue is up to you.”

“That gives maximum space to someone like Brad Wall to make this work in Saskatchewan.”

Province by province regulations will be necessary to meaningfully reduce emissions where they start.

A recent report by Mark Jaccard, climate policy analyst and professor at Simon Fraser University, found a carbon tax of $200 per tonne would be necessary to catalyze significant climate action and a transition to renewable energy systems.

Jaccard said an overreliance on carbon pricing can mask a suite of alternative options like sector-by-sector performance standards, renewable portfolio standards, mandatory market shares and zero-emission vehicles.

“Ninety per cent of the reductions in the last eight or nine years…in California are occurring because of the flexible regs, not because of that very low floor price in their cap-and-trade,” Jaccard told DeSmog Canada in a recent interview.

Whether or not this federal government will be a strong actor on climate change remains to be determined.

For Kai Nagata, communications director at the Dogwood Institute, Trudeau’s carbon price announcement should be viewed within the context of last week’s approval of the Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal.

“If you set a weak carbon pricing target, that means to hit your pollution reductions targets you have to reduce actual carbon infrastructure. Are we doing that? Not at all, in fact, quite the opposite.”

“This is the dilemma,” Nagata said, “no one believes carbon pricing alone, through whatever form, is going to reduce pollution enough to get at base pollution levels.”

“The only thing that would really take a bite out of Canada’s carbon pie is to stop adding fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Nagata added if Trudeau fails to put pressure on the energy sector to reduce emissions, that pressure will be placed on other less-polluting sectors and individual citizens.

“It’s fundamentally unfair and it will have the effect, if they continue to approve extraction and production, of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry at the expense of the ordinary citizen.”

Alex Doukas, senior campaigner at Oil Change International, also pointed to the issue of subsidies.

“Setting a strong national carbon price is potentially a very important step forward for Canadian climate action,” Doukas said. “But there’s a multi-billion-dollar elephant in the room: Canada still gives $3.3 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies each year.”

Doukas said the Trudeau government needs to complement its carbon price with an “ambitious timeline for phasing out all of its fossil fuel subsidies.”

“Otherwise, the Trudeau government’s incentives to polluters risks cancelling out the newly announced carbon price.”

So while some Canadians are celebrating the announcement of a national carbon tax as a victory, it will remain pyrrhic until Trudeau implements the types of regulation that will actually bring significant emissions reductions and starts to make the tough calls on building new fossil fuel infrastructure. Until then, we’re going to hold the applause.

Update: October 4, 2016. The provincial environment ministers walked out of a meeting of ministers in Montreal, not out of the House of Commons as was previously stated. Kai Nagata’s title has been updated from energy and democracy director to communications director. 

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It might not have packed quite the same visual punch as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s behaviour in the House of Commons on Wednesday, but the Saskatchewan government’s throne speech —  delivered just the day prior — may be remembered for being equally as bizarre.

Specifically, because of the implicit rejection of climate change science, which was described as “some misguided dogma that has no basis in reality.”

The throne speech, delivered by Lieutenant Governor Vaughn Solomon Schofield, pointed to “oil and gas, coal and uranium, livestock and grains” as allegedly victimized sectors.

“They look at those jobs like they are somehow harming the country and the world,” she read. “To those people, my government has a message. You are wrong. You could not be more wrong.”

Premier Wall Continues to Push Back Against National Climate Action

Such assertions fly in the face of climate change science, which overwhelmingly suggests that fossil fuel extraction, production and usage is at the heart of the ongoing increase in average global temperatures.

Making the throne speech even more peculiar was the fact the provincial government currently states on its website that it “acknowledges the science-based reality of climate change.”  

Premier Brad Wall hasn’t made that government position especially apparent in recent months, consistently opposing calls for provincial and national climate change action. Such hostility has become especially notable given Alberta — a province that has historically been rather resistant to meaningful environmental policies — implemented its own climate change action plan in November.

While Wall attended the Paris Climate Change Conference in November, he was notably absent from the widely circulated photo of the country’s premiers and prime minister. Wall said he attended the international climate gathering to promote clean coal and carbon capture and storage.

In March, Wall said in response to the idea of a national carbon tax: “We just don't think a tax right now when the national economy is facing challenges — a tax that would cost consumers more, cost more at the pumps, potentially cost jobs — is not the right thing, right now.”

Saskatchewan Government Dubs #Climate Change ‘Misguided Dogma’ in Throne Speech https://t.co/OukaVJAlcs pic.twitter.com/JirvqBlBlZ

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 19, 2016

Saskatchewan Has Highest Per-Capita Emissions Record in Canada

Saskatchewan sports the highest per-capita emissions of any province: at last count, the province accounts for 10.3 per cent of the country’s emissions despite only boasting three per cent of its people. Between 1990 and 2013, its total emissions increased by 66 per cent, compared to Alberta (the second highest in the category) which increased by 53 per cent.

The oil, gas and mining sector accounts for 34 per cent of the province’s emissions, with the electricity sector chipping in an additional 21 per cent (close to half of the province’s power is generated by burning coal).

This is all in spite of a 2020 target of cutting emissions by 20 per cent below 2006 levels as articulated in the unimplemented Management and Reduction of Greenhouse Gases Act of 2009.

There are plenty of opportunities for the province: agree to put a price on carbon, invest in renewables and public transit, limit the future growth of resource development. Instead, the government has put all its eggs in the carbon capture and storage (CCS) basket, specifically in the form of the maligned SaskPower Boundary Dam project.

In October 2015, it was reported that Boundary Dam features "serious design issues" and was performing well below expectations. Despite that, Wall has refused to critique the project and has continued to point to it as an example of Saskatchewan’s work on the climate change file.

Former Saskatoon Resident Starts Petition to Demand Wall ‘Stop Denying Climate Change’

Jason Mogus — principal strategist at Communicopia and digital director for the Tar Sands Solutions Network — started a petition on Lead Now in response to the climate change denial featured in the throne speech.

Born in Saskatoon, Mogus says he didn’t expect to hear that kind of rhetoric from the Saskatchewan government and that the divisive nature of it sets up “this great battle that they’re these victims of this global conspiracy to steal their jobs.”

“People from Saskatchewan understand the changes that are happening to the land,” he says. “They’re probably more connected to land than most Canadians are. They don’t all live in big cities. They understand the droughts, they understand the changes in winters, they understand fires and weather disasters. I know they’re better than this.”

Mogus suggests the open-ended nature of Trudeau’s climate change strategy — allowing each province to come up with their own version, whether it be a carbon tax, cap-and-trade or regulations — means that Wall has a lot of power to “hold back the entire nation, which is going to hold back the entire world.”

It appears to be true: Saskatchewan currently serves as the lone province with over one million residents to resist substantial climate change action.

Given the need to implement a national policy, such obstinance could result in watered down federal legislation or frameworks. But Mogus maintains optimism the tide can still turn despite the tone of the throne speech.

“I’m confident that people will rise above their personal issues and fears and concerns and smaller views. Saskatchewan brought us Medicare,” he says. “This is a community and caring issue. And I am confident that once they see beyond the rhetoric, Saskatchewan people will do the right thing, which is join with the rest of the world and to take climate action to save lives.”

Image: Brad Wall/Flickr

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This is a guest post by Mitchell Beer, which originally appeared on GreenPAC.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and provincial/territorial premiers meet in Vancouver on Thursday, they’ll be searching for agreement on the pan-Canadian climate framework that Trudeau promised to introduce within 90 days of the 2015 United Nations climate summit in Paris.

It’s a big enough, ambitious enough agenda. But the real question facing First Ministers, and the elephant in the room that will dominate their deliberations, is bigger still. It comes in two parts:

What kind of economy do we want for Canada in the 21st century? (Because it’s 2016!)

And however that’s answered, is the plan realistic against anything we know about the future shape of global energy use?

The Fossils Come Out to Play

Canada-wide carbon pricing is one of the high-profile items on the First Ministers’ agenda, and there’s been a lot of advance positioning in the weeks leading up to the meeting.

"This is not right for Saskatchewan, and may I say, I don't think it's right for the country right now," Premier Brad Wall told CBC in mid-February. "The last thing we need right now is a tax increase or a new federal carbon tax or, frankly, a provincial carbon levy. Now's not the right time for any of those things."

Wall’s comments were eerily reminiscent of ex-prime minister Stephen Harper’s statement in mid-December 2014, when the oil price crash was just beginning to pick up steam: “Under the current circumstances of the oil and gas sector, it would be crazy—it would be crazy economic policy to do unilateral penalties on that sector,” Harper told the House of Commons. “We’re clearly not going to do that.”

You would almost think Wall was setting up for a provincial election in mid-April. Or that the federal Conservatives were on their way into a leadership campaign, with Wall being touted as a possible candidate.

Nah. Couldn’t be.

Reality Bites

At least a handful of premiers seem likely to try to defend or resurrect the fossil industry during the First Ministers’ meeting. The underlying issue, though, is whether that industry has any prospect of success in a world of constrained carbon, low oil prices and surging clean energy technologies.

Consider these news snippets, most of them from the last couple of weeks:

• Now that the world’s governments have adopted 1.5°C as the long-term limit on average global warming — with Canada playing a lead role at a crucial point in Paris negotiations — the available carbon budget for the world’s fossil producers is even more limited. Even in a 2.0° scenario, most of Canada’s oilsands production and all Arctic oil and gas would be unburnable. It would have to stay in the ground. At 1.5°, small island states will actually have a fighting chance of surviving the wrath of rising seas. But the remaining “atmospheric space” for future carbon emissions is essentially cut in half, according to a paper earlier this month in the journal Nature Climate Change.  
• At a major oil and gas conference in Houston last week, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had a stark warning for high-priced fossil producers: If you can’t compete, get out of the market. “It sounds hard, and unfortunately it is,” he said. But “cutting low-cost production to subsidize higher-cost supplies only delays an inevitable reckoning.” Al-Naimi wasn’t pointing a finger at Canada, but given the cost of diluted bitumen production, he might as well have been.  
• International auditing and consulting firm Deloitte forecast that one-third of the world’s fossil producers may not survive 2016, and since September, analysts have been projecting that the oil crash could last through 2018.  
• Even if fossil prices begin to recover toward the end of the decade, the next crisis will be on the near horizon. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, electric cars will cost less to own and operate than conventional vehicles, as early as 2022. The ensuing rush to cleaner, cheaper mobility will be enough to take another couple of million barrels of daily demand out of global oil markets, triggering the next price crash.

That’s just a small sample of a daily surge in reporting and analysis, all pointing to a major industrial transformation in Canada’s immediate future.

The Economy We Want: First Ministers Can Have It All

If you believe that resource development, specifically fossil development, is Canada’s only path to prosperity, the future looks bleak. But the oil price crash is also the opportunity of a lifetime to build the economy we want.

Clean energy already created more direct employment in Canada than the oilsands in 2014, before the oil price crash began to hit. And at the Paris conference, the Canadian Labour Congress and Climate Action Network Canada co-hosted a workshop that pointed to the million climate jobs the country could create over the next five years. It’ll just take the right vision, supported by the right infrastructure investments.

Which means that if they make the right choices, First Ministers really can have it all.

They can embark on a grand nation-building project (somewhat more decentralized than they may have thought) to craft a 21st century energy economy.

They can meet and exceed Canada’s current international climate commitment that calls for a paltry 30 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.

And they can create a million person-years of climate-related employment by 2020.

That sounds like a pretty good starting point for discussion when the First Ministers get together. It might even be the right fodder for a triumphant closing communiqué.

Mitchell Beer is President of Ottawa-based Smarter Shift and curator of The Energy Mix, a free, thrice-weekly digest on climate, energy, and low-carbon solutions. He represented Sierra Club Canada as an accredited observer at the 2015 United Nations climate summit in Paris.

You can click here to read more about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and climate change.

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Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall announced Monday he asked the federal government for $156 million to help fund oil and gas well cleanup efforts. In a press release he said the program “will stimulate economic activity and job creation while at the same time delivering environmental benefits.”

But Saskatchewan already has a fund in place for dealing with so-called “orphan wells,” or wells that have been left behind by companies or individuals who are no longer financially able to pay or legally responsible. Since 2009 the province has collected payments from wells in operation, and if the well doesn’t meet a particular threshold for financial stability the province may demand a refundable deposit as a guarantee. As of last fall that fund held $11.4 million in payments, up a million dollars from the previous year, plus another $45 million in refundable deposits.

The Alberta NDP government said in a statement on Tuesday that the province — despite having about seven times as many orphan wells as Saskatchewan — will not seek federal money because “industry should continue covering costs related to remediating abandoned wells.”

So why does Saskatchewan need $156 million now?

“Some workers have been laid off, some are job-sharing, some doing things like taking Fridays off without pay,” says Kathy Young, chief of communications for the provincial government. “The funds will help these people stay employed.”

The province’s oil and gas industry has shed 1,900 jobs in the past year, according to government statistics, and Wall’s plan would put 1,200 of them back to work.

Young would not say exactly what the money would be used for. She says the Ministry of the Economy came up with the $156 million number based on an estimate of 1,000 well clean-ups, which are typically funded by industry.

The health of the orphan wells fund depends on the health of the industry. Since the money is collected incrementally from well owners, a downturn and the ensuing bankruptcies can mean the province is left holding the bag for cleanups that haven’t yet been paid for.

“If [oil and gas firms] have the ability to pay, the fund is fine,” says Judy Ferguson of the provincial auditor’s office. “If there is a risk to their ability to pay, the province is at risk, financially.”

As of last November the fund was reporting that it had just $5 million in unfunded liabilities, or work that needed to be done that was not covered by money the province had already collected.

In the same budget report, it claimed that in 2014-2015 it had cleaned up 58 orphan wells and a number of other sites, all of which cost $1.7 million. The province has 100 left to go, according to Young — and last year it expected to complete about 70 of them.

It is not clear, however, how many new orphan wells have appeared since the oil downturn prolonged and intensified. It’s also unclear whether wells that are orphaned within a year of breaking ground are included in the province’s figures; companies get a break on their payments for the first year. Young declined to comment on these wells.

Among the proposed purposes for the federal funding, the provincial government said in its press release that it wants to fund “environmental site assessment, the safe removal and disposal of old equipment, the remediation of oil and salt water spills, the restoration and re-contouring of the site, and the re-vegetation of the land.” It is unclear which of these procedures are already required by the language of the existing legislation, and Young has also refused to answer questions about this.

In Alberta, the Petroleum Services Association of Canada is preparing a similar pitch to the provincial government, despite Notley’s statement that taxpayer dollars would not be used to fund reclamation.

“There’s ways to do it with industry in conjunction with the government where we don’t go after the taxpayers,” says association president and CEO Mark Salkeld, saying he wants to explore “partnerships” with the government that would tap into an as-yet undetermined pool of money.

“We just like the whole concept,” he says. “If you’re going to spend money on infrastructure — if they’ve got money to spend putting people back to work again — well, then we can put people back to work again.”

He says the petroleum service association’s proposal should be ready in two weeks, and that he is “a bit miffed” that Saskatchewan beat it to the punch.

“It’s such a great idea,” he says. “We wish we were first to it.”

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Several prominent western Canadian politicians came out firing at Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s announcement yesterday that Montreal-area municipalities will oppose TransCanada’s Energy East oil pipeline project. The outraged western leaders were not exactly polite in their criticism either.

“He’s wrong on this one. There’s no better way to put it,” Calgary Naheed Nenshi told CTV’s Power Play. “The alternative is more oil by rail and people in Quebec know the dangers of oil by rail, tragically.”

“I trust Montreal area mayors will politely return their share of $10B in equalization supported by (the) west,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said on Twitter.

The 82 municipalities of the Communauté Municipale de Montréal (Montreal Metropolitan Community) voted yesterday to oppose the 1.1 million barrels a day proposed pipeline going through their jurisdictions. The environment risks outweighed the meager economic benefits of the project, according to the political body representing nearly four million Quebecers.

"We are against it because it still represents significant environmental threats and too few economic benefits for greater Montreal," Coderre told reporters in a press conference yesterday.

“Call a spade a spade: It’s a bad project,” Coderre said.

Alberta’s provincial politicians also took shots at Montreal’s concerns about Energy East. Alberta’s Wildrose Leader tweeted that the Montreal-area municipalities cannot “benefit from equalization and then reject our pipelines.” The Alberta government called the announcement “both ungenerous and short-sighted.”

Earlier this month, the British Columbia government came out against Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain pipeline project and Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan requested the regulatory review of the project be suspended. Neither announcement was met with the same outrage from politicians in the oil patch.

Some of the criticism showed a clear lack of understanding of the Energy East project by pro-pipeline politicians.

Nenshi seems to have mixed up Energy East with Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline when he tried to justify Energy East as “a pipeline that already goes to Montreal. This is a project to modernize it, to bring it up to even better standards.”

Some 3,000 kilometres of the 4,600 kilometre proposed Energy East pipeline do exist as a TransCanada natural gas line stretching from Alberta to the Ontario-Quebec provincial boundary. The remaining kilometers of pipe will be a newly constructed pipeline in Quebec and New Brunswick.

The new pipeline would be built in the northern municipalities of Montreal should the project receive regulatory approval.

Nenshi’s and other western Canadian pro-Energy East politicians’ praising the pipeline for its potential to supply eastern Canada with western Canadian oil overlooks eastern Canada’s inability to refine large amounts of oilsands (tarsands) bitumen. The three eastern refineries lack the equipment to process heavy bitumen.

As Andrea Harden-Donahue of the Council of Canadians points out in a recent article, by the time Energy East comes on line eastern Canadian refining needs will likely already be met by rail, tanker and the existing Line 9 pipeline with Atlantic Canada offshore oil, U.S. light crude as well as western Canadian crude.

“When it comes to U.S. imports, the fact is it is cheap light crude and a likely ongoing choice given refineries desire for the best bang for their buck,” Harden-Donahue writes. “This leads to the conclusion that 978,000 barrels of the 1.1 million BPD is destined for export.”

How bitumen is going to help eastern Canadian refineries has yet to be adequately explained by Energy East supporters.

Alberta and Saskatchewan politicians’ condemnation that Montreal is sucking oil and gas provinces dry through equalization payments smacks of typical ‘Quebec bashing’ seen before in Canada. It also skirts around the issue that only half of natural resources wealth is subject to the equalization system because natural resources are under provincial control.

“Despite having a higher than average ability to fund services, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland receive more in federal spending and transfer payments than they contribute,” the Mowat Centre states in a 2014 press release on Canada’s “broken system of federal redistribution.”

At the end of the day, the most diplomatic response to Coderre’s announcement from the pro-pipeline side came from Energy East’s proponent TransCanada:

“[We] will continue to listen to other elected leaders in Quebec and stakeholders across the province as we take their concerns and input seriously.”

Image Credit: City of Calgary via flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

At the premiers’ climate summit this week, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall brought up a statistic that has received a fair amount of attention lately: Canada’s emissions account for fewer than two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

He’s not wrong, but used as an argument against doing our part to combat climate change, his point does contain some flawed logic.

“Showing leadership matters, signals matter, examples matter, but the numbers are the numbers,” Wall said.

Essentially, Wall appears to be suggesting that because no single action by itself will solve the problem, we shouldn’t take that single action.

Applying this logic to other situations reveals just how faulty it is.

“Canada accounted for less than two per cent of the allied war effort in the Second World War but our leadership certainly made a difference,” says Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor in the faculty of environmental studies at York University.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne rejected Wall’s argument.

“Yes, we are a small country in terms of our population and absolute emissions, but we are heavy emitters per capita and that actually gives us more of a responsibility to innovate and create technology that allow us to deal with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

A recent poll showed that most Canadians side with Wynne over Wall. Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are justified because they represent only a small portion of the global total. Only 17 per cent agreed with that sentiment.

So, let’s get clear about how Canada’s emissions fit into the global climate context and how our country has been performing so far.

Both on an absolute basis and on a per capita basis, Canada is a very significant polluter. The World Bank lists Canada in the top 15 emitters of carbon dioxide per capita. And, when taking into account emissions from land use and forestry, the World Resources Institute ranks Canada as the highest per capita polluter in the world.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, using International Energy Agency data, ranks Canada ninth when it comes to the country’s global share of carbon emissions.

The oilsands are the fastest growing source of emissions in Canada even though Alberta is home to only 11 per cent of the population.

As the Pembina Institute puts it, if Alberta were a country it would have the highest per capita emissions in the world.

What’s more, Environment Canada projects oilsands emissions will more than double over the next decade, growing from 48 megatonnes in 2010 to 104 megatonnes in 2020.

In this figure the National Energy Board compares several oilsands’ production forecasts, all of which show significant growth in the resource continuing to 2035.

That growth is completely at odds with meeting our climate targets. In fact, Alberta’s growth in emissions is actually un-doing the climate gains made in other provinces, such as Ontario’s phase-out of coal powered energy plants.

That’s been allowed to happen because despite eight solid years of promises, Canada still has no national regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

Last December, during the UN climate summit in Lima, Peru, Stephen Harper made headlines for saying it would be “crazy” to regulate the oil and gas sector. Canada regularly ranks dead last out of developed nations on the climate file.

Under the Copenhagen Accord, Canada committed to reducing its emissions 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 but, according to Environment Canada, we are nowhere near meeting that target.

The importance of this can’t really be overstated.

This is why: Canada has subscribed to the target of limiting the world’s temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius. Each country’s contributions to that target translate into our ability to limit the worst impacts of climate change. Canada’s failure to meets its own target threatens this international goal that other countries are furiously working towards.

The debate about climate change isn’t merely a moral one. The cost of failing to act will almost certainly outweigh the costs of acting. Think: floods, heat waves, adaptation efforts, rising sea levels, water scarcity, lower crop yields and wildfires.

Economic research by experts like Yale’s William Nordhaus demonstrates that waiting to act on climate will cost a lot — like in the trillions-of-dollars a lot.

All of that is to say that Canada’s poor-sport attitude on climate change amounts to a major ‘tragedy of the commons’ outcome. Basically, if everyone shrugs off their individual responsibilities, we’re all going to suffer.

Image Credit: Kris Krug

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.