While the office of Canada's Environment Minister is claiming it is consulting with the provinces on a long-term climate commitment, Quebec's Minister of Environment says he hasn't heard from anyone in more than three months. 

As part of preparations for a United Nation's climate leadership summit to be held later this year in Paris, the United States is set to submit its carbon emission commitment to the UN today.

And pressure is mounting against the Harper government as it tries to explain why it is failing to meet the same agreed deadline of March 31st to submit its own set of commitments.

The job of explaning this failure falls to Harper's Minister of Environment, Leona Aglukkaq. The Minister's office sent an e-mail to the Canadian Press earlier this week in response to their inquiries, stating that the Canadian government would be delayed in its submission to the UN because the office wanted to ensure that provinces were adequately consulted. 

“Canada wants to ensure we have a complete picture of what the provinces and territories plan before we submit,” a spokesman for Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq said in an e-mail Sunday. "Because this is a national contribution and the provinces have targets of their own, we are collecting information on how they intend to meet their targets.”

However, there appears to be another version of what the government of Canada is actually up to. 

In a CBC interview late yesterday, Quebec's Minister of the Environment David Heurtel said he met with Aglukkaq in early December of last year at the UN climate summit in Lima, Peru, and has since heard nothing from the minister or her office.

As the CBC reports:

"David Heurtel said he met with Aglukkaq at last year’s UN climate summit in Lima, Peru, the precursor to this year's meeting in Paris. Heurtel said he wrote to the minister seeking a dialogue on developing a national strategy on cutting greenhouse gases, but has heard nothing back."

In the same CBC article, Ontario's Minister of the Environment, Glen Murray, expressed his frustration with the consultation process so far by the feds:

"We need the federal government to play a leadership role in the federation. They’ve got to work with particularly Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and we need to see what they can put on the table to enable [greenhouse gas] reductions," Murray said. "They’ve got to be part of it. They can’t simply publish an inventory of what the provinces are doing and then making that Canada’s contribution. We need leadership here."

There is, of course, quite a bit of time between now and the climate summit to be held in Paris in December. However, the reason countries were asked to submit their plans by the end of March was to allow for a comprehensive "sunlight period." If countries submit too close to the Paris summit there will not be the necessary time for proper analysis of various country's proposals. 

So if you don't want to see things go well at the Paris climate conference, a delay tactic such as the one we are seeing from the Harper government could be quite effective.  

And while the Harper government has gotten away in the past with throwing monkey wrenches in climate talks, it appears this time around that the leadership at the provincial level might not let them get away with it.

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If Canada is to seriously confront its addiction to fossil fuels and fight climate change, we need to reframe the entire debate.

That's the message a group of protesters aimed to send when they occupied and disrupted a conference at Montreal's McGill University on Friday.

At 7:45 a.m., about 30 people entered the prestigious McGill Faculty Club where the second day of Petrocultures, a conference organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), was to take place. Instead, the conference was forced to start an hour and a half late. While most of the day's events still went ahead at the new location, the protesters saw the action — which was tied to a banner drop — as a success.

"Every slowdown of this kind of conference helps," said Mona Luxion, a McGill student and spokesperson for the occupiers, in an interview with DeSmog.

At first glance, the conference isn't an obvious target for environmental activists. While featuring several pro-oil speakers, including an oil company vice-president and the former head of the Oilsands Developers Group, the conference appeared to lean towards voices critical of fossil fuel extraction, including an Indigenous anti-oilsands activist, prominent environmentalists, and academics and artists critical of the fossil fuel industry.

But while the conference featured critics of the oilsands, a promotional video for the event featured co-chair Dr. Will Straw saying the goal of the conference was to cover all sides: "It would be very easy to have a conference on this subject that would bring together everybody who's on the same side: hard core environmentalists, anti-oil people, and so on. But we do want all sides to be heard," he said in the video produced by TV McGill.

It's this kind of false equivalency between the two sides of the fossil fuel debate that's dangerous, said Luxion. "Debate can be productive…But a debate that puts support for the tar sands as equal [to criticisms of the fossil fuel industry] isn't the debate we need to be having."

The negative impacts of the fossil fuel industry — from higher rates of cancers in First Nations communities living downstream from the oilsands, to the growing catastrophic impacts of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions — are well documented, Luxion said.

Instead, the occupiers argue there is an urgent need to discuss how we end our dependency on fossil fuels, and how to stop the promotion of the fossil fuel industry.

Co-chair Dr. Will Straw told DeSmog he agrees not all sides of a debate are equal, and said McGill attempted to give more space to fossil fuel critics.

"We didn't look for a balanced conference. One side already has more access to the media," he said, referencing the oil and gas industry. He also stressed that by holding the conference on campus and reducing the entry fee (in the past, McGill Institue for the Study of Canada) conferences have been held at hotels with hefty $400 registration fees), there was a much broader student and community participation.

Even with greater participation, the conference's mandate to "discuss and debate the role of oil and energy in shaping social, cultural and political life in Canada at present and in the future" still served to reinforce the status quo, said Luxion.

The protesters voiced an additional concern that invited representatives from the environmental movement weren't challenging the status quo aggressively enough. 

In a written statement, the occupiers were specific in their concerns:

"To whom does Petrocultures offer a stage? Beyond outright promoters of the tar sands and fracking: a co-founder of ForestEthics, which advocates for 'responsible industry,' a co-founder of Équiterre, which urges 'responsible consumption,' and the president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which campaigns to achieve 'green growth.' The common thread uniting these speakers is a commitment to making moderate adjustments to life under capitalism, adjustments which serve to extend the lifespan of an inherently violent system without abolishing it."

Steven Guilbeault of Montreal-based Equiterre was invited to speak at the conference, on a panel with Tzeporah Berman of ForestEthics, and Sun News personality and oilsands proponent Ezra Levant.

While Guilbeault agreed the debate around fossil fuels is in need of being reframed, he feels the necessary discussions on how to combat climate change are happening in the environmental movement, and that Équiterre and its allies have seen successes.

"I often debate with myself and others on what we need to do to be more effective; how do we become more radical, more effective, more inclusive," he said. The debate is shifting, he argued, pointing to 50,000 people out last year for a march in Montreal against fossil fuels, and 300,000 coming out for Earth Day in 2012, at the height of the Quebec student strike.

But Luxion says the protesters want a stronger challenge of current economic frames: "Our concern specifically was that that the people who are proposed as opponents don't veer too far from capitalism…They aren't talking about decolonizaton or about changes to our economic model."

Also reached for comment, Levant, who contends that Canadian oil is more ethical than oil imported from countries like Saudi Arabia, agreed that the debate around oil in Canada needs to be framed differently, although to different ends.

"Right now the framing of it is: imperfect oilsands oil versus the fantasy fuel of the future that's perfect in every way (except it doesn't exist yet)," he wrote. "I'm trying to reframe the debate towards real-life choices: ethical oil from Canada versus conflict oil from OPEC."

The ethical oil argument, however, fails to address the problematic aspects of oil development in Canada, leaving the important questions unaddressed. Ethicaloil.org has deep ties to the oil and gas industry and the Conservative party.

Levant's presence at the conference became a lightening rod for criticism. Straw said if he was to redo the conference, he may not have invited the controversial pundit. Guilbeault said Levant's presence served to reduce the credibility of the event.

For Luxion and other occupiers, though, the mere presence of Levant wasn't what made the conference more problematic. Rather, it's that the discussion continues to reflect a status quo that places pro- and anti-fossil fuel positions on the same footing, a status quo which is also reflected prominently in mainstream media and Canadian politics.

"The fact that all the federal parties support fossil fuel extraction to a degree points to the fact the debate is about how to exploit oil and gas, and not whether or not we should," said Luxion.

* Correction Notice: This article originally stated that the Petrocultures Conference was forced to change venues. That was not the case.

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Today federal scientists from Environment Canada presented research at an international toxicology conference in the U.S. that indicates contaminants from the Alberta tar sands are polluting the landscape on a scale much larger than previously thought.

A team lead by federal scientist Jane Kirk discovered contaminants in lakes as far as 100 kilometers away from tar sands operations. The federal research confirms and expands upon the hotly contested findings of aquatic scientist David Schindler who, in 2010, found pollution from the tar sands accumulating on the landscape up to 50 kilometers away.

"That means the footprint is four times bigger than we found," Schindler told Postmedia News.

Senior scientist Derek Muir, who presented some of the findings at Wednesday's conference, said the contaminated region is "potentially larger than we might have anticipated." The 'legacy' of chemicals in lake sediment gives evidence that tar sands pollution has been traveling long distances for decades. Samples show the build up of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, known to cause cancer in humans and to be toxic to aquatic animals, in 6 remote and undisturbed lakes up to 100 kilometers away from tar sands operations.

The pollutants are "petrogenic" in nature, meaning they are petroleum derived, and have steadily and dramatically increased since the 1970s, showing the contaminant levels "seem to parallel the development of the oilsands industry," Muir said.

After the release of Schindler's groundbreaking research on tar sands pollution in 2010 the Alberta government claimed the contaminants were naturally occurring and posed no risk to aquatic life.

However at today's conference, the annual meeting of the North American Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Kirk discussed the long list of 'priority pollutants' that accumulate in the region's snow. Within 50 kilometers of the tar sands, snowpack contains numerous contaminants including dangerous neurotoxins, such as methyl mercury, that bioaccumulate in food webs. Kirk found priority pollutants in the air were 1.5 to 13 times higher at test sites within 50 kilometers of tar sands refineries, and highest within 10 kilometers.

Abstracts for Kirk, Parrott and Muir's presentations can be found on pages 103 and 104 of the conference programme (pdf).

"We don't really know the fate of the various metals including mercury as they go from snow, to melt water to run-off and then into the aquatic environment," Muir told Postmedia.

The toxicity of melt water from snow falling in the tar sands region was researched by federal scientist Joanne Parrott, who also presented at the conference. Studying snow samples taken in 2011 and 2012 along the Athabasca River, Parrott found that the melt water was toxic to minnow larvae, even when diluted down to 25 percent. "The larval fish don't do very well in that snow at all," she said.

Parrott suggests melt water, once mixed with water from the Athabasca River, will no longer be toxic to minnows.

Snow melt, however, provides a significant amount of water to tributaries where fish hatch in the spring, says Schindler. "My big concern is that slowly because of mortalities at spring melt, that this will erode the fishery, killing off the embryos," he told Postmedia, pointing to the abnormally low numbers of fish in the Muskeg River as a possible occurrence.

Parrott plans to expand her research to consider whether young fish in tributaries that feed the Athabasca River are affected by the pollution.

Schindler's research has already highlighted the increasing incidence of fish deformity in areas downstream of tar sands operations, like Lake Athabasca. "I think what could happen is that the few embryos that manage to survive, deformed as they are, struggle down to Lake Athabasca," he said, adding the fish look "so horrible" the First Nations who depend on them for survival will not eat them, even if they don't have confirmed high levels of contaminants.

"I think that's fair enough, they wouldn't sell in Safeway," Schindler commented.

The scientists' presence at the conference is significant given the Harper government's strict control of scientific communications surrounding the tar sands. Federal scientists were prevented from speaking with the media at the same conference in Boston last year.

An internal document uncovered by Postmedia instructed federal scientists to avoid answering media questions, saying "if scientists are approached for interviews at the conference, the EC communications policy will be followed by referring the journalist to the media relations…phone number. An appropriate spokesperson will then be identified depending on journalist questions."

After Postmedia's Mike De Souza released the internal document last week, Environment Canada made arrangements for the news agency to speak with both Muir and Parrott.

Postmedia's Margaret Munro explains: "Environment Canada earlier this month said scientists were not available to comment on their findings of contamination around the oilsands. The department’s media office arranged this week’s interviews with Muir and Parrott after Postmedia News obtained details of the reports the scientists will present at the U.S. conference on Wednesday."

As DeSmog covered in an earlier post, the Harper government's heavy-handed treatment of federal scientists led to a mass demonstration this summer, where scientists and academics mourned the "Death of Evidence," claiming "Stephen Harper Hates Science." 

The government's strict communications policy is seen by some as an attempt to silence critics voicing science-based opposition to development of the tar sands.

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