Implement an economy-wide carbon tax, attain “social licence,” score a federal approval for the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.

the Alberta NDP’s rhetoric represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social licence,

“It’s like saying: ‘if I’m good to my neighbour then I can engage in some petty theft of the corner store.’ As opposed to saying: ‘Being good to my neighbour and the environment just means that I’ve learned how to start to do that on an ongoing basis.’ It doesn’t open up the possibility for something else.”

Social Licence Responds to Perceived Flaws in Regulators

The concept of “social licence to operate” was birthed out of the mining sector in the late 1990s.

Jennifer Winter, director of energy and environmental policy at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, says the idea made sense in that particular context, with companies attempting to engage the immediate community with partnerships, Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBAs) and local hiring preferences.

However, Winter notes there’s never been a clear articulation of what social licence even is.

“It’s like any other buzzword,” she says. “It sounds good and you think it has meaning. But what is it? Who grants this licence?”

Szeman agrees that the definition of social licence is indeed murky. But unlike Winter — who suggests the discussion “definitely hasn’t helped in terms of people thinking of the NEB as an effective and neutral regulator” — he says he’s “very glad” that it’s being talked about and that it helpfully attempts to broaden the onus of responsibility beyond what agencies and boards currently require from companies.

“I think it’s this kind of sense that ‘is this a kind of enterprise that is a legitimate one in today’s world given the challenges that the entire society is facing, whether or not our legal description has caught up to it?’,” says Szeman, adding that the Alberta NDP is “abusing the concept” by detaching it from such roots.

‘It’s A Real Stretch For Governments to Claim to Grant Social Licence’

As opposed to corporate social responsibility — which is largely assessed and reported on by the company itself via annual reports and sizable marketing teams — the idea of social licence has been claimed by communities as a pressure point to make up for perceived deficiencies in consultations and environmental assessments conducted by governments and corporations.

Fiona MacPhail and Paul Bowles, both economics professors at the University of Northern British Columbia who were collaboratively interviewed via e-mail, noted that many communities have “co-opted” the term for their own purposes as opposed to the typical co-optation by industry and governments of terms like “empowerment” and “participation.”

“Seeing this, governments are entering the debate too and trying to use the language to support their aims, in this case by arguing that oil pipelines have social licence if they are accompanied by a carbon tax and climate change targets,” they write.

“It’s a real stretch for governments to claim to grant social licence [to themselves] since it’s their failure to ensure that the ‘political licences’ which they grant to resource firms have legitimacy that spurred the move to social licence in the first place.”

#Alberta’s #CarbonTax Doesn’t Equal ‘Social Licence’ for New Pipelines https://t.co/woeYeqDJSs #ableg #bcpoli #cdnpoli #KinderMorgan

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 8, 2016

Over Half of Canadians Have Little to No Confidence in the National Energy Board

This notion is especially true in the context of pipelines, which cross many jurisdictions that have distinct interests and concerns (including spills, tanker traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, all of which can result in problems far beyond the scope of provincial or national boundaries).

For instance, what does consent look like when a pipeline crosses dozens of First Nations, municipalities and tracts of private land? Is gaining an “approval” from 51 per cent of impacted citizens enough?

Winter argues that the job of regulators like the National Energy Board (NEB) and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) isn’t to decide if every person and community is better off by having a pipeline, but if “Canada as a whole is better off.”

This perspective is echoed in the rhetoric of a unitary “Canadian public interest” that the NEB uses to describe its own responsibilities, as well as Notley’s submission to the NEB in support of Kinder Morgan’s proposal: “This important pipeline infrastructure will support an integrated energy economy in Canada that will be more attractive to investors, which in turn will generate more economic activity Canada-wide.”

But Szeman suggests that such nationalistic rhetoric is no longer sufficient.

“I find it very interesting the degree to which quite a large segment of the Canadian public don’t find the claims made on behalf of pipeline projects to have the proper amount of legitimacy,” he says. “Not because they don’t understand that it might lead to jobs and profits, but because they don’t buy the long-standing argument that the thing that matters above all else is jobs and profits.”

Commitments to Indigenous Rights and Climate Targets Currently Ignored

If the responsibilities and actions of the NEB and CEAA reflected an acknowledgement of the inability for Canada to both build new pipelines and meet international climate commitments, for instance, then perhaps it would be a different story.

Or if projects only proceeded with the guarantee of “free, prior and informed consent” as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), then social licence might “not exist” as many conservative commentators insist.

But the overhaul of the NEB and CEAA hasn’t been completed in time to impact the review of the new Kinder Morgan pipeline, contradicting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge during the federal election to the Dogwood Institute’s Kai Nagata.

The project is still opposed by the mayors of Vancouver and Burnaby, the chief of Tsleil-Waututh Nation and the Treaty Alliance Against Tarsands Expansion, which features more than 50 signatories. On Oct. 24, 99 people received trespassing citations outside Parliament Hill while protesting the Kinder Morgan expansion; two weeks later, 15 people occupied the constituency office of Minister of Natural Resources Jim Carr for the same reason.

Alberta’s climate plan and Canada’s review of its environmental assessment process hasn’t done nearly enough to satisfy concerns about new pipelines that will allow for the further expansion of the oilsands.

But as indicated in Notley’s Oct. 3 speech, the Alberta NDP seems to assume that the battle for hearts and minds has been concluded, and that social licence has been attained.

Winter says there’s a lot banked on that assumption.

“I think it would be really politically costly for the Alberta NDP if the federal government decides not to approve Trans Mountain,” she says. “The issue is that I’m not convinced that Alberta implementing a carbon tax is really going to change opinions on whether or not the oilsands are bad. I don’t think that moving to a broad-based carbon tax really buys that much more.”

Image: Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. Photo: Premier of Alberta via Flickr

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By now, it’s an almost entirely predictable routine: a celebrity takes a tour of the Alberta oilsands for a day or two and quickly harnesses apocalyptic rhetoric in press conferences to detail the experience. Chagrined industry spokespeople lash out. News coverage dissipates after a few days. Rinse and repeat. Thus far, Neve Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Darren Aronofsky, Desmond Tutu and James Cameron have partaken in the ritual.

Now, at long last, we can add Bill Nye to the already stacked roster, thanks to his recent two-day stint in the area for a climate change documentary he’s working on.

“Producing all this oil that’s producing all this carbon dioxide, that’s not good from a global stand point,” the Science Guy said in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, which was tweeted by the likes of Bill McKibben and 350.org.

Nye’s statement is very true. Alberta’s oilsands represent fossil fuel development on an unprecedented and highly visible scale. Canada won’t meet its 2020 emissions reduction targets as a result of the growing sector (by that year, the oilsands are expected to churn more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually than all the passenger transport in the country).

But do celebrity visits help push the dialogue out of gridlock?

“Where they can often fail is there’s a really naive and limited zero-or-one view of fossil fuels,” says Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures research cluster. “Celebrities come up, they see the price of extraction, they see the scale, they’re horrified and they say: ‘Tomorrow, let’s stop using them.’ It’s really not a way to generate a narrative that will get us to where we might want to be.”

The West Versus the Rest

It’s a situation severely complicated by the fact Canada is a federation, not a unitary state, with resource development entirely governed by the provinces. Albertan voters are very proud of that latter fact.

Mary Janigan, author of Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, notes the prairie provinces weren’t birthed with resource control, resulting in decades of spatting due to perceived “constitutional inequality.”

Alberta finally received ownership in 1930 and fiercely resisted infringements on such rights in the years to follow (think of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed’s labelling of the 1973 oil tax as “the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation,” or the backlash to Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift proposal in 2008).

“The people of the West may not remember the history,” Janigan says. “I’m sure a lot don’t. But it’s become part, I would argue, of the identity of provincial pride. You can see people bristling when the idea of a national carbon tax is raised, because the provinces do own their resources and control them. The National Energy Program (NEP) settled that once and for all.”

It’s a backstory celebrities who visit the oilsands don’t tend to take the time to explore. As a result, statements from people like DiCaprio that “we must fight to keep this carbon in the ground” can often be met with hostile headlines like “Back off our oilsands, Leo.” Every attack seems to solidify already polarized positions.

Much-Needed Public Attention

Unfortunately, the visits are often the only way to generate noteworthy dialogue on the matter.

Mark Meister — professor and chair of the department of communication at North Dakota State University and author of “Celebrity Culture and Environment” in The Rutledge Handbook of Environment and Communication — says celebrity environmentalists can bring much-needed public attention to an issue that politicians and other prominent figures often ignore.

There are three types of celebrity environmentalists, Meister says. There’s the celebrity conservationist, like DiCaprio; the conservationist turned celebrity, like David Suzuki; and celebrity politicians like Al Gore.

Of the three, Meister says he’s partial to the conservationist-turned-celebrity type — a category which Nye falls fairly neatly into as a mechanical engineer and science educator — as they often have a stronger scientific background and therefore more legitimacy to speak on technical issues.

Still, celebrities often oversimplify complex issues. And organizations on the ground like the Pembina Institute and Petrocultures are confronted with the challenge of translating momentum generated by celebrity soundbytes into public pressure for tangible policy outcomes.

Harnessing Celebrity Momentum

Amin Asadollahi, oilsands program director at the Pembina Institute, points to many such policy ideas, including investments in renewable and clean tech sectors, diversification of the economy and incentivizing industry to reduce emissions with carbon pricing. Those alone are intricate subjects often beyond the purview of celebrities.

Szeman is concerned with an even headier set of questions, noting the reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuels (as G7 countries recently pledged to do by 2100) will necessitate a radical restructuring of how society prioritizes things like mobility, leisure and consumption.

In other words, the transition will require the exploration of completely new narratives about communities and economies, as opposed to lowest-common-denominator conclusions that oil is evil. These ambitions helped inspire “What Comes After Oil?,” a public roundtable hosted in August and organized by Szeman’s Petrocultures research cluster.

Attracting a sold-out crowd of 200 people to the Art Gallery of Alberta, the event featured contributions from academia, industry and government. Many of the exchanges were very fruitful, Szeman says, with thoughtful perspectives expressed by the panel and audience. He chalks such successes up to the way the issue is presented to people.

“When you say to them not ‘should we use oil or shouldn’t we’ — which I think is how celebrities often do it — but say ‘OK we’re an oil society, we’re a petroculture, we’ve made the kind of bad mistake of connecting ourselves to a non-renewable resource that has a significant environment impact’ there’s a kind of discussion that begins to emerge there that I don’t think happens otherwise,” he says.

The Next Steps

It’s a style of diplomacy that’s also been sought by the Alberta government’s recent climate change open houses, with hundreds of citizens showing up to the two events hosted in Calgary and Edmonton (those who weren’t able to make it have been invited to fill out online surveys).

Szeman says such popularity may suggest celebrities have contributed in positive ways despite a lack of nuance, with more citizens paying attention to the issues than ever before. When it comes down to it, celebrity visits are brimming with flaws, but they may be better than nothing at all.

“If we’re gong to make environmentalism — and particularly climate issues — a significant one, celebrities have a vital, important and I would say obligatory role to play,” Meister concludes. “Are we going to be able to depend on our politicians to bring legitimacy and a voice to this issue? I don’t know. Celebrities can grasp a lot of our public attention if the public sphere sees their work and the environment as significant.” 

Image: Bill Nye the Science Guy visits Fort McMurray. Photo by Mike Hudema via Twitter.

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