“We will continue to have a strong economy while meeting the 2020 [climate] targets … and we will meet those.”

It was a bewildering statement, like something out of a poorly scripted political drama. The idea that within the next five years, Alberta — the province responsible for over 35 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 — would meet its emissions targets would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

But that’s what was said.

And by Diana McQueen, a former minister of environment, no less. By the very person who’s now leading the revision of the province’s oft-delayed climate change framework.

Back in 2008, the Alberta government, then headed by Progressive Conservative leader Ed Stelmach, brought forward a fairly weighty climate change strategy. Goals were set, policies outlined.

“Our targets,” wrote Stelmach, “are based on sound research not wishful thinking.”

The strategy promised that by 2020, the province’s annual emissions would fall by 50 megatonnes below “business-as-usual” numbers — in 2008, that number was  232 megatonnes per year.

But according to Environment Canada’s most recent projections for emissions, Alberta’s annual output will instead grow to 287 megatonnes a year — an overall increase of 55 megatonnes, which means that the target (a 12 per cent increase from the 2005 number) will be missed by a full 27 Mt.

Removing bitumen from the oilsands will account for a great majority of that increase, the report noted. The resulting emissions from that process will practically wipe out all the reductions in Canadian emissions accomplished by retiring coal-fired power stations.

In other words, unless emissions from the Alberta oilsands are dramatically tempered in the next five years, the bitumen extraction industry will come close to single-handedly undoing all the hard work done by the rest of the country to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the next five years, Ontario is projected to reduce its emissions by 37 megatonnes, Nova Scotia by eight, Quebec by six.

Alberta could wipe out all of that (and New Brunswick’s contributions while we’re at it).

But McQueen asserts that Alberta will live up to its goals.

McQueen’s Troubling Climate History

It’s not the first time McQueen, the former mayor of Drayton Valley, has made statements that were out of touch with reality.  

In 2011, when McQueen was environment minister, she denounced Kyoto because it “didn’t work for Canada without all the large emitters at the table.”

Then in 2013, McQueen told a Belgian news agency that the province had “taken some very strong movements … with regard to monitoring.”

But the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (thankfully reducible to the easy acronym of AEMERA), designed under McQueen’s watch, has been roundly criticized as a failure.

Alberta’s auditor general, Merwan Saher, condemned the agency’s work in his October 2014 report, noting the organization’s report for 2012-2013 took an egregious length of time to be made public. Saher said the report “lacked clarity and key information and contained inaccuracies” and that there was little actual information on the implementation of the monitoring program.

Now that Prentice has slashed Saher’s budget by a cool half-million, we can expect less review of the agency’s shortcomings.  

The agency serves as the primary body to oversee the responsibilities suggested in its title and yet the chair of the board is Lorne Taylor, former environment minister under Ralph Klein, and a serious hater of Kyoto. He gets paid $50,000 a year for that job, which requires a once-a-month, six-hour meeting.

On a side note: AEMERA is now looking for a new chief executive officer! Apply today. Warning: Might be a stressful gig.

Alberta’s False Climate Starts

Other nonstarters have plagued the governing party on its road to meeting 2020 targets.

In April 2013, then-premier Alison Redford hinted at an augmented carbon levy. The Specialized Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which has remained untouched in specifics since its inauguration in 2007, charges large emitters (those who emit more than 100,000 tonnes a year) a mere $15 for 12 per cent of all total emissions.

Definitely not a carbon tax. But it’s something, right?

Specifically, Redford briefly proposed a 40/40 framework as an addition of sorts to the regulation: that is, $40 would be charged for 40 per cent of emissions. Not at all in the realm suggested by the Pembina Institute – which recommended a legitimate carbon tax between the range of $100 and $150 per tonne — but again, an improvement! Unfortunately, that concept was quickly forgotten.

But none of the aforementioned examples – the monitoring agency or increased carbon levy – come close to the dashed promises of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

CCS was the foundational element of Alberta’s 2008 climate plan. The province committed $2 billion to the controversial technology.

Interestingly, now-premier Jim Prentice, called CCS a “science experiment” during his campaign for party leader but has since gone on to describe the technology as “game-changing” during a pro-Keystone XL pipeline tour in Washington, D.C.

Prentice did not mention that the remaining $700 million allocated to CCS advancement would be diverted for other purposes.

The abandonment of CCS leaves Alberta with effectively no plan to reduce per-barrel emissions from the oilsands, which have been on the rise since 2011 according to the Canadian Association for Petroleum Producers (CAPP). 

Which brings us back to McQueen.

She stated — as a public servant presumably expected to tell the truth to constituents — that the province she represents will achieve the respectable emissions reductions by 2020.

In reality, the oil and gas sector has increased emissions by more than 100 per cent in the opposite direction. And no one, including McQueen, seems to have any idea about how to turn that around. 

Image Credit: Diana McQueen via Twitter

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This is a guest post by Mark Jaccard, professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University. 

In 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government asked me and four other economists if we agreed with its study showing huge costs for Canada to meet its Kyoto commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. We all publicly agreed, much to the chagrin of the Liberals, NDP and Greens, who argued that Kyoto was still achievable without crashing the economy. It wasn’t.

As economists, we knew that the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien should have implemented effective policies right after signing Kyoto in 1997. It takes at least a decade to significantly reduce emissions via energy efficiency, switching to renewables, and perhaps capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and oilsands. Each year of delay jacks up costs.

Mr. Harper’s government knew this too. Years later, when environment minister Peter Kent formally withdrew Canada from Kyoto, he charged the previous Liberal government with “incompetence” for not enacting necessary policies in time to meet their target.

With the excuse that Kyoto was too expensive, Mr. Harper replaced it with his own emission target for 2020, which he presented in his 2007 policy statement, “Turning the Corner.” Two years later, he reconfirmed it alongside U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders at the Copenhagen climate conference.

Just like Mr. Chrétien, however, Mr. Harper failed to immediately implement the necessary policies. Canadian emissions have declined slightly, for which he tries to take credit. But analysts agree that the main causes are the 2008 recession, some decline of heavy industry, Ontario’s reduction of coal-fired power, and climate policies in British Columbia and Quebec. Mr. Harper’s adoption of U.S. vehicle regulations will have a small effect by 2020, not his coal regulations.

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But instead of honestly admitting that it won’t achieve the 2020 target, the Harper government still pretends that it will. And it won’t admit that its vigorous promotion of oilsands and new pipelines, such as Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, is a key factor in Environment Canada’s prediction that Canadian emissions in 2020 will exceed the target by at least 20 per cent.

Growth in oilsands emissions alone will account for half the overshoot.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will meet a similar 2020 target. And California, with the same population as Canada, will meet a tougher target.

This time, the Harper government has not asked me to comment on the cost of trying at this late date to keep its promise. I doubt it will – at least not before the 2015 election. But as a helpful gesture, I’ve done the analysis anyway, with a model like Environment Canada’s.

My analysis shows that if Mr. Harper had “competently” enacted in 2007 the regulations he promised, the effective price on carbon would have started around $15 per tonne of CO2 in 2008, reaching $100 in 2020. This would not have harmed the Canadian economy. It would have phased-out most coal plants, as Ontario has done. It would have shifted transportation toward natural gas, biofuels and electricity, as is occurring in California. It would have substantially slowed the growth of oilsands, and led to investments in carbon capture, as in Norway. Oilsands jobs would not have grown as rapidly, but would not have declined. And job creation in alternative energy would be substantial, as has occurred with renewables in B.C. and Ontario. There would be no Keystone XL, no Northern Gateway.

My analysis further shows that were Mr. Harper now to seriously pursue his 2020 promise, he would crash the economy. His frantic regulations would be equivalent to shocking the economy with a CO2 price that quickly escalates to $200 – increasing the price of gasoline by 50 cents a litre. Industrial jobs would be lost. Oilsands production would decrease.

Mr. Harper has admitted that he will do nothing for the climate that might slow the growth of oilsands jobs, as he recently confirmed during the visit of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Yet he won’t admit that this makes his 2020 climate promise false.

Isn’t it time we had some honesty in Canada? Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. We are being horribly let down by the Harper government.

Mark Jaccard is one of eight scientists who published a commentary in Nature in June calling for a moratorium on oilsands development. Follow him on twitter: @MarkJaccard

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.

WARSAW, Poland — Canada has led the way to scuttle the UN climate talks here in Warsaw, Poland taking with it nearly all hope of keeping global warming to less than 2C say members of various international organizations.

Along with 190-plus nations, the Harper government signed an international agreement to keep carbon emissions below 2C at the UN climate talks in Cancun in 2011. And yet here at these very difficult climate talks to create a new treaty to protect the climate, the Canadian delegation considers the 2C target "aspirational" and not especially important according to sources.

The government's official COP 19 Qs and As webpage fails to mention the 2C target.

Canada has unilaterally walked away from it's international climate commitments including the Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, a German climate science research organization.

Following Canada's lead, Japan abandoned its Copenhagen target last Friday. Meanwhile, Australia under the Abbott government, has gutted its climate policies making it impossible to reach even its inadequate Copenhagen target Hare told DeSmog here in Warsaw.

The Harper government actually congratulated the Abbott government for doing this.

"These countries' promises and commitments are not worth the paper they're written on," said Hare.

This is creating a "very corrosive atmosphere" here. Why should any country trust Canada, Japan or Australia when these countries have no problem walking away from previous commitments he said.

"We're in a downward spiral that's pushing us on a path to 5C a temperature the planet has not seen in 55 million years," he said.

Even a future where the global average temperature is 4C higher means temperatures in southern Canada will be 10 to 12C hotter than the warmest days. Food production will collapse as well most nations says Alice Bows-Larkin, a climate scientist at the UK's Tyndall Climate Center.

"A 4C world must be avoided at all costs," Bows-Larkin said.

This bleak future can be avoided but countries like Canada must cut their carbon emissions 10 percent per year starting now she said.

Instead Canada's emissions are skyrocketing mainly because of the tar sands. Meanwhile the Harper government tells Canadians it takes climate change seriously and is acting.

"As a Canadian I'm ashamed of our increasing emissions and our efforts to block progress on creating a new climate treaty," said Elizabeth May, Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands and leader of Canada's Green Party.

That's probably why the Harper government refused to allow May to be part of the Canadian delegation here in Warsaw. Instead, she is here as a member of the tiny Afghanistan delegation, who are grateful for her knowledgable support in what is a very complex negotiation.

"Rich countries like Canada never talk about staying below 2C," May told DeSmog. "We're walking away from our commitments, even the ones the Harper government made."

She urged Canadians to pressure their MPs, and not just Tory MPs. The Liberals and NDP need to be pushed to take a strong stand on climate she said.

"There is an election coming in 2015. We have to make climate change the key issue." 

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.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 1 reveals Canada's emergence as a Petrostate, part 2 outlines Canada's climate crimes, and part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty.

Canada's opposition to anything that might help developing countries is “mind-boggling” a delegate from Mali told me during a UN conference to slow the widespread extinction of species. “Canadians are known to protect the environment, I cannot understand why they are pushing policies that are clearly unsustainable," he said.

Only a few days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper told delegates that losing wildlife was an urgent and alarming issue. Then as nearly 190 nations made plans to take action, Canadian delegates blocked those plans with legal and technical manoeuvres.

“Do Canadians know what their government is doing here? You must tell them.”

That was in 2008. Since then at environmental or development gatherings around the world I've been asked dozens of times “what has happened to Canada?” And it's not just me.

“Wherever I travel in Africa people ask me, ‘what happened to Canada?” Joanna Kerr told the Globe and Mail March 30. Kerr, a Canadian, heads the global anti-poverty organization ActionAid.

It's no secret what's happened to Canada.

"Oil wealth has changed the culture of Canada, but there is no discussion about any of this,” says Alberta journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, author of the award winning book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. His latest book is The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.

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Canada's media have avoided the issue or acted as cheerleaders of the energy sector. The tar sands are already too big and have had enormous impacts on Canada's politics, economy and environment, Nikiforuk says.

Energy Prosperity? Canadians earn only $100 for every $165 spent

All of Canada's newfound oil and gas wealth has ended up hurting most Canadians as documented in Part 3: The Bigger Canada's Energy Sector Gets the Poorer People Become. Canadians are poorer – one in seven children live in poverty – and hold enormous personal debts. Last year for every $100 earned, Canadian households spent $165. This is highest debt ratio in Canadian history.

While Canada's GDP has nearly tripled in the last 15 years, more than half a million manufacturing jobs vanished largely due to the high Canadian dollar amped up by energy revenues.

The huge amounts of money generated by the energy sector don't seem to stay in Canada given the evidence of huge governments deficits. Even oil-rich Alberta has had deficits the last six years. The federal and Alberta government response has been to make major cuts in public services like health care, education and environmental protection.

What's happening in Canada is the sacrifice of forests, rivers, wetlands and wildlife so one industry can profit by selling products that are polluting the global climate. In a mock trial at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the CEOs of oil companies operating in the Alberta tar sands were found guilty of the international crime of ecocide for deliberate and extensive damage to the environment.

That verdict should not be surprising. As documented in Part Two: Canada's Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate, the world's new energy superpower is betting its future on profiting from dumping two billion tonnes of climate-wrecking carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by 2020 (Total emissions from extraction, processing and burning).

That's two billion tonnes of CO2 from Canada's energy sector alone. Add in emissions from all other sources of roughly 500 million tonnes and that's far more than India's total emissions, a country with 1.2 billion people and the world's third largest emitter.

You'd think it'd be hard to claim Canada takes climate change seriously.

“Canada is a global environmental leader … and yes, that includes the oil sands,” said Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver last March in address in Chicago.

The Alberta and Federal government seem to think no one reads George Orwell's 1984 any more

What Canada has actually become a leader in is gutting environmental protections and muzzling scientists. Stuffing gags in the mouths of government scientists was among the first things a Stephen Harper minority government did when they were elected in 2006. Scientists and other experts were told they had to get permission from the Prime Minister’s communications office to talk to media. Even when studies by Environment Canada scientists are publicly available in scientific journals, reporters have to file their science questions with the communications office who decide if scientists will answer.  The process takes days and sometimes weeks.

By 2010 media coverage of climate change in Canada declined by over 80% according to internal government documents obtained by the Climate Action Network (Canada), a coalition of 80 non-governmental organizations. Incidentally only weeks after Harper's election the coalition's funding was eliminated.

Even scientists in universities and independent research institutes hesitate to speak out. Thomas Duck, an atmospheric scientist at Halifax's Dalhousie University said he'd never again get federal funding for his research after speaking to me about the recent gutting of Environment Canada.

In 2011 the Harper government claimed financial hardship and slashed $200 million from Environment Canada's budget. The programmes targeted were those informing Canadians about the state of the environment and will have a direct impact on the health and welfare of Canadians, said Duck.

"I'm speaking out because these cuts will be very bad for my children," he added.

The muzzling of Canada's scientists has been widely criticized by international science organizations. This week Canada's Information Commissioner launched a formal investigation.

It may now be risky for ordinary Canadians to speak out in one of the world's most lauded democracies. The Harper government considers environmental activists potential threats to national security. Tar sands, gas wells, coal trains and pipelines are now conflated as essential to national security based on analysis of documents obtained by the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario

Those documents show that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) view activist activities such as blocking access to roads or buildings as "forms of attack" and depict those involved as national security threats

It's the “new normal” for Canada's security agencies to keep a close eye on the activities of environmental organisations. Greenpeace Canada's executive director Bruce Cox, has had recent meetings with the head of the RCMP but Cox insists that it is “governments and fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations."

The world is finally figuring out what's happening to Canada.

“The Harper government's decisions reflect the narrow interests of Canada’s fossil fuel industry,” said Christoph Bals, policy director of Germanwatch, a German NGO focused on development and global equity.

Bals was referring to decisions to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol, the only international climate treaty and last week's decision to abandon the UN organization fight to reduce drought and land degradation (UNCCD).

“That decision and the UNCCD decision do not reflect the majority of Canadians, in my opinion,” said Bals.

Perhaps the growing concerns by people outside of Canada will finally force more Canadians to cut through the curtains of corporate and government propaganda and ask themselves: “What has happened to my country?”

Image Credit: Tar sands refineries in Fort McMurray by Kris Krug, used with permission.

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.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 2 outlines Canada's climate crimes, part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty and part 4 asks What is Happening to Canada?

What's happened to Canada? To the dismay of many a country with an international reputation for relatively progressive environmental policies (at least compared to the United States) is rushing headlong to dig up all the oil, gas, and coal it can. The country’s leaders can scarcely muster the effort to pretend to want to limit climate-heating carbon emissions. And the Canadian business establishment and media have largely gone along with the program. Put it all together, and you have a country that has become a full-blown “petrostate.”

People are starting to notice. Last December at the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, Canada beat out tough contenders like Saudi Arabia to be elected "Colossal Fossil" by environmental organizations from around the planet. Canada had the dishonor of being the most uncooperative country out of 193 nations at the climate summit. It was the sixth year in a row that international environmental groups gave Canada their 'highest' award for its persistent efforts to block any agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

What's happened to Canada is that it has experienced a steady takeover by the fossil fuel industry. Canada's is now the world's fifth largest crude oil producer and the biggest supplier of oil to the US. Canada is also the third largest producer of natural gas and one of the top ten miners of coal. This enormous boom in fossil fuel production has been underway since the late 1990s. Like Saudi Arabia, fossil energy is by far Canada's biggest export and has become the dominant economic and political focus.

The emerging energy superpower

Newly-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper made this perfectly clear in 2006 when he proudly proclaimed Canada as "the emerging energy superpower" during a G8 meeting. Harper, the son of an oil company executive, heads the Conservative party that has pulled Canada sharply to the right. Prior to entering politics, Harper was the climate-change denying head of a right-wing lobby group. Not surprisingly, his government has done little to reduce Canada's carbon emissions, which are among the fastest growing in world. By contrast, US emissions declined in recent years.

But it’s not the only difference between the two countries. Financial support for clean energy has been a consistent priority of the Obama Administration. In Canada, the federal government has effectively ended its support for new renewable energy production and for residential energy efficiency improvements while continuing to give the oil and gas industry $1.4 billion in annual subsidies.

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Even as Canadian carbon emissions rise, the Harper government is shutting down some of the country’s few remaining “green” programs. In 2012, the government cancelled a popular home energy retrofit program. The retrofit program reimbursed costs of up to $5,000 for improving energy efficiency in homes. It was unexpectedly cancelled with more than half its budget — $200 million — unspent.

Not surprisingly Canada's climate change policies rank at the very bottom, 58th out of 61 countries, beating only Kazakhstan, Iran and Saudi Arabia according the 2013 Climate Change Performance Index (pdf).

With a majority government Prime Minister Harper doesn’t have to contend with the checks and balances (and filibuster rules) that President Obama faces. If the PM wanted to put a strong climate policy package in place, he could do so tomorrow.

Instead Canada pulled out the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Under the 1997 Kyoto agreement Canada promised and was legally bound to reduce its CO2 emissions by six percent compared to 1990 levels by the end of 2012. (Note: CO2 and carbon are used here interchangeably. Burning fossil fuels are by far the largest source of Canada's emissions, i.e. +90%.)

"My early Christmas present to myself — and to Canada — was to exercise our legal right to get out of the Kyoto Protocol," Peter Kent, Canada's Minister of the Environment, said in a speech in Calgary, Alberta.

“It really wasn't a tough decision," Kent said.

Canada's 2012 emissions were around 26 percent above 1990 levels mainly due to expansion of the tar sands. They're going to be far higher. During the two weeks following Kent's self-gifted Xmas present, Canada handed out very big presents to oil giants Exxon, France's Total, and Canada's Suncor by approved expansions of their tar sands operations. Those multi-billion-dollar expansions are expected to increase tar sands oil output by one million barrels per day in 2020. With 450 kg of climate-heating CO2 locked in every barrel, plus the additional CO2 emissions from extraction and processing the tarry bitumen, just these three projects will dump an additional 200 million tons of climate-wrecking CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

That's more than the annual emissions of sizeable economies such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Oddly enough, 88 percent of Canadians believe their country should protect the environment even if this slows economic development according to an October 2012 survey by Environics Institute. Most Canadians are even willing to pay (pdf) higher taxes for solutions to combat climate change.

"Canada has become a 'petrostate,'" says Alberta journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, author of the award winning book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. A petrostate is a country where much of the wealth comes from oil.

"The Canadian and Alberta governments now lobby on behalf of the oil industry and fight any restrictions on carbon emissions to combat climate change," Nikiforuk says.

Canada's federal government collected about one billion dollars in 2011 in corporate taxes from the tar sands industry. It does not receive royalties. The province of Alberta where the tar  sands and much of the oil and gas industry is located receives about $10 billion a year in revenues from the oil and gas industry from 1999 to 2008 according to the Parkland Institute, an independent research centre at the University of Alberta. Those revenues are now estimated to be more than than one-third of Alberta's $40 billion annual budget.

Hooked on energy dollars, the Canadian and Alberta governments only make decisions that favour growth of the energy industry, Nikiforuk says.

Click here for Part 2 of Blame Canada.

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As the Obama administration revisits its decision on whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, DeSmog Canada decided to take a look at how the project became a cause célèbre.

We asked ourselves: Of all the environmental causes to fight, what was it that mobilized Hollywood celebrities, renowned scientists, environmental activists and a handful of Texans to face jail time protesting a proposed pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast?

What’s more: How did a decision on the project – which Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once brushed off as a “no-brainer” – get sidelined by the U.S. government ahead of a crucial 2012 presidential election?

While the Stephen Harper government has been quick to point fingers at so-called foreign-funded “radicals” and First Nations, we believe the answer lies much closer to home.

In fact, if the Obama administration decides to reject TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, the Harper government will need to face facts: Its own environmental policies and PR tactics will be largely to blame.

Its pro-pipeline campaign, which vilifies environmental groups and suggests Canadians must choose between the economy and the environment, is backfiring. Keystone XL could very well be the first failure case study, followed by other anti-pipeline movements such as the one organizing against the Enbridge Northern Gateway.

Where exactly did the Harper government go wrong? The bungling of the issue dates back to 2006, when the newly elected Harper administration began backing away from the Kyoto Protocol climate change agreement, going against the trend of most other developing nations.

At a time when climate change concerns started to resurface as a top issue for Canadians, the Harper government was signaling its plans to loosen environmental targets for heavy-polluting industries, in particular oil and gas and tar sands. Its argument was that the targets were unrealistic and uneconomic.

That said, as the 2008-09 recession took hold, the pro-development message resonated with many Canadians. While climate change concerns remained, polls taken during the global financial crisis showed those worries took a back seat to the economic worries.

However, as the economy recovered in 2010 and 2011, so too did environmental concerns. Still the Harper government continued to drive home its commitment to expanding the Alberta tar sands and played down the importance of meeting emissions targets.

When it officially withdrew Canada from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, amid international backlash, the Harper government and its friends in the oil industry continued to treat climate change not as an environmental issue, but as a public relations problem.

Once the U.S. announced it would delay the Keystone XL decision, the Harper PR machine went into overdrive. Instead of seeking collaboration with environmental groups and First Nations, the government doubled down, ramping up its rhetoric about environmental “radicals,” while at the same time increasing its advertising spending to promote the Harper administration as environmentally responsible.

Consider the response to a February 2013 report from the federal environment commissioner, Scott Vaughan, which found shortcomings in how the government protects citizens from pollution risks associated with resources development. Commenting on the findings in his final report Commissioner Vaughan said, “we need a boom in environmental protection in this country.”



Instead of responding with a commitment to do better the Harper Government sent Canadian Ambassador to the US, Gary Doer, out to the media to suggest that Keystone XL critics have overblown the estimated net increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the Keystone pipeline project.

He was quoted by Postmedia News saying: “If you ask the question: Do you want oil from (Venezuelan President) Hugo Chavez or (Alberta Premier) Alison Redford I think I know the answer.”


With all due respect to the Ambassador this is just a bad political shell game that has already backfired once. People can see that he is asking the wrong question. What Americans want to know is: Why isn’t the Harper government working quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands and other sectors of the Canadian economy?

In its newest advertising campaign, the government continues to promote itself as greening the tar sands, even though its emission targets remain largely unchanged. This greenwashing only serves to inflame the critics, as we’ve seen with the fresh round of Keystone XL climate change protests in Washington.

Now, as a result of the Harper government’s muted response to environmental concerns, Keystone XL has become about much more than just a pipeline. As a recent opinion piece in The Guardian points out, Keystone XL will become a climate legacy issue for the Obama administration at a time when the environment has once again become top-of-mind for many Americans, particularly in the destructive aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

Instead of attempting to address society’s growing concern about climate change, the Harper government’s response has been to try to spin its way out of the issue through denial and misleading PR campaigns. What’s worse, these government-sponsored ad campaigns are being funded by Canadian taxpayers, many of whom disagree with the Harper administration’s position on the environment, according to polls.

Still, as global climate change concerns continue to grow, the Harper government continues to dig in its heels. It’s that stance that is fuelling environmentalists not just with Keystone XL, but Northern Gateway and other resource projects across North America.

Opposition to Canada’s tar sands expansion efforts is growing globally, and the Harper government has only itself to blame.

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By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington. This post originally appeared in the Science Matters blog on the DSF website.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in 2010, killing 11 people and spewing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it cost more than $40 billion to mop up the mess. In Canada, an oil company would only be liable for only $30 million, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the rest.

That’s just one of a litany of flaws Canada’s environment commissioner identified with the government’s approach to environmental protection. According to environment and sustainable development commissioner Scott Vaughan, who released a final series of audits before stepping down, the federal government’s failure to protect the environment is putting Canadians’ health and economy at risk.

Vaughan says the government has no real plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and is not even on track to meet its own modest targets (already watered down from the widely accepted emission-levels baseline of 1990 to 2005). It is unprepared for tanker accidents and oil spills in coastal waters. It lacks regulations governing toxic chemicals used by the oil industry.

He noted the federal government does not even require the oil and gas industry to disclose chemicals it uses in fracking, which means there is no way to assess the risks. And despite the fact that Canada has committed to protecting 20 per cent of its oceans by 2020, we have less than one per cent protected now and are not likely to meet our goal within this century.

“We know that there is a boom in natural resources in this country and I think what we need now – given the gaps, given the problems we found – is a boom in environmental protection in this country as well,” Mr. Vaughan told the Globe and Mail. He added that not dealing with the risks will cause economic losses as well as damage to human health and the environment because it will cost more to clean up problems than prevent them.

Remember, this is not coming from a tree-hugging environmentalist but from the government’s own independent office of the auditor general. It should concern all Canadians. We have a beautiful country, blessed with a spectacular natural environment and a progressive, caring society. But we can’t take it for granted. Beijing was probably a nicer city when you could breathe the air without risking your life.

Often, the justification for failing to care for the environment is that it’s not economically feasible. It’s not a rational argument – after all, we can’t survive and be healthy ourselves if we degrade or destroy the air, water, soil and biodiversity that make it possible for us to live well. But Vaughan shows the folly of this way of thinking on a more basic level. Beyond the high costs of cleaning up after environmental contamination or disasters, he notes the government doesn’t even have a handle on some of the financial implications of its policies.

“The government does not know the actual cost of its support to the fossil fuel sector,” he reports, adding that it has no idea how much its sector-by-sector approach to greenhouse gas emissions will cost either, even though that was a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which the government bailed on, arguing it was too expensive.

The government has also steadfastly refused to consider putting a price on carbon, through a carbon tax and/or cap-and-trade, even though economists point to the ever-growing mountain of evidence that those are effective ways to reduce carbon emissions.

With an expected doubling of fracking wells, from 200,000 to 400,000, and tripling of tanker traffic off the West Coast, we can’t afford such a lax approach. Our prime minister has responded mostly with slogans and platitudes, but others in government say the issues will be addressed. For the sake of our country’s future, we must demand that they keep that promise and recognize the crucial role the environment commissioner has in analyzing Canada’s environmental practices and recommending improvements for environmental performance.

Given our government’s current record of ignoring scientific evidence and gutting environmental laws and programs, it will have to do a lot more to convince Canadians that it doesn’t see environmentalists and environmental regulation simply as impediments to fossil fuel development.

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.

“If people don’t speak out there will never be any change,” says the University of Victoria’s award-winning climate scientist Andrew Weaver. 

And the need for change in Canada, says Weaver, has never been more pressing.

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.