As California experienced rolling blackouts during a dire electricity crisis in the summers of 2000 and 2001, a group of behavioural psychologists embarked on an experiment.

What would motivate people to ratchet down their air conditioners during a heat wave and become more energy conscious at a time of scarcity?

The answer was surprising.

People’s actions were not informed by the knowledge that they could save money on their electricity bills or do something meaningful to help the environment or society.

But if they knew their neighbours were conserving electricity they were keenly motivated to keep up with the Joneses.

“It was all about what the neighbours were doing,” explained behavioural psychologist Supriya Syal.

That finding and other observations from the field of behavioural psychology could have game-changing implications for work on urgent environmental issues such as saving endangered species and curbing global warming, according to Syal, the former chief behavioural scientist for the federal government’s privy council office.

“If our only strategy is that we need to convince everybody to hold the same beliefs as ourselves, and then use those beliefs to propel environmental action, that is going to take forever,” Syal said.

“We don’t necessarily have the time to do that. If people do the right things for the wrong reasons that still counts. We’re at a precipice. We probably do not have time to convince the whole world about the importance of biodiversity.”

Using social norms to alter behaviour

Syal, who spoke at a recent World Wildlife Fund conference in Toronto focused on reversing the precipitous decline of endangered species populations in Canada, said leveraging social norms has the potential to alter behaviour rapidly.

“Social norms is essentially just the idea that we are very sensitive to what other people like us do,” said Syal, the founder of Dulcimer Labs, a company that uses evidence-based decision making and behavioural science to create social impact.

“If you tell people that normative behaviour is to use less energy you are going to tell them that their neighbours are using less. Neighbours are people like you. So the norm around you is to use less.”

As an example of leveraging social norms, Syal pointed to Twitter posts from the Canada Revenue Agency towards the end of tax season, which  proclaim that 90 per cent of Canadians have already filed their returns.

“And then people say ‘oh no, I’m in the 10 percent. There is a social contract that I’m supposed to be part of but I’m not.’”

Following the California blackouts and behavioural psychology study, one energy company began to provide information about neighbourhood electricity consumption on every household’s electricity bills.

If people were doing well by comparison, they received a smiley face on their bill. “If you were doing really well you got two smiley faces,” said Syal.

“This has led to 11 terawatt hours of energy savings — US$1.1 billion in energy savings for consumers.”

However, she cautioned that social norms should not be used indiscriminately, pointing out that the tactic can backfire if people realize they are ahead of their compatriots and consequently adjust their behaviour to fit in with the crowd.

One way to counteract backfiring is to use a symbol to condone a sought after behaviour, Syal said.

“You can tell them what the prevalent behaviour is — like 80 per cent of people are conserving energy and you are conserving even more — and then add a smiley face. I’m also signalling to you that this is a desirable behaviour.”

What do the monkeys tell us?

During her conference presentation, Syal showed a video clip from an inequality experiment with two Capuchin monkeys, each in its own cage with a full view of the other.

The first monkey, given a slice of cucumber in exchange for handing over a small rock, is perfectly content with its food.

But when the second monkey is given a red grape and the first monkey is handed cucumber again it immediately becomes indignant.

Instead of eating the cucumber, this time the monkey throws the slice at its handler, jumps up and down, bangs its hand on the counter, and furiously rattles the bars of its cage, much like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.

The insight for behavioural scientists?

“People are influenced by the context in which they make decisions and the emotions they evoke,” said Syal. “Making decisions that maximize their gains or gains for the planet that they live on are not necessarily factors that are going to influence them.”

Brain overload in decision-making

When you ask people how many conscious decisions they make during any given day, most will say about 70, according to Syal. In fact, people make an average of 226 decisions every day about food alone, she said.

People are only able to hold four units of information in their minds at any given time.

“We simply do not have the metabolic capacity to process all the information that we are provided with in order to make judicious decisions all the time.”

“Unfortunately, decisions that are as complicated and sometimes as heart-wrenching and as intense as environmental decisions get procrastinated. They are just difficult decisions to make, difficult behaviours to execute.”

So emotions, rather than logic, drive many of our decisions.

It’s not that emotions are constantly leading us astray, said Syal, but we simply don’t have the time or mental ability to process all the information given to us.

That’s why financial appeals from non-profit organizations that focus on individuals, as opposed to causes, tend to elicit a higher response.

“Even though logically it makes sense that I would want to help many people, human beings just don’t operate that way.”

For instance, Syal said conservation organizations talk about beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River suffering the consequences of human actions in the form of habitat destruction.

“We don’t really talk about Pierre the beluga whale pictured with his mum and tell the story of what is happening to his family. There is something really powerful in the empathy that can lead to the response of wanting to take action to help this individual.”

How to become a person who cares about the environment

Behavioural science also shows that sometimes actions can drive preferences or values, rather than the other way around.

If you don’t particularly value fresh food but eat a salad, you will send a signal to yourself that “‘I am the kind of person who eats salads’ and you’re going to build that value for yourself over iterations of that behaviour,” Syal said.

Correspondingly, if the hook for habitat restoration activities like pulling out invasive plants is to come and have fun with your family and community, and later participants discover that they helped protect an area for wildlife, they may start to think of themselves as the sort of person who helps wildlife and cultivate that value.

Behavioural psychology research has also found that when people have to opt-in to something important to society, such as signing up to become an organ donor, they are far less likely to subscribe compared to people in countries where the default is to opt out.

“Very few people opt out,” said Syal. “Basically people don’t like making complicated decisions.”

Take the state of Maryland which, through a Living Shoreline Protection Act, made natural infrastructure — such as planting native marsh grasses — the default to deal with erosion caused by rising sea levels. Anyone who wants to build non-natural infrastructure in Maryland, such as seawalls, must justify their actions.

Consequently, Maryland now has 250 natural infrastructure projects compared to just 10 in North Carolina, said Syal.

Her final piece of advice is to involve people at all levels in conservation programs and services.

If you go on Craigslist or Kijiji and check the asking price for Ikea furniture you’ll understand the reasoning. People try to sell second hand Ikea furniture for almost as much as they bought it for, Syal observed.  

Why?

“Because they built it. If you build something you ascribe more value to it [and] work harder than ever not to let it get lost.”

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Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa and Grant Blank, University of Oxford

“Information warfare” may be a top concern in the next Canadian election cycle, as a report on a workshop by CSIS suggests, but some fears about how people get their political information and the impact of social media are overstated.

In a recently published study, we show that fears about an “echo chamber” in which people encounter only information that confirms their existing political views are blown out of proportion. In fact, most people already have media habits that help them avoid echo chambers.

There is a common fear that people are using social media to access only specific types of political information and news. The echo chamber theory says people select information that conforms to their preferences.

A related theory about “filter bubbles” claims social media companies are incentivized to prioritize likeable and shareable content in an individual’s feed, which in turn puts people in an algorithmically constructed bubble.

The democratic problem with these supposed echo chambers and filter bubbles is that people are empowered to avoid politics if they want. This means they will be less aware of their political system, less informed and in turn less likely to vote — all bad signs for a healthy democracy.

People who like politics aren’t immune either. They might become increasingly polarized in their views since all they see are people confirming their own beliefs. While a lot of the current work is theoretical, a few studies have shown that echo chambers and filter bubbles could exist on Twitter or Facebook, for example.

People get information from many sources

But people don’t consume political information and news from only one source or channel.

Individuals have access to a wide range of media, from traditional news outlets on television, radio and newspapers (and their digital versions) to a wide range of social media sites and blogs. This means studies that focus on any one single platform simply cannot speak to the actual experiences of individuals.

We wanted to solve this problem by conducting a study examining the media habits of individuals. We wanted to understand what social media they use on a daily basis, what political information and news sources they incorporate in their daily lives, and whether they do things that might help them avoid echo chambers.

To do this we conducted a nationally representative online survey of 2,000 British adults. This is part of the larger Quello Search Project that examines the formation of political opinions and the digital media habits of adults in seven different countries. Unfortunately no similar Canadian data set exists at present.

Our analysis suggests that people are rarely caught in echo chambers. Only about eight per cent of the online adults in Great Britain are at risk of being trapped in an echo chamber.

Individuals actively check additional sources, change their minds based on information they find using search engines and seek out differing views. All of these are ways individuals can avoid that echo chamber effect.

Importantly, political interest and media diversity — how many sources of information and how many social media a person uses — both help people avoid the threats of echo chambers.

People who have more than one source of political information are far more likely to act to avoid echo chambers.

They encounter different perspectives, they verify information and they sometimes change their minds. Even people who are not interested in politics are likely to do things that help them avoid echo chambers as long as they have a diverse media diet.

There are widespread fears that so-called echo chambers and filter bubbles are leading to political polarization that poses a danger to democracy. But are the fears unfounded? https://t.co/wAaNMLzE3k

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 14, 2018

Fact-checking is crucial

Worries about political polarization are also dampened based on these results.

We fret about polarization, but in fact those who are politically interested are more likely to have encountered different opinions, checked facts and changed their minds about a political issue after searching for more information.

This means that most people are already on the right track for avoiding echo chambers. It also means that media literacy programs that emphasize incorporating multiple sources into your daily routines, and fact-checking, are crucial.

Social media platforms also have an important role to play.

Facebook and Twitter could still be home to communities that exchange information in a way that confirms existing beliefs and opinions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s important to remember that people rarely get all their political information from just one place.

That said, social media companies can help promote media literacy in the very design of their platforms, for example by making sources of news content visible, explaining how their personalization algorithms work and offering suggested content that helps users find new perspectives.

Happily, some of this experimentation is going on within social media companies already. Facebook has experimented by tinkering with what shows up in news feeds and how content is flagged as false. Twitter recently announced a program to examine the health of conversations. So far there have been varying levels of success and criticism.

While we do not have access to data about the Canadian population, preliminary results from our U.S. data set, and from work others have been doing in different national contexts and with different samples from the U.K., suggests we should expect the same trends in Canada.

Most people have media habits that help them avoid echo chambers. When it comes to our elections, our democracy or information warfare, the threat of social media-enabled echo chambers is not a major concern.

Elizabeth Dubois, Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa and Grant Blank, Survey Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Protected bike lanes are a favourite punching bag for Canada’s pundits and politicians.

Lawrence Solomon recently called for Toronto to “ban the bike” in one of his three columns on the subject in the span of a month. Rob Ford made a career out of condemning the “war on the car” and ripping out bike lanes. Loren Gunter of the Edmonton Sun accused the city government of inflating its usage statistics in favour of elite bike riders, then arbitrarily cut the number of riders in half to make the point that they were a waste.

Fortunately, while they may be entitled to their opinions, that privilege doesn’t extend to facts. Countless studies have been published over the years to test the impact of bike lanes — and the results are pretty clear.

So, what do we know?:

• There’s been a reduction in cyclist injuries, even while cycling volumes have increased dramatically.

• Women especially are more likely to commute by bike if they have access to protected bike lanes.

• Everyone — cyclists, pedestrians and motorists — reports feeling safer on the road.

One user group, though, is benefitting even while frequently being the most opposed to the lanes: drivers who don’t bike.

Study after study has shown the ways that drivers benefit directly or indirectly from bike lanes, and yet drivers are the most likely to disapprove of bike lanes: in Toronto, 57 per cent of drivers who don’t bike do not support the Bloor Street project.

But they should. Here’s why.

Bike lanes mean fewer conflicts

Not only do bike lanes make the roads safer for cyclists, but they also reduce crashes and near-misses between cars. In Toronto, there was a 71 per cent decrease in car/car conflicts. That’s an even bigger reduction than there was in conflicts between cars and bikes and between cars and pedestrian, both of which fell by more than half.

“The overall tenor of the street changes,” says Tom Babin, a Calgary cyclist and author of the book Frostbike: The Joy, Pain, and Numbness of Winter Cycling.

“It’s a little less car-dominated, a little more human scaled. All of that improves safety for everyone using it.”

In Toronto, there is one caveat: there was a 61 per cent increase in conflicts between bikes and pedestrians, but those tend not to be as serious (a similar study in New York found pedestrian injuries actually fell by more than a fifth)  — and crashes overall went down by 44 per cent.

One user group that is benefitting from — even while frequently being the most opposed to — bike lanes? Drivers who don’t bike. https://t.co/KIf47fY03A

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 23, 2018

Bike lanes mean less traffic

Even accounting for the traffic that diverted to neighbouring corridors, in the Bloor Street study the city found overall traffic went down. Driving times at rush hour increased by between two and four minutes.

“If you feel there’s too much congestion on the roads, you should be supportive of bike lanes,” Babin says, pointing to a city planning phenomenon known as “induced demand” in which extra car lanes, once built, quickly fill with more cars as people adjust their commutes.

“You can’t build your way out of congestion,” he says, and the opposite is true as well. When car lanes are reduced, people find other ways to get to work, and traffic is alleviated.

After the bikes lanes were built in New York, travel time at peak hours decreased.

Bike lanes improve public health

Canada’s socialized medical system means we all bear the costs of large-scale choices. Nudging people to be more active can save us all money.

An enormous British health study of more than a quarter million people found those who commuted by bike reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and all other causes of death by nearly half. Cardiovascular disease and cancer alone cost the Canadian health care system over $25 billion per year.

Another British study, this time looking at bike lanes in New York, estimated that the lanes, at a cost of more than $8 million, may have increased the probability of riding bikes by nearly 10 per cent. That’s a good deal, it concluded: “Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.”

Bike lanes grow retail sales

Business owners along bike lanes have often rebelled against the idea of building them in front of their stores and restaurants. In Vancouver businesses along Commercial Drive actually collected 5,000 signatures to oppose a plan to put in a bike lane along that street.

But evidence indicates that concern is misplaced.  Establishments along the Bloor Street bike lane and the bike lanes in New York actually saw an increase in spending. In San Francisco, after four and a half years, two-thirds of businesses thought bike lanes had improved their sales. A Portland State University study found cyclists spend more money overall (except at grocery stores) than car-driving customers do — because they visit more frequently.

“When you’re riding a bike, especially in a dense urban area, it’s much easier to stop and pick up something on your way home,” Babin, who also runs a cycling website called Shifter, says.

The same goes for parking. An Australian study found that a parking spot used for a single car as opposed to the six bikes it could otherwise accommodate would only generate about a quarter as much revenue for nearby businesses.

In Vancouver, a 2011 report to the mayor from the West End Mayor’s Advisory Committee prominently featured criticisms of the bike lanes being built in the neighbourhood. But today, the West End Business Improvement Association boasts on its website that it is “one of Canada’s premier urban cycling destinations.”

Bike lanes make streets look good

In New York, bike lanes added an additional 110 trees to the streets. They also shortened crossing distances for pedestrians. In San Francisco, three-quarters of business owners thought their streets looked more attractive.

Bike lanes can also be taken to the next level, like this glowing Van Gogh-inspired Starry Night pathway in Eindhoven in The Netherlands. But, you know, one step at a time.

A Halifax survey found the most popular choice by far for a divider between the road and the bike lanes were planter boxes, adding visual appeal to what had formerly been just a lane of pavement.

Some respondents in that last survey opposed the project entirely based on what they saw as a lack of demand. That’s an argument that’s also rearing its head in Victoria. The first phase alone of Victoria’s downtown bike lane project (5.4 km of separated bike lanes, nearly as much as Vancouver and Calgary) will cost the city $14.5 million. That’s a lot of money to spend — but it’s also less than a fifth of the $85 million spent on the McKenzie Interchange on the highway out of town.

But will it be used, many people ask? Currently one in six Victoria residents walk or bike to work, and that’s the highest proportion in the country.*

“I’ve heard this comparison before that making decisions on bike lanes based on the number of people riding their bikes is like building a bridge based on the number of people swimming across the river,” Babin says.

To Babin, one of the biggest benefits of bike lanes is making biking accessible to more people.

“It gives drivers a chance to get out and ride their bikes.”

* Corrected Feb. 2, 2018, at 1:20 p.m. to indicate that one in six  Victorians walk or bike to work. The article previously incorrectly stated that one in six Victorians bike to work. According to 2016 census figures, 6.6 per cent of Victorians bike to work.

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Senior administrators at the University of Calgary suppressed academic freedom and failed to address glaring conflicts of interest while attempting to establish an Enbridge-funded research centre, according to a report commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) that was released Wednesday.

The report — co-authored by Alison Hearn of the University of Western Ontario and Gus Van Harten of York University — is the result of almost two years of investigation, and starkly contradicts the findings of the university’s own internal review of the situation.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is a nationwide federation of associations representing 70,000 post-secondary workers.

“Academic staff and professors involved at the centre reached out to senior administrators and said ‘we’re concerned about Enbridge’s influence over the centre, we don’t think we should be a PR firm for Enbridge,’” said David Robinson, executive director of CAUT, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“Those concerns were rebuffed. That’s a very serious matter that strikes at the heart of the academic credibility and integrity of work at the University of Calgary.”

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

1) University president Elizabeth Cannon was in a stunning conflict of interest

In 2011 and 2012, the University of Calgary fervently worked to launch the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability within the university’s renown Haskayne School of Business.

A small problem: the University of Calgary’s president, Elizabeth Cannon, was a board member of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings Board, for which she received an annual remuneration of $130,500 per year (that’s in addition to the $454,000 in salary that she made in 2013). At the end of 2014, Cannon owned over $800,000 of shares in the income fund.

Yet she failed to recuse herself from any of the negotiations for the sponsorship deal with Enbridge.

In fact, she made several direct interventions in the process, including an email in August 2012 to the dean of Haskayne School of Business stating that Enbridge is “not seeing your leadership on this file and are feeling that once the funding was committed, the interest from you was lost. This is not good for you or the university. I want to have a good relationship with Enbridge given that Al Monaco is incoming CEO and our grad (and I am on one of their Boards!).”

The CAUT report concluded this represented a “clear appearance of a conflict of interest” that “should have been readily apparent to anyone who knew of the circumstances.”

Its advice? Quite obvious, really: she shouldn’t have occupied a paid position on an external corporate board as U of C president, or should have recused herself from all involvements with Enbridge.

2) Former Enbridge Centre director Joe Arvai had his academic freedom seriously compromised by the university

Joe Arvai, a former Michigan State University professor and member of Barack Obama’s energy advisory group during the 2008 campaign, was hired on as director of the proposed centre.

Almost immediately, he started resisting the company’s push to create what he called a “PR machine for themselves.” His concerns included Enbridge’s request for the institute to partner with Central Michigan University — which was geographically close to where the catastrophic Kalamazoo River oil spill happened in 2010 and served as an opportunity for the company to try to rehabilitate its reputation in the area.

In addition, he became concerned that the centre’s name and terms would “strip away my credibility when it comes to the kind of research and policy work I do best.”

He eventually left the directorship after Enbridge strongly opposed his dual appointment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency science advisory body. Furthermore, he told the CAUT committee that he was actually removed from his position only a week after he indicated his opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline when asked by the company’s public relations firm.

The report held nothing back on this front.

“This mishandling appears to have been due to a desire on the part of senior U of C leadership to please a significant donor,” the authors wrote. “On repeated occasions, one or more University officials who should have been affirming and defending Arvai’s academic freedom instead undermined it.”

3) The university failed to credibly maintain any independence from Enbridge

The agreement was that Enbridge would provide $2.25 million over ten years to help fund the research institute, which would focus on “corporate sustainability and triple bottom line decision-making.”

In return for a mere $225,000 a year, the company pushed to receive naming rights, influence over who funding awards were given to, ability to push for partner institutions such as Central Michigan University and “customized opportunities to meet with researchers pursuing projects of interest.”

The university happily granted them all their wishes.

That led to business professor Harrie Vredenburg writing an email in August 2011 to Haskayne School dean Leonard Waverman, suggesting the situation “smacks of us being apologists for the fossil fuel industry rather than independent scholars and teachers doing work in a broadly defined area.”

The report concluded that “there appears to have been a significant failure of collegial governance, accountability and oversight in the establishment of the [Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability].”

Robinson of CAUT said in an interview with DeSmog Canada: “It doesn’t surprise me at all that companies want to try to influence university research to their advantage. What does surprise me, and frankly shocks me, is when universities give into those demands so easily.”

4) The university has no serious interest in admitting its mistakes

In response to the criticism following the explosive investigation in late 2015 by CBC News into the situation, the university’s board of governors launched a “comprehensive and independent review,” led by former judge Terrence McMahon.

The 17-page report, which took under two months to prepare, cleared Cannon of any alleged wrongdoing. The university maintains that “the McMahon Report is the proper, comprehensive and independent review of matters connected to the Enbridge Centre.”

The authors of the new report strongly disagreed, concluding the McMahon Report was “undermined by his limited acknowledgement and consideration of the role of academic freedom at universities” and gave “significant benefit of the doubt” to higher-ups at the university.

In an interview with DeSmog Canada, Kate Jacobson — current student and former editor-in-chief of the student paper, the Gauntlet — noted the McMahon Report only looked at whether the university had violated its own “very narrow” policy.

“In my mind, the University of Calgary likes this report because it doesn’t ask any hard questions and exonerates them within the confines of their own policy,” she said.

Furthermore, the University of Calgary’s senior administration refused to participate in the report, despite having what Robinson described as “numerous opportunities in which they could have contributed.” When CAUT came to campus in 2016 to interview faculty members for the report, university provost Dru Marshall warned that the group may not protect the confidentiality of participants.

Without expanding on its reasoning for concluding the report “lacks legitimacy due to flawed process,” the board of governors “considers the Enbridge matter closed.”

Arvai, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email to DeSmog Canada that: “To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t a lot of fun to read the CAUT report because it brought back very vivid memories of the conflicts and intimidation I experienced at the time. But, on a positive note, it’s a vindication after the McMahon report, which felt incomplete and one-sided to me.”

5 Things We Learned from the Damning Report on the University of Calgary’s Connections with #Enbridge https://t.co/hkNXwsCWnV @UCalgary

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 13, 2017

5) There are many opportunities for the university to improve, but it won’t be easy

The report concluded with nine recommendations.

They included prohibiting the president and other senior officials from serving for remuneration on any external corporate board, acknowledging publicly that it was wrong for Cannon not to have recused herself from Enbridge-related matters and implementing a policy governing the creation of externally sponsored research institutes.

But that itself might require a re-evaluation of the institution’s entire relationship with the oil and gas industry.

After all, the University of Calgary has a long history of controversies relating to alleged collusion with oil and gas interests, including channeling oil funding for Friends of Science via “research accounts” and housing the Bruce Carson-led Canada School of Energy and Environment.

“This keeps happening because all of these people are part of the same class: they go to the same events, and parties, and Petroleum Clubs,” Jacobson concluded. “They have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in Alberta, and that manifests itself on campus in terms of how oil companies are involved.”

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How much stuff will you give and receive this holiday season? Add it to the growing pile — the 30-trillion-tonne pile. That’s how much technology and goods humans have produced, according to a study by an international team led by England’s University of Leicester. It adds up to more than all living matter on the planet, estimated at around four trillion tonnes.

Scientists have dubbed these times the “Anthropocene”, because humans are now the dominant factor influencing Earth’s natural systems, from climate to the carbon and hydrologic cycles. Now they’re labelling our accumulated goods and technologies — including houses, factories, cars, roads, smartphones, computers and landfills — the “technosphere” because it’s as large and significant as the biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. Researchers estimate it represents 50 kilograms for every square metre of Earth’s surface and is 100,000 times greater than the human biomass it supports.

As CBC science commentator Bob McDonald wrote, “Our technology is a super-organism that competes with the biosphere for resources, and is winning that competition by taking over the surface of the planet.”

Report co-author Mark Williams explained the significance: “The technosphere can be said to have budded off the biosphere and arguably is now at least partly parasitic on it. At its current scale the technosphere is a major new phenomenon of this planet — and one that is evolving extraordinarily rapidly. Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”

Living systems renew and recycle. Organisms die, get eaten or absorbed by other organisms, and other life takes their place.

But much of what we produce takes enormous amounts of natural, mostly finite resources to make and breaks down slowly, if at all. It covers the land and fills oceans, and even extends into space.

As the human population continues to grow and consumerism shows no signs of abating, the technosphere expands, causing pollution, contamination and resource depletion, further upsetting the delicate natural balance that keeps our planet habitable for humans and other life forms.

Many things we’ve invented have made our lives easier in some ways. But much is unnecessary and, we’ve learned, a lot comes with consequences we didn’t foresee — such as climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from our obsession with private automobiles and cheap energy. 

If this pace continues, we’ll leave a fascinating fossil record for any intelligent species that comes across our planet in the future. But that may be all. If we want to survive as a species, we must get a handle on population growth and consumerism. It’s something to consider this time of year, when so much time and energy are spent on acquiring new stuff, for ourselves and others.

Although population growth is starting to stabilize, curtailing growth requires greater access to effective, voluntary family planning and birth control, increased women’s rights including the right to make decisions about their bodies and reproduction, and reducing poverty.

We can all do our part to reduce consumption. We might find we’re happier when we do. At the end of his life, my father didn’t talk about accomplishments or possessions or wealth. He talked about connections to friends and family and shared experiences. Although he didn’t have a lot of material possessions, he felt wealthy and happy.

That’s what life is about. A new car or smartphone won’t make you happier in the long run. Nor will it fill gaps caused by loneliness or lack of connection to others.

That doesn’t mean we should live without material goods, but we should consider what we really need, and make sure we recycle items we can no longer use. Reduce, re-use and recycle! And reconsider what really makes us happy.

More important, during the holiday season, we should nurture our connections to friends and family, and give gifts that won’t add to the technosphere. We can share time, experiences and food. Those who find themselves alone might consider volunteering to help others during what can be a difficult time.

May you all have a joyous season, focused on the important things in life. And may the New Year bring humanity a greater understanding of what truly makes life worthwhile.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Electronic waste. Photo: Steve Janosik via Flickr CC licence 2.0.

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By Sarah Boon from Watershed Moments.

In the days following the U.S. election, two former Canadian ambassadors to the U.S. had some advice for Canadians worried about the future of Canada-U.S. relations.

“Calm down,” they said. “Change the channel and watch some hockey.”

This paternalistic statement not only played on the worn cultural stereotype that all Canadians like hockey, but it suggested that a ‘head in the sand,’ ‘everything will be fine’ mentality was a good way to deal with Trump.

In truth, Canadians have every reason to worry.

Let’s start with the ambassador’s original concern: Canada-U.S. relations. While they argued that nothing will change, that’s highly unlikely. Trump’s policies don’t really jive with Trudeau’s. For example, if Trump goes ahead with his anti-climate change stance, Canada’s government will have to rethink their climate strategy or risk the perception of falling behind economically relative to a country with minimal climate change regulations. Other potential issues include NAFTA, our defence alliances, the Paris climate agreement, and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Another consideration is whether Trump-style politics will cross the border. Well it’s clear that’s already happened. Kellie Leitch is one of the candidates running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). Shortly after Trump was declared the victor, Leitch sent out a flyer saying that Trump’s win was “an exciting message that needs to be delivered in Canada as well.”

Leitch was also a supporter of the ‘Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline’ that popped up during our last election as a cornerstone of CPC policy. Basically a way to tattle on your neighbours for being brown. In the current CPC leadership race, Leitch has proposed screening immigrants for anti-Canadian values. What might those be? Liking soccer instead of hockey? Frequenting Starbucks instead of Tim Horton’s?

More recently, Leitch has called for dismantling the CBC to “create more competition in the media market.”

Seriously? Does she not realize that the TV market has been concentrated into just a few outlets — as of 2013? Has she not followed the news about the concentration of newspaper outlets last year? Is she not aware that the CBC is one of the few remaining (sort of) independent media outlets?

In case you think her ideas are too right of mainstream, think again. Leitch leads the CPC leadership campaign in terms of total funds raised, and donations to her campaign increased following her proposal of screening for anti-Canadian values.

While the former Canadian ambassadors focused on Trump and Canada-U.S. relations, they should have also considered the impacts of a Trump presidency on Canadian society. Racist attacks have increased in Canada since the election, including swastikas painted on Muslim and Jewish religious centres, and Muslim individuals experiencing harassment.

Following the election, some media outlets are painting Canada as the tolerant and progressive cousin to an America that’s gone off the rails. 

Instead of keeping calm, watching hockey, and basking in the compliments, however, we need to confront the fact that we’re not as tolerant and progressive as we like to think we are.

Canada Isn't Immune to Trump-ism https://t.co/xi2kxyaZ9D #cdnpoli @SnowHydro

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) December 6, 2016

I’ve just finished reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian and Wab Kinew’s The Reason You Walk. Pair these with Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood (and many, many more books on the topic), and you’ll begin to understand one aspect of the race problem in Canada. For example, it took an election to get the government to pay attention to missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW), and the current government is stalling on adopting the UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into law.

We also seem to have a problem with women. In Alberta, Sandra Jansen, a candidate for leader of the Alberta Conservative Party, crossed the floor to the NDP, citing “bullying, extreme views, and intolerance” as her reasons for abandoning the Conservatives.

The leader of Alberta’s NDP, Rachel Notley, is no stranger to these types of attacks — she (and other women in her party) has been attacked repeatedly merely for being women in politics.

Then there’s our environmental record. Trudeau has approved an LNG plant in Squamish and another in Prince Rupert. The latter is particularly contentious given the potential impacts on salmon in the region. Trudeau has also approved permits for B.C.’s Site C hydropower development. All of these projects negatively impact indigenous communities and have serious environmental implications, but are being approved nonetheless.

It’s no surprise, then, that over 1300 early career Canadian scientists wrote a letter to Trudeau asking him to apply more transparency and rigour to the environmental assessment process. And when it comes to our progress on tackling climate change, the Dialogues on Sustainability group based out of McGill University notes that the approval of the LNG projects outlined above will make it difficult to reach our emissions targets.

Finally, there are those who think we have some wisdom to impart to Americans about how to deal with an anti-science government. While it’s true that we learned a lot about how to organize and fight for science during Harper’s War on Science, we remain far behind the U.S. in several crucial ways. First of all, the U.S. has the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has advocated publicly for science since 1969.

Here in Canada we have Evidence For Democracy, which is doing excellent work but has only been around since 2012. In the U.S., scientific societies publicly advocate for science funding, as they did last year when the House Science Committee threatened earth science funding. Here in Canada, scientific societies are noticeably absent from the debate about science and science-based policy.

The U.S. also has a President’s Science Advisor, who directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Here in Canada, Harper abolished the office of the Science Advisor after it had only been in place for four years. We’re still waiting for word from the Trudeau government as to whom they’ll appoint as the new Chief Science Officer.

The Americans have fought for science before, under the George W. Bush administration (particularly climate science). While the current fight won’t be the same — and could be a lot tougher — they’re prepared. Much more so than Canadian scientists are.

Given just these few examples of how we treat indigenous peoples, women, and the environment, and the state of science nationally, Canada can’t get too smug about being a better version of our neighbours to the south. Although we don’t have the same level of income inequality as we see in the U.S. (thanks Alexis Morgan for pointing this out), we can’t assume that Trump-style politics won’t gain a foothold here.

Instead of watching some hockey and burying our heads in the sand, we need to stay aware, and commit ourselves to ensuring that we not only fail to buy into the racist, misogynist, and anti-science politics from south of the border, but that we actually improve things here at home.

Sarah Boon was an environmental science professor for seven years before returning to writing. Her articles about academic culture, women in science, and the environment have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Outpost, BC Forest Professional, iPolitics, Canadian Science Publishing, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, Hakai Magazine, CBC’s The Nature of Things, Terrain.org, and Science Contours. Sarah is a co-founder and serves on the Board of Science Borealis, where she was formerly the Editorial Manager (2013-2015) and Earth & Environmental Science Editor (2013-2016). Find her at Watershed Moments or on Twitter: @SnowHydro.

Image: Kellie Leitch via kellieleitch.ca

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If you feel exhausted by Canada’s fevered debates about oil pipelines, liquefied natural gas terminals, renewable energy projects and mines, there just might be relief in sight.

Right now, the federal government is reviewing its environmental assessment (EA) process. Yes, it’s reviewing its reviews. And while that might sound kinda boring, it could actually revolutionize the way Canada makes decisions about energy projects.

“My highest hope is that Canada will take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity … and take a really visionary approach to environmental assessment,” said Anna Johnston, staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.

That could include implementing something called “strategic environmental assessment,” which creates a forum for the larger discussions about things like oil exports, LNG development or all mining in an area.

So instead of the current environmental assessment process, in which pipeline reviews have become proxy battles for issues such as climate change and cumulative effects, there’d actually be a higher-level review designed specifically to examine those big-picture questions.

This week, the panel that will help determine the future of environmental decision-making arrives in B.C. at the end of its cross-country tour.

We spoke to Johnston — who is part of the advisory council providing advice to the panel — about the review, how strategic environmental assessment could help move Canada’s energy conversation out of gridlock and how Canadians can get involved.

Q: Why does this review matter to everyday Canadians?

What we saw with CEAA 2012 [the changes to environmental assessment made under the Harper government] was that it was a real erosion of democracy and it put Canadians’ environment at risk.

We’re in the middle of this national conversation about what we’re going to do about climate change, for example, and we’re seeing protests across the country about projects that have gone through environmental assessment largely because people have felt like the environmental assessment was inadequate and there was a lack of transparency and accountability in the review process.

Good environmental assessment allows the public to have a meaningful say.

The public really cares about climate change and they really care about their ability to have a say. So it’s about trusting government and it’s about knowing that you’re able to have a say and influence decisions.

But then it’s also about, on this other level, how are we going to get to carbon neutral by 2050? Environmental assessment is the main tool for making decisions about proposals that affect the environment.

There’s a lot of concern that no matter how good the [climate] plans might be that we need to make sure they influence the project-level decisions.

Q: How should we best grapple with those big societal questions?

Right now we’re grappling with them at the project level. So when Kinder Morgan or Energy East proposes a pipeline to take tarsands bitumen to tidewater all of these concerns come up at that project level, where it takes an incredibly long time and the reviewing bodies and the proponent argue it’s outside of the scope of the assessment.

The solution is to create a forum for those policy-level discussions where you have essentially an environmental assessment of a government policy or a plan to have oil to tidewater, without tying that conversation to a particular project.

Right now we’re trying to have these really high-level national conversations about climate change, tarsands, at the same time as in a project-level assessment, getting down into the weeds of whether or not a pipeline should be sited here, maybe on a different route, what are the impacts on a particular species?

So it’s just putting way too much into one basket.

Best practices in environmental assessment say you have to begin with what’s called a strategic environmental assessment. And that’s where you have those policy discussions. Once you get that strategic assessment that has examined those bigger picture policy-level issues then those assessments can provide guidance at the project level.

So it might be that if we’d had a national conversation about oil to tidewater 10 years ago, we would have been able to decide as a country that that was not a viable idea, that it was going to bring us away from any reasonable goals to do our fair share on climate change and that we’d never approve a project. And that would have saved everybody a ton of money and a ton of time.

Q: How does a strategic environmental assessment actually work? In some senses, aren’t those policy-level decisions typically political decisions?

Yea, they are political decisions but we already have a requirement that government plans, policies and programs that require ministerial approval get a strategic environmental assessment. That requirement is set out in the cabinet directive.

The problem is that it’s not being followed. The auditor general and the commissioner of environment and sustainable development have found that time and time again that government departments and agencies are not doing strategic environmental assessments in the vast majority of cases.

So it’s already required, the government has already acknowledged the importance of it. It’s just that we need to put that requirement into legislation so that there’s more accountability.

There’s another kind of strategic environmental assessment where you are doing a regional scale environmental assessment, but you narrow it in some way so you might only be looking at all mining in an area, or all oil and gas in an area, and you come out with a regional-scale plan for how you want that kind of development to occur.

There’s pretty broad consensus among not just environmental groups, but also among industry groups, that doing those kinds of regional-scale assessments would really ease the burden on proponents, on the public, on indigenous peoples, on government, because it would mean first of all that we’re creating a vision for what we want development in the region to look like and how we want the environment in the future to look like and then set out these pathways for how to get there.

Then we’d have that strategic-level guidance for the project-level assessments. It would ease the burden at the project level

Q: Would this work for something like the development of LNG, for instance?

Yea, that’s the perfect example of where we should have done a strategic EA.

Right at the very first whisperings of LNG in B.C., we should have done a strategic EA of LNG in B.C., figured out whether we should have LNG at all — could we have LNG and achieve our climate obligations and goals?

Are there particular communities who would like to have LNG? Are there particular environments that could sustain an LNG facility? Are there particular environments that are a no-go zone? Many would say that Lelu Island should have been flagged right off the bat as a no-go zone.

If we had done that at the very outset, then when the project proponents come along, they’d have the guidance from a strategic EA that would have said: maybe we can have one or two in B.C. Here are the different temporal spacings they’d need to occur in and here are the locations, the pipeline routes and the LNG facility locations where it might work. And then once you get to the project-level EA you’re looking much more closely at the specifics.

Q: Do you feel hopeful about the outcome of the review?

Yes, I feel hopeful. I think the biggest challenge that this panel is facing right now is how to drill down to really concrete recommendations to the government. So they’re hearing a lot of things … at the 50,000-foot level … and the difficulty for them will be drilling down to a more practical implementation level.

Q: Will fixing the environmental review process really solve our problems? Or ultimately do we need that to come from the political level?

I think you need both. You need elected decision makers making good decisions for the people who voted them in. But you can’t rely exclusively on them so we need to have good processes. And that’s one of the main purposes of environmental assessment.

Q: What is the thinking about recommendations — should they be binding?

There are two schools of thought on that … the minister probably should retain some sort of discretion but I think that the legislation needs to set out much more explicitly the criteria by which she makes her decisions … right now, our decision-making process is the minister concludes: “Will this project result in significant adverse impacts and, if so, are they justified?”

And the justification decision is made by cabinet behind the dark curtains of cabinet, where they get to take into consideration anything, even beyond the environmental assessment, including political considerations.

That black box of the justification decision is what really undermines public confidence in the process.

So you can have ministers making decisions, but the legislation should really clearly set out the decision-making criteria, so that the public, so that indigenous people, so that proponents know exactly what this project needs to achieve in order to get approved.

Q: What are the biggest points of push back from industry?

One of the things I’ve been hearing from industry is that they think the provinces should be entrusted exclusively to do environmental assessments where they have jurisdiction or where there’s shared jurisdiction. I don’t share that view. I think you get better processes when you have both parties, or all parties, at the table, collaborating, drawing on the highest standards of process.

Q: Who should participate in these hearings?

Anyone who is concerned about the environment, who has experience with environmental assessment, anyone who was shut out of the Kinder Morgan [Trans Mountain] environmental assessment or had to fill out those long forms, and anybody who has concerns about how the public is engaged in decision-making.

There are two different types of public process: there are the hearings, which are a little bit more formal and you get one-on-one time with the panel for 15 minutes. And then there are the workshops, which more people are able to attend and it’s more of a dialogue on key questions on federal EA and I think that it’s really important that the panel get a diversity of experiences and a diversity of voices.

This isn’t just for experts for sure.

More Resources

• The panel is holding sessions in Kamloops, Fort St John, Prince Rupert, Vancouver and Nanaimo, finishing up on December 15. Find out how to get involved.
• The panel’s report will be released on Jan. 31, 2017, followed by the release of the Fisheries Act review in mid to late February and the review of the National Energy Board on March 31. *UPDATE: In December, the panel’s deadline was extended until March 31. There will also be a 30-day public comment period on the report.
• Read Johnston’s full participant’s guide for the environmental assessment review.

This interview has been condensed. 

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Implement an economy-wide carbon tax, attain “social licence,” score a federal approval for the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.That’s been the advertised logic of the Alberta NDP since the introduction of its Climate Leadership Plan a year ago. Nearly every mention of carbon pricing and associated policies — a 100 megatonne oilsands cap, coal-fired power phase-out and methane reduction target — has been accompanied by a commitment to “improve opportunities to get our traditional energy products to new markets.”  Such a sentiment was reinforced with Premier Rachel Notley’s retort on Oct. 3 to the announcement of federally mandated carbon pricing: “Alberta will not be supporting this proposal absent serious concurrent progress on energy infrastructure.” But for some, the Alberta NDP’s rhetoric represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social licence, with the government assuming that moderate emissions reduction policies allows it to ignore serious concerns about Indigenous rights and international climate commitments.

“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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Allowing wealthy corporations or powerful government agencies to launch baseless court cases against citizens who speak out against them is putting a chill on free expression in B.C. and there is a growing need for legislation against SLAPP suits, says the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

It is time to fight back against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), which aim to intimidate and silence critics by landing them with the often-unmanageable cost of defending themselves against an unwarranted lawsuit, said Micheal Vonn, BCCLA policy director, who believes SLAPP suits are undermining B.C.’s democratic health.

BCCLA is aiming to put pressure on the provincial government to bring in anti-SLAPP legislation, similar to changes introduced last year in Ontario, to help those threatened with legal action to defend themselves against those with powerful financial interests and deep pockets.

“We need a concerted movement for people to make their voices heard. We need to explain what SLAPP is, what it does, what devastation it can cause and how it skews and distorts the political process,” Vonn said.

“There is the ability to bring a suit that has zero merit and it could be weeks in court before it comes to the crux of the argument, and by that time, you may have spent your whole life savings,” said Vonn, emphasizing that corporations are careful to frame lawsuits in such a way that basic protections against “frivolous or vexatious” lawsuits do not click in until someone has already mortgaged their house or gone deep into debt.

“It is too late even if you win, because the process is the punishment,” she said.

Other jurisdictions, ranging from Quebec to Texas, have anti-SLAPP legislation and, in 2001, in the dying days of the NDP government, B.C. New Democrats briefly enacted anti-SLAPP legislation that was seen as ground-breaking.

But it was repealed five months later by the newly-elected BC Liberal government who argued it would lead to a “protest culture.”

Laws Needed to Protect Citizens from Industry & Government SLAPP Suits, Says @bccla https://t.co/4VS24Uc8MU #bcpoli #SiteC #KinderMorgan

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 7, 2016

Last year, the NDP again unsuccessfully tried to reintroduce anti-SLAPP legislation and the issue remains on the NDP to-do-list as the province heads into a spring election.

“People must be able to have their voices heard without the threat of expensive legal action,” said New Democrat justice spokesman Leonard Krog, when he introduced the motion.

“The rights of free speech and peaceful assembly are absolutely fundamental to any democratic society.”

A statement from the Justice Ministry, in answer to questions from DeSmog Canada, said the province has existing mechanisms for dealing with improper lawsuits or other abuses of legal process.

“These include court rules allowing for the early dismissal of frivolous claims, summary judgments, security for costs and awards of costs where a lawsuit is found to be without merit,” said the emailed statement.

“These mechanisms work to protect the public from abuses of legal process and ensure British Columbians can participate in public discussion without fear of retribution.”

Vonn disagrees.

“There has been a growing aggressiveness around SLAPPs. It has certainly affected environmental groups — but not just environmental groups — who have found themselves deeply hampered in public participation by having to deal with these suits,” Vonn said.

Recent cases that raised questions include:

• A $6.6-million lawsuit launched by Kinder Morgan against five members of the group Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion — the suit was later dropped with the company picking up court costs;
• Taseko Mines was accused of filing a SLAPP suit against opponents of its proposed tailing plan at the New Prosperity mine;
• BC Hydro is being accused of using SLAPP tactics in civil suits against six protest campers at the Site C dam site — something that BC Hydro denies, saying it supports protests that do not disrupt construction;
• Numerous legal letters were delivered to residents of Shawnigan Lake who oppose a contaminated landfill site operated by South Island Resource Management Ltd.

“These are people like your neighbour, who are speaking their minds about something that affects them deeply,” Vonn said.

BCCLA and others working towards anti-SLAPP legislation envisage rules that would ensure early access to the court system to weed out potential SLAPP suits.

“The ultimate goal here is to basically level the playing field to make sure parties who are the targets of these sorts of suits have access to the courts early and they can present to the court to say why they think it’s a SLAPP suit and what remedy they are seeking,” said Chris Tollefson, Hakai Chair in Environmental Law and Sustainability at the University of Victoria and co-founder of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation.

With a fast-track procedure it would then be up to the court to give the case special scrutiny and decide whether there should be an early dismissal, he said.

“I think there’s a very significant issue of democracy in play here if we think of democracy as being a system where people are not only protected, but encouraged to express themselves even in ways that might be controversial, in ways that challenge government or private companies. If that is something that we are serious about, we need to take steps to protect that wherever there’s a threat,” Tollefson said.

Enacting legislation should be an issue that crosses party lines, he said.

“This should not be party political. There should be no question really that this is something that one needs to do regardless of what party you support,” Tollefson said.

Image: B.C. legislature. Photo: Jason Baker via Flickr CC by 2.0.

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The federal government has appointed the founding chair of a vocal B.C.-based industry advocacy group to a four-member panel tasked with reviewing Canada’s environmental assessment process.*

The panel is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s attempt to make good on his campaign promise to restore credibility to environmental reviews of major energy projects — but the appointment calls into question the credibility of the panel.

The appointee, Doug Horswill, is the founding chair of Resource Works, an industry advocacy group with close ties to the BC Liberals that aggressively advocates for the interests of extractive industries in B.C.

Resource Works Connection Presents Credibility Risk

Resource Works claims to promote balanced conversations about B.C.’s resource development, but the group takes a consistently pro-industry position on, well, basically everything: mining, LNG development, new pipelines, climate legislation, carbon taxes, raw log exports, environmental opposition, the Site C dam, oil tankers and the National Energy Board.

The overarching message of Resource Works is that continued extraction of natural resources is essential to B.C.’s prosperity and anything that stands in the way of extraction — local opposition, regulations, taxes — is a threat to that prosperity.

It’s a message they repeat over and over and over.

Resource Works has already jumped on Horswill’s appointment in an attempt to bolster the organization’s credibility. But while Horswill’s new position might make Resource Works look good, should a representative from a voraciously pro-extraction organization really sit on a panel created to re-design Canada’s environmental assessment process?

In all fairness, Horswill is the sole industry-aligned representative on the panel, which also includes Johanne Gélinas, a former Canadian environment commissioner, Rod Northey, an environmental lawyer and Renée Pelletier, an aboriginal rights lawyer.

The panel absolutely should have industry representation, but taking a close look at Resource Works, we’re not convinced the feds chose the right guy.

Resource Works, Industry and BC Liberal Connections

A closer look at Resource Works raises plenty of questions about the organization’s origins, political connections and pro-industry arguments.

Resource Works’ executive director Stewart Muir, who refers to B.C.’s environmental movement as the “anti-everything movement” with “folk-singing, the props and the sloganeering,” is closely connected to the BC Liberals through his former marriage to Athana Mentzelopoulos, who was a bridesmaid at Premier Christy Clark’s wedding, in addition to once serving as deputy minister of jobs, tourism and skills training.

At the time of Resource Works’ launch, Menzelopoulos was the head of Clark’s $26-million Government Communications and Public Engagement department for which the rebranding and promotion of LNG was a priority.

Just before launching Resource Works, Muir worked with the Wuzuku Advisory Group, a PR and lobbying firm aligned with the BC Liberal party. At Wazuku, Muir partnered with Steve Kukucha, Clark’s airplane and bus campaign coordinator during the last provincial election.

Muir also served as the Deputy Managing Editor for the Vancouver Sun for more than 13 years — a time that overlapped with Fazil Mihlar, the long-time editorial page editor who now holds of the post of — wait for it — deputy minister of climate leadership in the Clark government.

Horswill is no stranger to promoting industry interests either.

Before becoming senior VP of Teck Resources, one of B.C.’s largest mining firms, he served as B.C.’s deputy minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources under, you guessed it, the BC Liberals. Teck Resources donated $144,600 to the BC Liberals in 2014 alone. Since 2005, Teck has donated $2.3 million to the party.

Resource Works Big-Time LNG Pusher

The close connections to the BC Liberal party, Clark and corporate interests may explain why Resource Works operates much like a PR firm for the government, especially when it comes to contentious issues like climate action, the development of Clark’s LNG empire and mining in B.C.

For example, Resource Works — contrary to Clark’s own disenfranchised Climate Leadership Team — praised B.C.’s climate action plan, quietly released on a Friday afternoon in August.

While members of the province’s hand-picked team of experts excoriated Clark for undoing much of B.C.’s climate success and failing to implement the panel’s recommendations for climate leadership, Resource Works praised the premier for her “climate leadership.”

Muir, in a column published in the Vancouver Sun, said “B.C. still holds bragging rights on climate” because residents remain some of Canada’s lowest polluting citizens.

What Muir doesn’t acknowledge is that Clark’s pursuit of LNG and her freeze on the carbon tax mean what bragging rights B.C. once held are dramatically slipping away.

When it comes to LNG, Resource Works has been industry’s (and government’s) most unwavering supporter.

The group went as far as to publish a full pro-LNG pamphlet in 2015 called the Citizens’ Guide to LNG that repeats a number of industry talking points, including the notion that natural gas is a clean energy climate solution, a “bridge-fuel” to other low-carbon energy resources and that there is a “moral imperative” to provide Asian countries with natural gas as a solution to coal.

Funnily enough, there’s no mention of fracking-related concerns, such as high water usage, drinking water contamination, methane emissions, wastewater injection induced earthquakes or landslides.

Resource Works’ sponsorship of the LNG industry doesn’t end there. Since its launch, Resource Works has hosted an online petition to “support LNG in B.C.” because the industry will theoretically create 100,000 jobs — a talking point straight out of Clark’s playbook. (The petition now has just over 650 signatures, which, at least, is more jobs than the LNG industry in B.C.)

Resource Works’ promotion of mining follows a similar trajectory although it goes the extra mile to remind renewable energy advocates that mineral extraction is the “real backbone of green technology.”

But why stop there?

Resource Works doesn’t limit itself to just industry promotion: the group also raises questions about the feasibility and practicality of recognizing indigenous rights and mocks the notion of social licence and environmental opposition.

Restoring Faith in Canada’s Environmental and Regulatory Process

Public trust in the National Energy Board is at an all-time low, with the National Energy Board cancelling its Energy East pipeline hearings, in part, to deal with revelations that two panel members had met with TransCanada lobbyist and former Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

Those revelations are a reminder of the extraordinary power industry wields in the Canadian political process. It’s that power, in part, that has led to an environmental assessment process that doesn’t have public confidence.

Meantime, public scrutiny of the federal government — for issuing permits for construction on the Site C dam and failing to restart the Trans Mountain and Energy East pipeline reviews under new rules — is at an all-time high.

Restoring trust and credibility is a tall order for the federal government — and it will be made all the more difficult with a creator of Resource Works on the panel tasked with doing just that.

As Albert Einstein said, we can’t solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them.

*This article originally stated that Doug Horswill is the current chair of Resource Works, as indicated on Resource Works’ website until after his appointment to the federal panel. After publication, Resource Works informed DeSmog Canada that Horswill resigned from his position with Resource Works before starting his role with the federal review panel. However, as of September 9, 2016 Horswill is still listed as a director on the Resource Works Society documents filed with B.C. Registry Services (excerpt below). Updates to this article made September 8, 2016 07:20:00PST and September 9, 2016 11:35:00PST.

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.

It’s been shocking to watch news of the Brexit vote in Britain, Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. and the ongoing threats and violence against ethnic minorities in many parts of the world. I’m not a political or social scientist, but my training as a biologist gives me some insight.

When I began my career as a scientist, geneticists were starting to analyze the molecular properties of single genes within a species. When we started looking at highly evolved species such as fruit flies, we thought we would find that their genes had been honed through selection over time, so they would be relatively homogeneous within single species. Examining one kind of protein controlled by a specific gene, we expected to find them all pretty much the same. Instead, we learned there was a great deal of heterogeneity, or diversity. A gene specifying a protein could exist in a number of different states.

This is now called “genetic polymorphism” and is considered to be the very measure of a species’ health. Inbreeding or reduction of a species to a small number reduces genetic polymorphism and exposes harmful genes, thereby rendering the species more susceptible to sudden change. In other words, genetic polymorphism confers resilience by providing greater possibilities as conditions shift.

Within ecosystems, species diversity provides greater flexibility to adjust to disturbances. Around the planet, ecosystem diversity has enabled life to flourish under different conditions. Like nested Russian dolls, life seems to have been built on diversity within diversity of genes, species and ecosystems.

Over time, conditions on the planet have not remained static. In response to change, life has had to adapt or disappear. The sun is 30 per cent warmer today than it was when life arose four billion years ago. The atmosphere changed from oxygen-free to oxygen-rich after plants evolved. Continents have moved, collided and pulled apart. Oceans have filled and emptied. Mountains have risen up and worn down. Life spread from the oceans to land and into the air. Ice ages have punctuated warm periods. And all the while, life fluctuated and flourished because of the resilience conferred by diversity.

Human beings have added another level of diversity: culture. Cultural diversity has enabled our species to survive and flourish in regions as different as deserts and Arctic tundra, wetlands and steaming tropics, prairies and mountains.

Monoculture — the spreading of a single gene, species, ecosystem or idea — runs counter to the biological principle that diversity confers resilience. It creates vulnerability to change, especially sudden change. As a biologist, I believe we should encourage, spread, maintain and celebrate diversity. The drive to restrict immigration of people with different beliefs and the hostility to people of different ethnic, religious or cultural background are extremely dangerous.

In Canada, the apparently well-meant exhortation for Indigenous people to abandon their remote communities reflects the failure to see the enormous value offered by a sense of connection to place and accumulated cultural knowledge. As newcomers to these lands over the past five centuries, many of us lack the deep ties to place that are critical in a time of vast ecological change and degradation.

The United States is built on colonization and destruction of the diverse cultures that existed on this continent before European contact. That nation has evolved on the assumption that it’s a “melting pot,” where newcomers shed their identity of origin and blend with the dominant culture as Americans.

Similarly, Canada developed with a policy of growth while maintaining immigration dominated by a British majority. Under Pierre Trudeau’s government, Canada deliberately embraced the notion of the “cultural mosaic,” valuing diversity within society. I believe this is an exciting experiment in nation-building based on fundamental scientific truths. The challenge is to ensure that we can celebrate our diversity while recognizing our place as a country without elevating some groups above others.

From the microscopic level of genes to large-scale biological systems, and from natural ecosystems to human communities, diversity brings strength and resilience in the face of ever-changing conditions. In today’s world, that’s more important than ever. We must resist attempts to reduce diversity in all its forms.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: David Suzuki by Kris Krug via Flickr

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