Canada and the World

Even 20 months ago, no one knew what 350 meant, nor why it mattered. That's less than 2 years back. Then 10,000 year old ice sheets disappeared in the Arctic, Stephen Harper got a north of 60 hard-on, the IPCC released a report based on data that was already out of date (some of it a decade out of date), and a book detailing how James Hansen's work was censored came out. We shook our collective head, and some of us began to realize that we had entered what James Kunstler has called The Long Emergency.
It didn't take long to realize that 350 was the upper limit of atmospheric CO2 that could be considered "safe" (meaning that we might be able to keep global warming to 2°C and we might be able to live with the consequences of that rise), and here we are today looking at 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, no significant efforts being made to reduce carbon emissions, and a future that's looking at a minimum of 4°C warming and 6 metres of sea level rise--meanwhile emissions continue to increase and atmospheric CO2 rises at about 2ppm/year.
Here in Canada, we've got a Conservative government that is lead by a Prime Minister who still yet to convince anyone that he actually believes global warming may be a problem. Stephen "American Corporate Lackey" Harper is busy fiddling while the globe--including the nation of which he is nominally a member--burns. All our divorced-from-reality leader can see is the NorthWest Passage opening up and all that lovely ocean open to commercial exploitation.
Last week, the British Meteorological Office released a map of what we can expect to happen when we hit 4°C. The equatorial countries will get hotter, true, but the further you get from the equator, the more extreme the changes. But even now, Environment Minister Jim Prentice wants special treatment for Canada, allowing us--well, really just Alberta and the oil sands--to continue increasing our GHG emissions, while insisting that developing nations like China and India agree to hard caps that we ourselves will not accept. And the Canadian Government still refuses to release specifics of its plan to reduce our GHG emissions by 20% from our 2006 levels--which is light-years from our commitment under Kyoto.
Today comes the release of a new report. Quite unlike anything released in Canada before, it was financed by the Toronto Dominion Bank, produced by the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation, with economic modeling by the well-respected economic consultants, M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc. As John Ibbitson writes in the Globe and Mail; "A major bank has paid two environmental organizations to produce a groundbreaking report that, for the first time, calculates the costs of both the Harper government's modest plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the much more ambitious targets set by the environmental community, nationally and regionally."
The report offers a regional breakdown of economic impacts based on both the Harper government's vague commitment to 20% by 2020 (from 2006 levels) and  the impact from the deeper and harder cuts that environmentalists are calling for and that would put Canada in line with our international obligations. And guess what? Neither scenario would kill us!
According to the report,"The Conservative government's goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 can be achieved, but only by limiting growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan." Alberta's growth would be 8.5% less in 2020 than it would be under a BAU (Business As Usual) approach, the report concludes. Under the  same scenario, Saskatchewan would lose 2.8% of its projected growth. Central Canada, on the other hand, might well see some additional growth added to its projection. To quote Shawn McCarthy's article in the G&M; "Despite the steep costs involved in meeting targets, the analysis concludes the Canadian economy would continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace, and that investment in renewable energy and efficiency measures would result in an overall increase in employment compared to a “business-as-usual” scenario.
And even with the significant reduction in Alberta's potential growth and employment prospects, the province would still lead the country economically over the next 10 years."
So our economy would continue to grow AND there would probably be an increase in employment as well. And the cost? A reduction in projected growth an Alberta and Saskatchewan, and a significant out-migration from both provinces back to central Canada.
To further quote Shawn McCarthy's article: "TD's chief economist, Don Drummond, said the bank has not endorsed any targets, though it has supported a policy of a national emissions cap. He said the bank's interest was to shed light on an area where there has been little informed debate: the likely cost of imposing regulations."
I'm actually not seeing any real downside here. The Globe and Mail editorial board does though. In today's editorial, we read: "[T]he study acknowledges that what is proposed is no less than an economic upheaval: “There is a migration of capital and labour out of carbon and trade exposed sectors (e.g., fossil fuels) to sectors that are less carbon and trade exposed (e.g., manufacturing, services and renewable electricity).”
Canada cannot take its national unity for granted and must not, in the service of international obligations, allow itself to be immolated by a government policy of such wrenching dislocation." And the editorial concludes: "[T]he target [of carbon dioxide emission reduction] may be unreachable without unacceptable damage to Canada's economy and national unity. In which case, it is time for new targets, and new policies."
I can't help but think that no-one raised much of a stink about the "wrenching dislocation" caused by the development of the oil sands on the communities of Atlantic Canada. And even Jeffrey Simpson concludes that the Harper government's targets are just so much smoke being blown up our collective asses.
And so we have serious economic modelling of the potential and problems with trying to meet our international obligations regarding global warming and CO2 emissions. And we can now point to the report and say, "Tough, yes. But it won't kill us, and will probably make us stronger." And what of the complaints sure to come from the political and ruling classes of Alberta and Saskatchewan? Well, both provinces have had a great decade, with both provinces posting significant surpluses in their budgets, and neither has done a damn thing to prepare for the inevitable crash (particularly Alberta under Ralph Klein). For Alberta, that's two oil-based booms they've pissed away under Conservative governments. So honestly, I have no great sympathy for the Alberta government. And regardless of any future whining, we can look at the economic model contained in the M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc. report, and read again the conclusion that "even with the significant reduction in Alberta's potential growth and employment prospects, the province would still lead the country economically over the next 10 years." And the planet (well, the human part of it) would thank us for facing up to our responsibilities.

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Copenhagen, Canada, and the End of the World

The Globe and Mail is reporting on an interview with Environment Minister Jim Prentice, saying that the chance of an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen is pretty much non-existent.
The world wants a climate change agreement in Copenhagen. The US is even onside, with President Obama actually understanding both the science and political realities of global warming. The EU wants an agreement, with Germany busy poaching Canadian alternative energy companies and the Brits launching the 10-10 campaign. China is even pursuing lower carbon emissions. So what's the problem?
The problem is the Canadian government. Canada has become the biggest roadblock to an international agreement to lower carbon emissions. According the the G&M article (23 October 2009, p A1 Ottawa dashes hope for treaty in Copenhagen) Canada is continuing to "insist that it should have a less aggressive target for emission reductions[...] because of its faster-growing population and energy-intensive industrial structure". The Harper government is also going to insist that any cap on industrial emissions will not be applied uniformly across the country, but will allow the Alberta oil sands to continue expanding. To quote the Environment Minister; "The Canadian approach has to reflect the diversity of the country and the sheer size of the country, and the very different economic characteristics and industrial structure across the country." The Harper government has also demanded that emerging economies (like China and India) agree to binding caps on carbon emissions, and has refused to release its own plan for carbon reduction until there is clarity on what the Americans are planning to do.
The New Democratic Party has a bill currently in committee that would commit Canada to an emission reduction of 25% from 1990 levels by 2020--a target that would meet our commitment under Kyoto and would be consistent with the EU's approach in the next round of negotiations. Ottawa has proposed a reduction of 20% from 2006 levels of emissions by 2020--our obligation under Kyoto was a cut of 6% from 1990 levels by 2012. The plan proposed by the Harper government would result in a 3% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. Chief climate negotiator Michael Martin said to the committee considering the NDP bill that the Harper government's targets are "comparable" because they will be just as costly to achieve as the more aggressive NDP targets.
What becomes clear, as we follow the progress towards significant carbon emission reductions, is that the Harper government has no intention of ever reducing carbon emissions. Harper simply does not consider carbon emissions to be a problem (how can I say that? By simply looking at his record).
And our Prime Minister is dragging a lot of sceptics along with him. World-wide, temperatures maxed out in 1998, leading deniers to claim that temperatures have levelled off or are even declining. But new research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The research, "is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind's paper suggests." (The Guardian Online).

The British Meteorological Office released a new map of the world (below) showing the current thinking on what the world will look like with a 4°C rise in the average global temperature. The 4°C rise mostly happens at the equator--the further you move away from the equator, the greater the changes. Here on Vancouver Island, we may only see an average 5°C rise, but up in Hudson's Bay, its looking more like 16°C. What this doesn't indicate is just how this will affect global weather patterns. If it was just going to get warmer, that wouldn't be the end of the world.But all that extra energy is going to change things in ways we can't imagine yet, much less model.

The Met Office says that climate researchers have discovered that:

• levels of CO2 have risen 40% since the Industrial Revolution
• Global sea levels have risen 10cm in the last 50 years [and that's a hell of a lot of water]
• temperatures in the Arctic have risen at twice the global average [which suits our Prime Minister just fine]
• snow cover in the northern hemisphere has dropped 5% in the last 2 decades

And researchers figure that extreme temperatures will affect eastern North America, with Toronto and Ottawa seeing the temperatures of their hottest days jumping by up to 10°C to 12°C. Anyone having suffered through a GTA summer will be white with fear about now....

Notes From a Constitutional Crisis Zone

In our system of parliamentary democracy, we do not elect a government; we elect a parliament. The government is formed when a group of members of the parliament can demonstrate that they have the support of the majority of the members to carry on a legislative agenda: to govern.
When the government no longer has the support of the parliament, the government falls and is replaced. The creation of a coalition of opposition parties to defeat and replace a sitting government is not illegitimate; it's how our system is meant to operate.
What it is, of course, is highly unusual in Canadian politics. Nothing like this has been done in the memory of most living Canadians. That doesn't make it illegal.
Canadians did not give Harper's Conservatives a mandate to run the country single-handedly. Canadians may be willing to let Harper sit in the driver's seat for a while, but after two elections they sure don't seem willing to let him have the keys on his own. Harper has spent the last three years forming coalitions; in a minority situation, the survival of his government has depended on it. Not one piece of his legislation could have passed the house without at least some opposition members voting along with the government. Harper may not have formed a formal coalition as the opposition has now done, but every piece of government business he presented to the House necessitated the forming of an ad hoc coalition with one of more opposition parties.
Harper's mistake is the age-old mistake of hubris. With Dion a lame-duck leader of the weakened Liberals, Harper believed he could push through with his damaging agenda, using a crisis to push through ideologically-driven economic measures.
Harper's economic statement originally proposed a three-year ban on the right of civil servants to strike, limits on the ability of women to sue for pay equity and eliminated subsidies for political parties. How does denying pay equity for women help stave off the effects of the worldwide economic meltdown? It doesn't, of course. It's just classic neo-conservative tactics -- use every chance to propel your ideological agenda. It's not about the economy, stupid; it's about using the economy to score every little political point you can.
Harper follows every page of the neo-con text book. He says one thing, but does another. Fixed election dates, anyone? He spent two years (and millions of dollars) on an ad campaign deriding Stephan Dion with personal attacks before the election was even called, despite his previous campaign promises on returning civility to politics. He accuses Dion of sharing power with seperatists, yet he and his party suck up to them in Quebec every chance they get. They have to, because that's the only group where he will get any support from in Quebec. His party has a long history of courting with the seperatists; it was Brian Mulroney's inability to control the seperatists MP in his Tory ranks that resulted in the formation of the Bloc.
In his acceptance speech this year, he said we work with the other parties in the House, yet his first economic announcement includes the cutting of party subsidies. How is this going to return civility to the House? Or more importantly, how does this help stimulate the economy when opposition parties have to lay-off low-level party workers during a recession? This is just petty nastiness.
And he lies, of course. He lies when he says that the coalition agreement was not signed in front of Canadian flags because of the presence of the separatist party (a lie - there were two Canadian flags). He lies when says he would never enter deals to govern the country with separatists. He signed a deal with the BQ to do just that in 2004, and his predecessor Stockwell Day arranged one with the BQ in 2000.
When confronted with criticism, he and his lackeys do not confront the issues, instead they issue personalize attacks on the messenger. How many Harper ads did you hear during the last campaign attacked Dion the person, yet how few did you hear actually debating the merits of Dion's proposals and presenting alternatives?
The crisis here is one of a reckless leader over-reaching for his dubious goals. It is a crisis of agenda, not process. You may argue that the Liberal/NDP coalition (with Bloc support) is fraught with dangers, and it is. They have matches and there's a lot of gasoline pooled about. But even that does not make their proposed actions any less legitimate.
And I'll take that over a leader who gives every indication of his intention to burn down the progressive house that we Canadians have spent 141 years building.

Percentage of Canadians who did not vote for Harper's Conservatives in the 2008 election: 62.4%

I'm so embarrassed....

Listening/reading/viewing the commentary on current developments in parliament, I am left banging my head against the wall at the apparent total ignorance of the vast majority of Canadians about how a parliamentary system works. Every time I hear/read/see someone calling the coming change of government/Prime Minister a "coup" or "undemocratic" or whatever, I can't help but thinking it an indictment not of the opposition parties, but of Social Studies teachers everywhere who failed to teach their students the fundamentals of how democracy works in this country.

I'm fully sympathetic to Conservative supporters who say, "darn, I never saw that coming!", just as they were understanding that I was disappointed that the Conservatives managed to hang on to another minority government (for a while anyway). We all have to put up with it when the majority vote against what we think is the obvious best policy. But to characterize current developments as undemocratic, or as a 'coup' or 'treason' is just, well, embarrassing.

The majority of us did not vote for Harper. He did NOT get the mandate from the people for a majority government that he had hoped for. Even then, he got his chance to form a minority government, but any minority government has to win over at least a few of the opposition MPs/parties each time to survive. Harper's mistaken belief that he could introduce any legislation he liked and that there was nothing anyone could do about it (because the other parties could not dare force another election) strongly suggests both an undemocratic stance (i.e., not valuing the fundamental Canadian value of compromise) and a dangerously arrogant/naive understanding of Canadian parliamentary procedure. But parliament is working exactly as intended. The majority of MPs, representing the majority of Canadians, are ousting a Prime Minister and cabinet that no longer hold the confidence of the House. This is how the system works, and has worked stretching back to before there was a Canada to British parliamentary precedents. How could anyone in this country graduate high school and not understand this?

It's embarrassing.

They don't have to like the way things have played out, but they should at least be able to understand it.

January I get a new crop of Social Studies student teachers -- and they had better, by god, be ready to demonstrate that they take Social Studies seriously, not just a way to kill an hour between English and Mathematics. They had better be prepared to stand up and say, "No, you can't cancel Social Studies this week for school assembly because Social Studies is important. Can we cancel Phys Ed instead?" Or words to that effect. Because right now, it doesn't look like the previous crops have been doing their job.

Quote of the Day

On Don Newman's CBC Newsworld show today, someone said:

In early October Harper said it would be a good time to buy into the market and if you'd listened to him you would all be bankrupt today.

And We Spent $300,000,000 For What Exactly....?

2008 Voter Turnout:
59.1% of registered electors (or about 41% of all Canadians)
- one of the lowest in recent history

Total Conservative vote percentage:
2006 - 36.3%
2008 - 37.6%
- A 1.3% increase after governing for 2 years
- From 127 to 143 seats (gained 16 seats)

Percentage of Canadians who did not vote for Harper's Conservatives: 62.4%

Times Stephen Harper has attempted to get a majority and failed:
Three times (in 2004, 2006, and 2008)


Overall Seat Count 2008:
Conservatives: 143
Opposition: 163

Liberal vote percentage:
2006 - 30.2%
2008 - 26.2%
From 95 to 76 seats

NDP vote percentage:
2006 - 17.5%
2008 - 18.2%
From 30 to 37 seats

Bloc Québécois
2006 - 10.5% (Canada-wide)
2008 - 10% (Canada-wide)
From 48 to 50 seats

Green vote percentage:
2006 - 4.5%
2008 - 6.8%
No seats

Under a Proportional Representation system, the seat totals would have been:
Conservatives: 116
Liberal: 81
NDP: 56
BQ: 31
Green: 24
When a party like the BQ gets 10% of the vote and 16% of the seats, while the Greens get 7% of the vote and no seats, that clearly shows the flaws of the current first-past-the-post system.

All five party leaders have some thinking to do this morning. While many of them had a bright side to look at, none of them really got anything they wanted.
The Green's Elizabeth May got her wish: she was in the debate. The Greens increased their popular vote more than any other party. And were still nowhere near electing anyone. The Greens need a leader who will run for Prime Minister, not offer up advice on strategic voting.
Speaking of running for Prime Minster, that's what Jack Layton of the NDP did. He took dead aim at Harper's job. And finished fourth. Yes, the NDP did gain some seats, but how many more fight does Jack have in him?
Then there's Gilles Duceppe, The Man Who Would Not Be King. He's got to feel good. His party gained a couple of seats, and clearly his plea to Quebeckers to stop a Harper majority worked. It's too bad for him that all those voters who listened to him chose to block Harper by voting Liberal. How many more elections does Duceppe have in him? Can the Bloc survives if he leaves, or has it become irrelevant and does it survive only by the force of Duceppe's personality?
The only bright side to the Liberal's performance is that they did make some gains in Quebec, but otherwise it was a dismal show. Dion is toast. The knives are out. The Liberals need to make some big changes soon, or they will disappear has a force in Canadian politics. Who will be the next leader? I'm thinking Ignatieff. But the leader after him will have a familiar name: Trudeau.
Harper and the Conservatives had a reasonable night. But this is Harper's third time at the plate and he couldn't close the deal with a majority. And if he couldn't do it this time, with the center/left vote split three ways, an ineffective opposition leader, and an economist's perfect issue dropped into his lap in mid-campaign, can he ever? The knives may not be out yet for Harper, but I'm sure some Tories are going through the knife drawer.

Strong Leadership My Ass

Harper, the STRONG leader (at least according his ads), is too scared to debate the Green Party's Elisabeth May.
Click here to tell him how you feel about that.
And tell him whatever else is bugging you, too.

Sauce for the Goose

While commenting on the current conflict between Russia and Georgia, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said:
"I am deeply concerned by the notion . . . that Russia has a say or some control over a country outside of its border. This is a very worrisome development. I hope Russia will reconsider its actions."
The American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said, "This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it."
The irony should be apparent to all.
But it won't be.

Harper Pulls a Bush

Prime Minister Harper continues to use plays from "President" Bush's neocon handbook, using "hardball partisan politics."
Under fire from opposition MPs over erroneous statements by Defence Minister Gorodn O'Connor to the House of Commons concerning Afghan detainees, Harper responded by saying, "I can understand the passion that the leader of the Opposition and members of his party feel for Taliban prisoners. I just wish occasionally they would show the same passion for Canadian soldiers."
Needless to say, all the Opposition party leaders are outraged.
Harper is using an old Bush tactic, attacking the and patriotism and character of his criticizers instead of dealing with the criticism, in this case O'Connor's acknowledged misleading of the House of Commons two weeks ago by saying that the Red Cross would keep Canada informed about the condition of prisoners handed over to Afghan officials by Canadian soldiers. Earl er this week, O'Conner apologized to the House, admitting that the Red Cross is under no such obligation.
Harper would rather ignore the fact that a senior member of his cabinet mislead the House, and would rather insult the people who caught him at it.
That's misplaced priorities, and that's classic Bush.