It seems unlikely that poor Jacques Gourde, the hapless backbencher from Quebec, would have the heft to cripple Canada’s economy. But if you follow the chain of logic from the House of Commons, to Washington, D.C., and back again, with a detour through North American climate politics, that is where you end up. If Western Canadian crude trades at a discount to the world price for a generation to come, it’s all Gourde’s fault. He and others like him.
But, first things first: Obama. It is impossible not to admire the simple elegance of the American president’s climate speech earlier this week. As my colleagues Andrew Coyne and John Ivison have noted, it contained a couple of transport-truck-sized holes; no price on carbon, and no verdict on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. These are debates that bitterly divide most of those who engage in them, and on which politicians routinely have broken their teeth. Yet Obama won praise from all sides. Neat trick.
De facto, he furthered the fiction that carbon emissions can be decisively reduced at no visible cost to consumers. That is the essence of any plan that does not set a price on carbon. Why a fiction? According to the 2012 edition of Environment Canada’s Emissions Trends, transportation – including passenger and freight – accounted for a quarter of Canada’s GHGs (greenhouse gas emissions) in 2010, or 166 megatonnes. Emissions from power generation and buildings (including heating) accounted for another 178 megatonnes (99 and 79, respectively).
Individual needs and choices, in other words, still produce the lion’s share of emissions – not dastardly industry, though it plays a role. The knowledge that driving bigger cars produces more GHGs has not interrupted Canadians’ love affair with the SUV, for example, or pushed solo commuters off the roads. In fact, according to Statistics Canada’s 2011 census, solo commuting is on the increase.
On Keystone, Obama was exquisitely lawyerly, saying the pipeline will not be built, unless it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was on that like a trout on a fly. “We agree with President Obama’s State Department Report in 2013 which found that ‘approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oilsands or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast Area.”
The Environmental Protection Agency disputes that conclusion, but the fact remains: Rising demand for energy worldwide makes it inevitable that, Keystone or no Keystone, Alberta’s 168.7-billion-barrel reserve will be extracted, refined and consumed. A calculation of net emissions should therefore be limited to those stemming from construction. It will be difficult to make a case for rejection in that.
My point: When Harper ministers claim their climate strategies are in lockstep with those of the United States, they’re not lying. Both countries are signatories to the 2009 Copenhagen Agreement, which commits them to reducing GHG emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels, by 2020. Both are taking a regulatory approach, thus far. Neither is being honest with voters about the price that must be paid, via higher cost of living, if any kind of dent is to be made in GHG production.
Yet Obama is lauded by Suzuki Nation as a hero. Whereas Harper, Oliver & Co. are derided as knuckle-draggers. How can this be?
This is where we return to our old friend, MP Gourde. Anyone who regularly watches question period will know him well. He’s among the handful of Tory backbenchers who stood routinely in the House, beginning last fall, to decry the NDP’s plan to end civilization with a “$21.5-billion carbon tax.” In fact, there is no such plan. In its 2011 platform the NDP proposed cap-and-trade, as the Conservatives themselves proposed in 2008.
Reasonable people can debate whether it’s fair to describe cap and trade as a tax. But there is no contesting that this talking point mightily reinforced the view that the Harper government deems climate change to be a joke perpetrated on hard-working Tim Hortons shoppers by leftie eggheads. That’s steak for the Tory base. Only, perception drives U.S. politics, too. Obama cannot be seen by his own base, which is Green, to be capitulating to the flat-earth society. There are the inter-webs, nowadays. The Americans can see us even when we play peek-a-boo.
If Gourde and his colleagues had shut their traps about the NDP’s “job-killing carbon tax,” and if Oliver had refrained from painting environmentalists as dangerous radicals, the U.S. government would now have somewhat better cover to approve Keystone. This became amply obvious last November, after Obama won re-election. But chess grandmaster Harper kept at it anyway, even as his foot soldiers were mocked near and far as meat puppets.
Was it all Nigel Wright’s fault? Whatever. This was no kind of chess, and no kind of mastery. It is the price, truly, of stupid politics.
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