Canada losing friends over climate change

Stephen Harper is running out of places to hide on the environment.

The prime minister tucked himself behind the United States for seven years, promising to move in lockstep with Canada’s powerful neighbour and biggest trading partner on climate change. But President Barack Obama has leapt out in front him, determined to use his second term to leave a positive legacy on climate change.

He sheltered in China’s dirty shadow, claiming it was unfair to ask Canada to cut its fossil fuel emissions while the world’s economic powerhouse was spewing greenhouses gases into the atmosphere with abandon. But President Xi Jinping stripped him of that excuse last week, pledging to halt the growth of his country’s emissions by 2030.

He held up Alberta — “a stable, reliable energy producer in a volatile, unpredictable world” — as his shield. But even its premier, Jim Prentice, is distancing himself from Harper’s head-in-the-tarsands approach. He vowed in a speech last weekend to make Alberta “an environmental leader.”

Harper still has a few allies. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott shares his view that it would be economic folly on impose “a job-killing carbon tax” on energy producers. He can make common cause with the remaining climate change holdouts: Libya, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Egypt.

But he has become increasingly isolated and Canada’s relations with its allies and trading partners are showing the strain. French President François Hollande made a vain plea to Harper to act on climate change during his visit to Ottawa last month. The 120 heads of state who attended September’s United Nations Climate Summit in New York noted his absence. His aggressive lobbying for the Keystone XL pipeline alienated Obama.

On his latest foreign trip, the prime minister paid lip service to the environment. When the U.S. and China announced their game-changing deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions, he grudgingly welcomed the breakthrough. “For some time we have been saying we favour an international agreement that would include all the major emitters,” he said. But he made no move to cut or cap Canada’s fossil fuel emissions.

When Obama announced his $3-billion donation to the UN Green Climate Fund, Harper said Canada would make a contribution “in the not too distant future.”

Skeptics discount these vague promises. Harper will procrastinate, shift the focus, then move into election mode. His deft political footwork at last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane suggests they’re right. He succeeded in eclipsing Canada’s poor environmental record by boldly confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin over his incursions into Ukraine.

But now that he’s home, he will face more pointed and sustained questions:

Some of the country’s leading economists are challenging his contention that taxing pollution will handicap the economy. They believe that with the right fiscal framework Canada can be economically competitive and environmentally responsible. A growing number of political leaders — including most of the premiers — share that view. So do senior statesmen, industrialists, even oil producers.

Opposition to pipelines is spreading. Every major project in the country — Enbridge’s Northern Gateway to the B.C. coast, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain line to Burnaby, TransCanada’s Energy East line to Eastern Canada, Enbridge’s Line 9B reversal in Ontario — is facing protests (Keystone XL has its own problems south of the border).With Alberta’s bitumen landlocked, Canada looks less like an “energy superpower” than a frustrated resource peddler.

Oil prices are plummeting. That casts doubts on Harper’s “steady hand on the tiller” economic strategy.

And the prime minister faces two rivals eager to clean up Canada’s act and restore its reputation as a responsible member of the international community. New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulclair is promising to introduce a cap-and-trade system “that puts a clear market price on carbon,” invest in clean energy technology and “work with our international allies instead of working against them.” Justin Trudeau says a Liberal government would adopt a national climate change policy that includes greenhouse gas emission limits and shows the world Canada is no longer “forgetting about the environment in our drive to extract economic benefit from our resources.”

Harper is a master strategist. He knows how to get around obstacles, divide his opponents and silence his critics. He has navigated his way through trickier junctures than this.

But the moment Canadians decide they don’t want to be on the wrong side of the climate change issue, his last bulwark will buckle.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Carol Goar