On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week (November 1st and 2nd) I was in Montreal, where I joined with elected officials, civil servants, labour activists, environmentalists, members of faith organizations and others to discuss climate change. The occasion was the Climate Action Network’s Provincial and Territorial Climate Change Leadership conference.
We’re proud to be among the more than 80 labour, faith, environmental and other groups making up Canada’s Climate Action Network.
Here are the top 5 things I learned at the conference.
1. Bixi is SO cool! All right, I didn’t learn that at the conference, but I did use Montreal’s public bike system (called Bixi – a combination of “bicycle” and “taxi”) to get to and from the conference and get some exercise at the same time. You simply pay $5 and for 24 hours you have quick and easy access to bicycles parked at stations located throughout the city. Vancouver is actively working towards a public bike system, which is great, although – as has been pointed out –BC’s bike helmet laws are a barrier to widespread public use of such a system.
2. Canada is the only G8 country not to have a national strategy on public transit. OK, I should have known this, and probably did at one point, but I’d forgotten it. It turns out that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities has been calling for a strategy since 2006 at least. More recently, NDP MP Olivia Chow has introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-305, the National Public Transit Strategy Act, that would require the federal government to develop a National Transit Plan. Unfortunately private members bills only rarely become law, and it is not yet clear what position the governing Conservative Party and other opposition parties will take on the bill. However, it would seem like a National Transit Strategy would be an idea that everyone should be able to get behind.
3. The Yukon doesn’t burn coal to generate electricity, but pollution from coal-fired generation has poisoned lakes and rivers in the Yukon and elsewhere in the North with mercury. Because of the way pollution spreads disproportionately to the north, the Yukon is suffering the health and environmental impacts of coal burnt elsewhere (probably China and Europe). I can’t help but think that coal being mined, or which may be mined, in BC, much of which may be shipped to China, will add to the pollution of the Yukon and other northern regions. Thanks to Ecology North for telling me about this national and global injustice.
4. Everyone knows that public involvement is key to the public accepting renewable energy projects – so why do governments and companies everywhere get it wrong? Both at the panel on public power (which focused on wind farms and bio energy in Quebec) and in discussions during the conference about Ontario’s Green Energy Act – just about everyone I spoke to agreed that if the public is shut out of decisions about energy projects they fight back against those energy projects. This, of course, fits well with our experience here in BC – where the government has all but shut the public and local governments out of decision-making about Independent Power Projects, and where there is huge public opposition to these projects. We’ve made this point in our Recommendations for Responsible Clean Energy Development in BC, but the parallel experiences in Ontario, Quebec and elsewhere brought home to me how absurd it is to expect people to support projects which have been forced upon them with no consultation.
5. Complexity is in the eye of the beholder, especially when it comes to carbon pricing. Liberal MP Stéphane Dion made the compelling argument that his vilified carbon tax was far less complicated than many of the other climate change solutions being proposed. “The carbon tax was simple enough that most people could say that it was complicated. But cap and trade is so complicated that it seems simple.” I think that there is a good deal of truth in that statement. Certainly the mechanics of cap and trade, favoured by many governments as a way of addressing climate change, are significantly more complex, and open to manipulation, than a carbon tax. That being said, we, along with the vast majority of folks at the conference, agreed that the important thing is to get a meaningful price on carbon – and cap and trade is a good way to do that.
I also learned that although it sometimes seems that we’re going nowhere on climate change, there’s a lot of good things happening, particularly at the provincial and local government levels. It was great to hear about strong climate change laws and policies emerging in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and, of course, BC.
By Andrew Gage, Staff Lawyer
Phote Credit: Bixi website