Report takes aim at government's hypocrisy on the environment

Do-as-we-say, not-as-we-do approach is impractical and tone deaf, writes Colby Cosh.

On Monday, the think-tank Second Street published an intriguing overview of ways in which Canadian government policies increase greenhouse gas emissions as an unnoticed or poorly quantified side-effect.

Second Street, headquartered in Regina, might be described as an offshoot, or a side project, of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). It will not surprise you to hear that much of the paper, authored by policy analyst James Skinner, is dedicated to opposing the same kinds of government waste that the CTF is dedicated to denouncing.

The report emphasizes the excess emissions created when fossil fuels have to be moved by rail or truck rather than pipelines, for example, and has some fun with the insanely swollen political delegations we send abroad to climate change conferences. It also observes that when fuel taxes send consumers across the border to buy gas, some of the pro-environmental effects are offset by the wasteful trips.

It's not news that a sibling of the CTF is opposing taxes, though these arguments are all true as far as they go. What's more interesting is the wider theme that emerges in the report — that of “protectionist measures that are costly anyway, and that Canada ought to consider ditching in the name of societal efficiency, but that are also environmentally wicked.”

The airline protectionism that preserves our duopoly of domestic air carriers, for example, incentivizes longer trips by Canadian holidaymakers, as well as plenty of driving across the border to avoid exorbitant Canadian airport fees.

Canada has also, one way or another, outsourced a great deal of its health-care spending to the United States and foreign destinations — cross-border trips for medical purposes reportedly run into the hundreds of thousands every year.

It is mostly ideology that prevents us from being better equipped as a country. Right or wrong as the ideology may be, there is a permanent environmental cost to it, which is never quantified or even mentioned as a critique of the status quo. There is also a “truculent resistance to modernity” thread running through the report. There are discussions about virtual health care, courts and government service departments that highlight how much unnecessary toing-and-froing there still is in Canadian life that would astonish the citizens of other advanced countries.

The pandemic taught us how much potential exists for the internet to eliminate unnecessary doctors' visits, physical courtroom and other tribunal hearings, along with trips to file paperwork. But there's an obvious danger that some of this progress will be abandoned, and that COVID-ERA experiments with remote work and digital government will become nothing more than the vanishing memory of a largely successful experiment.

The report takes some carefully chosen, carefully non-partisan digs at other Canadian idols. It points out, for example, that our federal government provides incalculable fortunes to Bombardier to design and build business jets, a source of greenhouse gas emissions otherwise generally considered indefensible.

It also observes that every litre of milk this country pours into sewers to preserve supplymanagement quotas comes at an alleged cost of about a kilogram of carbon dioxide, to say nothing of the more destructive methane. Canadians don't mind the implicit throwing away of money, or at least we're not going to get to elect a government willing to stop it, but we are supposed to regard avoidable and gratuitous ecological harm as a problem, aren't we?

The effect of the report is to call attention to the hitherto little-noticed similarities between the classic CTF narrative of “government waste” and the ethical narratives of popular environmentalism. Is the rule of “small is beautiful” good for government or only those subject to it?

In private life, we are all now expected to absorb the moral imperative of the carbon calculus. If we don't, the taxman will be along to encourage us to make wise choices. Meanwhile, otiose protectionist features of our economy that fleece the citizens, or even ancient habits that would merely require some effort to change, stand in the way of better policy-making.

Governments are perpetually, ostentatiously, sending us a message they don't always seem to hear themselves.