Climate change threats dwarf Kenney’s western alienation talk
In Ottawa, Western alienation is seen as the crisis du jour. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is mobilizing every Liberal with a tie to Alberta or Saskatchewan that he can think of.
Thus Chrystia Freeland, his newly minted deputy prime minister is dispatched west to remind Albertans that she grew up in the province’s Peace River district.
Thus Manitoba MP Jim Carr, a former cabinet minister now undergoing cancer treatment, is put back in harness to act as Trudeau’s special representative to the West.
Thus former Newfoundland television reporter Seamus O’Regan is named energy minister simply because he hails from a province which, like Saskatchewan and Alberta, has oil.
All of this is done in an effort to mollify Westerners and compensate for the federal Liberal Party’s failure to win any seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
It is done under pressure from Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, both of whom want the Trudeau government to back away from measures it has already enacted — including reforms designed to strengthen environmental assessment requirements and limit West Coast oil tanker traffic.
And it has had the effect of diverting the minority Liberal government’s attention away from what is still the most pressing threat facing Canada — climate change.
This strange disjunction came into focus Monday with the publication of the United Nations Environmental Program’s latest report on the gap between what is being done and what needs to be done to fight climate change.
The report makes for grim reading.
Scientists reckon that if Earth is to avoid global catastrophe, the temperature increase from pre-industrial times to the end of this century must be held to between 1.5 and 2 C. That in turn requires a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions released by the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil.
But as the UN report points out, global carbon emissions are not declining. They are rising.
Over the last decade, they have risen by 1.5 per cent a year. If this rate keeps up, by the end of the century global temperatures will be 3.2 C higher than they were in pre-industrial times, leading to even more catastrophic floods, wildfires and violent storms.
The report notes that unless Canada does something quite different, it will fail to meet its self-imposed target of reducing carbon emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. In fact, says the report, Canada’s emission levels will be 15 per cent above that target.
It is this failure that should be occupying the Liberal government’s mind. By comparison, Kenney’s complaints about the equalization formula used to determine how much money have-not provinces get from Ottawa are minor.
Yet the federal Liberal government remains fixated on Western alienation. Indeed, Trudeau’s decision to shuffle Catherine McKenna out of the environment and climate change portfolio has been characterized by some as another effort to appease the West.
McKenna was forthright about her differences with the oil and gas industry and presented herself as a champion in the war against climate change.
Her successor, Jonathan Wilkinson, is lower key. He was also raised in Saskatchewan. In Trudeau’s new government of would-be Westerners, this is a definite plus.