Making forest preservation worth more than forest destruction

In amongst the stories of pessimism, pranks, and angry mobs of frost-bitten delegates, there was a little ray of hope in the news from Copenhagen today.

An agreement has very nearly been reached on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), a mechanism by which developing nations would be compensated with cash or carbon credits for preserving their carbon-storing forests. The idea is to make the world's forests worth more alive than dead, thus giving developing nations a strong financial incentive to favour forest preservation over mining, grazing, or other less carbon-friendly land uses.

Think of it as the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick approach to carbon pricing.

A Few Lessons For Michael Ignatieff

I'm a proud and active member of the Liberal Party of Canada, but I have never made any secret of the fact that I disagree with our new leader on a growing number of issues.

I guess we can add the Alberta tar sands to that list.

"This is a huge industry. It employs Canadians from coast to coast. We have oil reserves that are going to last for the whole of the 21st century. We are where we are. We've got to clean it up and we've got to make it a sustainable place to work and live, not only for the aboriginal population, but for the workers who live there," Ignatieff said.

"At the moment, it's barely environmentally sustainable, and it's barely socially sustainable. The Conservative government has done nothing about this. We need to move forward. But am I proud of this industry? You bet. It's a world leader. We just need to make it better. But I don't take lessons from the National Geographic."

He may not need any lessons from National Geographic, but he certainly needs a reality check from someone. So allow me to educate you, Mr. Ignatieff.

1) "Barely environmentally sustainable."

By what possible definition?

This is an industry that tears out thousands of acres of complex boreal forest habitat and eventually, slowly, when they get to it, replaces it with flat grassland or wetland - at a fraction of the rate at which it digs.

This is an industry that turns millions of gallons of fresh water into oily, contaminated sludge which it stores in endlessly growing 'tailings ponds' that it has only the vaguest notion of how to turn back into fresh(ish) water.

This is an industry that continues to spew out grotesque amounts of CO2 emissions that it insists will 'someday' be captured and stored, despite the fact that even the biggest boosters of CCS technology admit that what is being developed simply won't work for the tar sands.

2) "Barely socially sustainable."

Ft. McMurray is a boom town. To a lesser extent, so are Calgary and Edmonton. Boom towns by definition are the very opposite of 'socially sustainable'.

I can't help but wonder if Mr. Ignatieff has ever actually met any of these "Canadians from coast to coast" who work in the oil patch. I have. I sat next to one on a plane who was on his way home to Ontario for his monthly visit with his wife and kids. By the time he got on the Edmonton-to-Toronto red eye, he had already been on two other flights and was facing a fourth to get him back to Sudbury. He hadn't slept in over 24 hours and he was having a really hard time sleeping on the cramped and chilly WestJet flight, finally opting to lay his head on his food tray with his arm over his eyes. He moaned frequently. He looked like death.

Then there was the guy I knew who gave up his job and his home for one of those great paying jobs out in Ft. McMurray. He was back within three months, full of tales of broken promises, abusive bosses and unaffordable and unlivable housing.

Temporary workers, exploitive conditions, disrupted families, artificially inflated living costs, and health consequences that are only just now being understood. This is the social reality of the tar sands mining industry.

3) "But am I proud of this industry? You bet. It's a world leader."

A world leader in what - size? Certainly. But as a sustainable industry that benefits all Canadians and moves us forward into the future, it represents a complete and utter failure.

One proof of this failure is in the recent announcement that the province of Alberta will be running a deficit this year. How can this be? How can the "new economic centre" of Canada find itself so quickly in the red just because of a temporary drop in oil prices? Weren't they using oil revenues to build a budgetary surplus as a cushion against inevitable swings in commodity prices? Oh, right.

Just about every other country with significant energy resources has a national energy policy that to some extent involves public ownership of oil and gas companies so that their citizens have maximum control of, and enjoy maximum benefit from, their own resources.

Canada, on the other hand, has no national energy policy. Such decisions are left entirely to the provinces, and in the case of Alberta they have chosen to abdicate public stewardship of their own resources in favour of making a quick buck by renting them cheap to private corporations who are responsible to no one but their shareholders.

There is nothing to be proud of here, Mr. Ignatieff. And there are far more fundamental problems with the tar sands than their somewhat untidy appearance in the pages of an American magazine.

I think what bothers me the most about Ignatieff's comments is the knowledge that from this day forward, no Liberal MP will be able to stand in the House of Commons and object to the Conservative government's lack of action on the tar sands or the environment or energy policy without having these very comments thrown back in their faces by Harper or one of his lackeys.

I am not suggesting that Mr. Ignatieff automatically take the opposite position from the Conservatives on every single issue. That's what we have Jack Layton for. But if his intention here was to appease the citizens of Alberta and build the Liberal Party's fortunes in the west, there are better ways to go about it than becoming an apologist for the tar sands mining industry. Because the people of Alberta are getting screwed here as much as anyone - and most of them know that. They don't need apologies or defences. They need real leadership that will point the way towards responsible, sustainable, beneficial, public stewardship of their land and their resources.

Mr. Ignatieff had an opportunity this week to show that sort of leadership - to show that the Liberal Party can represent a rational middle way between shutting down the oil sands altogether and allowing corporate interests to continue their uncontrolled and destructive exploitation.

In the opinion of this Liberal, he failed.

Conservatives Hate Rural Voters

I don't usually do this, but April Reign has a brilliant post about rural politics that you really must read, especially given the noise coming out of the more right-wing denizens of Alberta these days.

Rural areas of Canada and the U.S. are strongholds for Conservative/Reform/Republican politics. Words like liberal, welfare, rights, environmentalism are bandied about like slurs, while abstract concepts like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, making your own work, and loyalty to your country and used almost as religious mantras and identifiers of the true believers. Spin doctors are quick to latch on to this blind faith and give impassioned speeches about the farmer, the way things were, the heartland. But do they really have their best interests at heart? Time and again it seems the answer is no.

She goes on to draw a straight line between meat packers receiving a chunk of Alberta's mad cow aid money, potential plans to privatize Canada Post, and the relentless and ongoing dismantling of the Wheat Board as evidence of the myriad ways in which Conservative/Reform policies screw over farmers and other rural Canadians, all in the service of corporate profits.

I would love to see this one published in the Calgary Herald. After all, nothing is more convincing to a westerner than enlightened self interest.

Ed Stelmach Loves Ducks

Sure he does. Of course he does. Everybody loves a duck, right? I'm sure Ed's real broken up over the news that about 500 migrating ducks landed in one of the massive toxic oil sands tailing ponds, and, well, died horrible lingering oily deaths.

But c'mon people, let's put things into perspective...

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is down playing the deaths, saying that wind turbines kill 30,000 birds annually.

No. Really. Don't stop there, Ed. Tell them the other major causes of avian deaths, like:

Utility transmission and distribution lines: 130 to 174 million
Collisions with automobiles and trucks: 60 to 80 million
Lighted Communication Towers: 40 to 50 million
Tall building and residential house windows: 100 million to 1 billion

And those numbers are just for the United States! Then there's cats, jet engines, bridges, etc.

So really, what's another few hundred dead birds? That would be, like, comparing the puny number of cancer deaths and birth defects at Love Canal to the thousands of cancer deaths and birth defects that happen every single day all over the world!

Immigration Bill: It's Not About Doctors

One of the most frustrating aspects of our current government is having to constantly decipher their true intentions. Nothing is ever what it seems, and you can bet that whatever the truth is, it will bear no resemblance to what is being publicly stated.

Take, for example, the current flap over the Conservative effort to fold major changes to Canada’s immigration policy into a budget implementation bill. The Opposition screams that the changes will allow the Minister to arbitrarily shut out immigrants from certain countries. The Government poo-poos this notion, insisting that they merely want to expedite the applications of "skilled workers".

So just what kind of "skilled workers" are we talking about here, anyway?

Under the new law, the Minister is expected to issue annual instructions on "categories" of applications that should be fast-tracked, such as those from high-demand professionals such as doctors. The Minister will decide which categories to prioritize based on input from the provinces and territories, the Bank of Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, as well as employers and labour unions.

And again:

The Conservatives say the proposed changes would give the immigration minister the power to fast-track applications from workers with specific skills that Canada needs — such as doctors — and would help clear the backlog of cases by allowing the minister to set an annual limit on cases the department can process.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? We could always use more doctors, right?

Trouble is, we already have plenty of doctors, engineers, and other highly educated, highly skilled immigrants being fast-tracked into this country under the current points system. Unfortunately, their credentials are frequently not recognized in Canada, so many of them are driving cab or running convenience stores. The lucky ones are only slightly less under-employed: surgeons working as nurses, nurses working in blood labs, engineers doing tech support. I used to work at a print shop where my boss was an electrical engineer from Egypt.

Three years ago, about a quarter of recent immigrants with university degrees were working at jobs that required only a high school diploma or less, and it’s only getting worse. And yet everyone keeps talking about the proposed changes being intended to fast-track "skilled professionals like doctors".

Assuming that’s a lie, what’s really going on here?

One need only look at where the real labour shortages are in this country to understand what sorts of immigrants the government is really hoping to expedite.

The system's bias toward the educated has left some industries crying out for skilled blue-collar workers, especially in western Canada, where Alberta's busy oil fields have generated an economic boom. Studies by the Alberta government show the province could be short by as many as 100,000 workers over the next decade.

In response, some Canadian employers are sidestepping the point system and relying instead on a program initiated in 1998 that allows provincial governments to handpick some immigrant workers and assign temporary foreign-worker permits.

"The points system is so inflexible," said Herman Van Reekum, an immigration consultant in Calgary who helps Alberta employers find workers. "We need low-skill workers and trades workers here, and those people have no hope under the points system."

Alberta is, of course, attracting thousands of workers from other parts of Canada, but many of them have been finding the isolation, high housing costs and poor working conditions too much to take, even with the high wages being offered. I know one fellow who tore up his entire life in Toronto and moved to Calgary for what was supposed to be a great construction job, only to return six months later because the accommodations and the working conditions were intolerable.

Now that the Unions are starting to organize oil sands workers, it’s no surprise that Alberta is doing its utmost to bring in more immigrants who might not be quite so fussy about things like worker safety or fair wages or being crammed into dorms with hundreds of other workers.

However, those ‘guest workers’ with temporary work visas are generally only useful for unskilled labour. What the province really needs right now is skilled trades people - pipefitters, carpenters, electricians - in other words, exactly the kind of people the government will be able to ‘fast-track’ under its new policy. In fact, this process had already started a year ago when Alberta signed an agreement with Ottawa giving the province more autonomy in recruiting and hand-selecting immigrant workers.

Alberta Government Taking on Labour Shortages with Immigration
Friday, 04 May 2007

Early next week, the Alberta government is expected to sign a special immigration deal with the federal government. As Canada’s fastest growing province, Alberta regards immigration as an important solution to its chronic labour shortages. With a job market growth rate outpacing all other provinces, Alberta currently has more jobs than they do people to fill them.

Though immigration is under federal jurisdiction, the new immigration deal would transfer much of the responsibility to the Alberta government. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has made this deal a priority since campaigning for his position and taking office in December. He hopes to set up Alberta "desks" in Canadian embassies and consulates worldwide, to recruit immigrants to Alberta. The deal will give the province more control over selecting immigration candidates to fill jobs in the industries most pressed by the labour shortages. It will also reduce bureaucratic red tape so that immigrants can settle in Alberta more easily and more quickly.

Sound familiar?

This would be all well and good if these new ‘skilled workers’ were going to be welcomed into Alberta as full and equal citizens, encouraged to buy homes and bring their families and put down permanent roots in a real community.

Sadly, the situation for these ‘skilled workers’ probably wouldn’t be much better than that of your average temporary worker because they are being brought in to fill what are essentially temporary jobs. They still wouldn’t be able to afford to own or even rent their own homes in Alberta’s inflated housing market. There would still be no guarantee that their families would be able to join them - even assuming they wanted their wives and children to live with them in cramped and chilly ‘company housing’.

And what happens to them and their families once the oil boom comes to an end? Would they still find themselves welcomed in communities facing a glut of newly unemployed oil sands and construction workers, or would they face discrimination and resentment in a newly competitive Alberta job market?

The opposition parties, and particularly the NDP, are trying to portray the new Conservative immigration policies as racist and anti-immigrant. But while those aspects might be an added bonus to please the party's right-wing base, I suspect that the truth is somewhat more callous and baldly mercenary.

Perhaps the Conservatives reveal themselves best through the language they chose:

The proposed legislative changes will provide flexibility for concrete measures, as required, to more effectively manage the future growth in the inventory, such as addressing the number of applications accepted and processed in a year… These changes will allow Canada to take the first steps towards establishing a “just-in-time” competitive immigration system which will quickly process skilled immigrants who can make an immediate contribution to the economy.

Immigrants aren't people. They're a commodity. Welcome to Canada.