When Mark Carney killed the carbon tax, Canada gave up its last shred of honesty about addressing the climate crisis. Oil companies got their way. We have built them pipelines, we have passed legislation to ease restrictions on their infrastructure projects and we are now pandering to an astro-turfed movement Alberta that is funded by the oil and gas sector and which, if it ever became a more serious threat than simply a partisan shill show, would threaten the unity of the country.
We are a climate change pariah, a position that we have never been very far away from. But it is clear now that the Canadian policy sphere is far more interested in crating the conditions for profiting from climate change than it is from doing our part to address it. We are working to enable a bunch of people who are shorting life on earth.
Catherine McKenna, the former federal environment minister, was quite candid about why the carbon tax didn’t stand a chance once the oil and gas lobbies, aided by a movement of “conservatives” who were doing their bidding, got their tendrils into the policy shop. She has published a new memoir and excerpted part of it on a Substack post which makes for fascinating reading.
In the end, Canada lost a climate policy that worked to reduce emissions in the most cost effective way, ensured that most families were better off (especially middle- and low-income ones), while creating an incentive for people to save even more money by choosing more energy efficient options, and which provided an opportunity for businesses to innovate and develop clean solutions. Losing a policy which leads to one of the most significant reductions in Canada’s emissions makes hitting the country’s climate target even harder.
Justin Trudeau can take the blame for a lot of this. Carney too. We will never hit the targets we need to. The Conservatives, who backed off their own preferred policy choice and convinced the Canadian electorate that a program that fairly priced carbon AND put money in the pockets of most Canadians was the height of evil.
Now you have Pierre Poilievre touting a further reduction in industrial carbon pricing to somehow make groceries more affordable for average people. He’s wrong about that, but Conservatives these days will cite any rationale, no matter how flimsy as long as taxes on the wealthy can be reduced.
The net result of all of this bad policy and a decade of stupid politics is a world in which there will be no more climate change solutions addressed by Canadian lawmakers until such a time as the market prices renewables so low that braying for markets for bitumen will look as archaic as whale oil. And our country will not be part of that conversation, because we will be relying on Chinese and European technology and resources to do it while still trying to jam sticky oil into tubes and send it to the coast to markets that don’t want it at a price that doesn’t make mining it profitable.
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Dave Pollard has written a piece of fiction containing instructions for a new game that seems fun and interesting at first but goes deep.
“It’s a game board, Dev. I’ve invented a new game based on ikigai. It can be used as an ice-breaker, to help people who don’t know each other discover things they enjoy in common. Or it can be used by people who do know each other to learn more about each other, and see how well they know each other.”
The Ontario government is making it harder for immigrants to attain citizenship. Under the guise of fighting fraud in the immigration system, the province is changing things which is throwing thousands of people into limbo and lots will leave as a result of the goal posts changing. This is cruel. Our immigration system has a major problem in that it promotes the fact the we need skilled people to work in all of our economic sectors. Yet when those skilled people choose Canada they get here and face multiple barriers to making their offerings. And then governments change the system from under them. It amounts to withdrawing a promise. One person quoted in the story says this:
“It’s like a broken promise… If they didn’t need us in the first place, they should not have invited us,” he said.
He’s right. And whatever systemic changes happen, it will not stop fraud. Fraud is the result of clever operators cheating the system. Every system has cheaters. It’s clear to me that the reasons for these changes are purely political, feeding into an increasing thread of xenophobia that wins partisan political points but throws yet one more barrier up in front of the people who have chosen to come here and be a part of this national project. It’s transparently racist and should be called out as such.
The system is broken, not the people. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of refugees fled to Canada where we welcomed them. Now some are being told that they will have to wait 50 years for their permanent residency.
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Rebecca Solnit puts it starkly:
The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes.
This has been true so long it seems normal, but when it is over we will see it as a second cold war that sometimes became a hot war…
This is why the climate movement has always been a peace movement. A movement for peace with nature, since climate chaos is the result of a war against nature and life on earth, but also for the peace that could come after the fossil fuel era winds down. Oil Change International founder Stephen Kretzmann said this morning: ” The fact that wars and lots of blood for oil are somehow an acceptable price to pay for energy has never ever been ok. This alone is more than enough reason to phase out fossil fuels asap.” Sun, wind, geothermal, and hydropower are widely distributed across the earth and will not generate any such conflicts and corrosive geopolitics.
I added the emphasis. it doesn’t matter who is in control. The price we pay for prosperity brought through fossil fuels is violence. Of course scarcity and control are the dynamics that drive these, and those apply to the scarce minerals and materials needed to use renewable energy too. Even in a country of abundant water resources like Canada, the development of hydro electric energy has been the vanguard of colonization for the past 100 years, displacing people from their lands, destroying entire ecosystems by flooding and requiring massive industrialization to produce “clean” energy.
But in a moment when the stark reality is laid bare before us it’s worth remembering this basic truth. There is no peace where there is oil and gas.
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I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
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The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.