When wildfires encroached on  the outskirts of Fort McMurray the morning of May 3, 2016, the general messaging from officials was “Go about your life as normal.” By noon, as John Vaillant reports in his book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, the tune had changed dramatically, to “Everyone out! Now!!” Eighty-eight thousand people fled the city, many carrying traumas that last to this day. Roughly 2,400 homes were destroyed, many in an explosive burst of incinerated fury, because the heat was so extreme. By the time the fire expired 15 months later, it had consumed 5,900 square kilometres of forest and caused $9.9 billion in damage. They called it The Beast. 

Fire in the forest is normal; the boreal forest has evolved to burn every hundred years. Spruce fir trees actually wait for fire to release their seeds. But when you consider that eight of the world’s worst wildfire years have happened in the last 10 years, this certainly isn’t normal. This year there have been furiously destructive fires in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Kazakhstan, Sicily, Sardinia, Lombardy, Athens, Corfu, Rhodes, France, Romania, Andalusia, Catalonia, Portugal, Arizona, California, Montana, Oregon, Maui (killing more than 100 people and destroying Lahaina), and now, as I write, Yellowknife. They are even burning in the Arctic.  

By early August, 5,500 fires had burned 134,000 square kilometres of Canada’s forests, six times more than the seasonal average, releasing a vast amount of stored carbon. That’s five times the size of Vermont, two and a half times the size of Nova Scotia. In northern B.C., the Donnie Creek fire is the largest ever recorded in the province. Canada has 3.2 million square kilometres of forest, so if this much was to burn every year, it would all be blackened and gone by 2047. All gone.  

The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.

 

– Wallace Broecker, oceanographer, paleoclimatologist, 50 years in climate science. 

The “beast” is both fire and the climate system. Each fire has a specific local cause, but if we continue to feed the climate beast, increasing the heat and drought conditions that fire thrives on, we can be guaranteed that future fires will be worse, as will the downpours, floods and sea-level rise that the beast also causes. In 2022, a landmark UN report warned that the climate crisis would increase the risk of wildfire by 50% by the end of the century. 

As humans, we like our creature comforts. We also like our beliefs, and we are reluctant to admit that we might sometimes be wrong. It’s a matter of pride. If we can persuade ourselves that there is no climate beast, we can continue to enjoy our trucks, our boats, our flights, our vacations, our steaks and our other fossil-fuelled privileges without a guilty conscience. To bolster our belief, we can listen to professors like Jordan Peterson, who will assure us and his millions of followers that any talk of a climate crisis is a hoax designed to take away our cherished personal freedoms. 

Meanwhile, the fire keeps coming, and a new word has entered our vocabulary: pyrocumulonimbus. This is fire weather that explodes like a bomb, cauterizing the landscape; devouring houses, cars, trucks and equipment; vaporizing any water that the valiant firefighters might try to send its way. 

In Fort McMurray, as Vaillant describes with aching pain in his book, 20,000 of the residents who fled chose not to return, but 68,000 did return to continue feeding the beast, many of them digging bitumen out of the ground, cooking it with two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, to produce three million barrels of crude oil a day, pumping it into pipelines, all so that we can keep on driving and flying our fossil-fuelled vehicles.  

In a few short decades, we have burned our way through fossilized energy that took millions of years to form. We have released all of its stored carbon into the atmosphere, where, as carbon dioxide, it traps heat. As a New Scientist editorial stated in June 2023, “The basic science of climate change is so universally accepted that only the most fringe elements of society now deny it.”  

Yet like an alcoholic who insists they are not drunk, many people refuse to talk about it. In Alberta, 53% of those who cast a ballot in the 2023 election voted for the United Conservative Party, made up of politicians who are determined to continue feeding the beast.  

Last week, a cold front passed through the province following several days of hot, dry weather. pic.twitter.com/fHbPsizjbr

— BC Wildfire Service (@BCGovFireInfo) August 22, 2023

It’s not just in Canada that people are having this difficulty. In the summer of 2021, the novelist Christy Lefteri flew to a small town on the coast of Greece near Athens to learn about the wildfire that ripped through the town in 2018, killing 80 people and destroying two– thirds of the homes. She wanted to hear people’s stories, to understand what it meant to be displaced by such a disaster. Everyone was distressed, but as soon as she raised the topic of climate change, they made it clear that such talk was “shut down immediately and completely.” 

In Lahaina, the historic town in Maui destroyed by an unprecedented blaze, the talk is of drought, hurricane winds, downed power lines, highly flammable non-native grasses, and the absence of warning sirens. After all, how can the myriad climate solutions help the victims of a fire that has come and gone? Far better to focus on prevention by protecting the wildland-urban-interface, fire-proofing people’s homes, and better training for firefighters to limit the damage from the fire beast’s assaults. We have our firefighter and first responder heroes, and our climate heroes are legion, but their efforts are being sabotaged, obstructed, and delayed by those who are addicted.  

If we continue to obstruct the climate solutions that can wean us off our addiction and lead us to a green, climate-safe future, the beast will destroy us all. It will burn our forests down, drive us off our farms, flood our homes, increase our torment with its heat, turn us into climate refugees, slowly cook the ocean and make our grandchildren curse us. Then it will melt the ice in Greenland and Antarctica and flood the world far beyond what anyone is expecting.  

So please don’t think “I’m glad it’s not my family that was living in Fort McMurray, Lytton, or Lahaina.” The beast will come for all of us. Ask instead how you can be one of the heroes who goes out to fight the climate beast. There is much that you can do: 

Have you: 

• written to your local, federal and provincial politicians, urging rapid action? 
• examined your investments and removed all those that support fossil fuels? 
• written to the directors of your bank, urging them to stop financing fossil fuels? 
• urged the companies you purchase from (and business friends in C-suites) to rapidly curb their emissions? 
• traded in your beast-mobile for an EV, bus or bicycle? 
• switched your home’s oil or gas heating to a clean electric heat pump? 
• held your children tight, and told them you will do whatever you can to stop the beast? 

Guy Dauncey lives in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island. He is the co-founder of the West Coast Climate Action Network. 

The post The fire beast is everywhere. A checklist for fighting back. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Canada’s Food Price Report warns us that food price inflation will continue throughout 2023, especially for dairy, vegetables and meat, and that a family of four will need an additional $1,000 to feed themselves. This is not a short-term crisis. Many of the crop losses that caused prices to rise were caused by the increase in dramatic floods, droughts and storms, courtesy of the climate crisis, which is just getting started. Meanwhile, politicians on Parliament Hill held committee hearings last week to grill grocery-store CEOs on their part in the sky-high prices.

If you were minister of agriculture, what would you do? Websites are full of advice on how to shop more wisely, but this is not the way to address a food crisis.

1. Form community food hubs

Most of the work needed to increase food security is local, requiring partnerships and planning. Every neighbourhood, county or town needs a community food hub to promote best practices and policies, taking inspiration from the Food Hub Network in British Columbia. Community food hubs are often community-led initiatives that distribute local food to those who need it. Governments could provide start-up grants to launch food hubs where they don’t yet exist.

Through strong partnerships, local governments can work with community organizations to turn vacant urban land into allotment gardens. Local farmers can benefit from the shared distribution systems of community networks; schools can develop year-round food gardens; residents can be encouraged to grow food on public boulevards; fruit-tree gleaning projects can be started; and much more.

In B.C., the provincial government has announced a $200-million investment to spend on a variety of measures to increase local food security and reduce the cost of food.

2. Launch a nationwide grow-your-own-food campaign

Throughout history, people have dug into the soil to grow the food they needed. When hunger demanded it, they terraced entire mountainsides to create new beds. At Kiwi Cove outside Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, 10 volunteers meet for three hours each Tuesday and Thursday morning from spring to fall to grow food for the Ladysmith Food Bank on a 4,750-square-metre plot of land. Together, they grow almost two tonnes of vegetables total, or 200 kilograms per volunteer, in a growing season. In Montreal, volunteers with Carrefour solidaire are growing vegetables in a plastic greenhouse in the middle of winter with thick snow on the ground outside, raising lettuces, cabbages, bok choy and many other vegetables.

We need a nationwide campaign to persuade Canadians to grow their own food, just as we did in wartime with victory gardens and like efforts launched by non-profits during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey by the National Gardening Association showed that Americans could save more than US$500 a year by growing their own food. To encourage Canadians to grow their own food, the federal government could give a $500 grant to any group of five or more neighbours who help each other to convert their lawns into food gardens. In a city of a million people, the government could issue 1,000 grants that would cost $500,000, or $19 million for the entire nation.

To encourage more home-grown food, the government could also remove GST from gardening tools, equipment and bedding plants and set up a fund for garden clubs to help new food gardeners. If the government distributed the grants through community food hubs, this could accelerate the formation of hubs in communities where they don’t exist, as residents (having seen the benefits in other communities) would pressure their government to set them up.

3. Protect farmland

In Ontario, 319 acres of high-grade agricultural land – equal in size to 58 city blocks – are lost to development every day, according to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. Since the beginning of the pandemic, municipal zoning orders have been used six times in Ontario to rezone farmland for urban use. For sure, we need to build a massive amount of new housing, but there is more than enough land to build two million new homes in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area around Toronto by 2031, without touching the Greenbelt or expanding urban boundaries.

In British Columbia, good farmland has been protected since 1973 through the Agricultural Land Reserve, but 50% of it is sitting empty, not used for farming. In Surrey, B.C., research found that if 3,300 hectares were used for small-scale, human-intensive, direct market production, it could supply 100% of Surrey’s seasonal consumption of 29 crop and animal products, and create 1,500 jobs.

The solution is to tax unused farmland at an annually increasing rate, forcing owners to either start farming, lease the land to a farmer, or sell. This would reduce the market price of farmland and open up opportunities for new farmers. Metro Vancouver has explored various ways of making farmland tax changes, but nothing has happened.

4. Save and distribute the food that’s wasted

Millions of Canadians are food insecure, yet 58% of the food produced in Canada each year is lost or wasted, according to Second Harvest, a food rescue organization. Of this, 32% (11.2 million tonnes) is edible food that could be redirected to support hungry Canadians. That’s 295 kilograms of dumped food per person per year, or 5.7 kilograms a week. We need to eat around 1.8 kilos of food a day, so that’s enough food for three days. Canada’s goal is to reduce the amount of food wasted by 50% by 2030.

France has set a goal to reduce its 5.5 million tonnes of food waste by 50% by 2025. In that country, 32% of food is lost during farming, 21% during food processing, 19% by consumers, 14% by grocery stores and 14% by restaurants. Since 2016, the French government has banned larger supermarkets from throwing away unsold food that could be donated to a charity. In return, they save on landfill fees and get a tax break of up to 60% on the value of the donated food.

But there are some holes in this plan. The French Federation of Food Banks found that every morning, 2,700 supermarkets send food that would otherwise be wasted to 80 warehouses, rescuing 46,000 tons a year. This, however, is just 6% of France’s grocery store food waste, and the system also assumes that struggling people will go to a food bank.

There’s a lot more that the supermarket industry could do, including training its staff and using demand planning to identify likely food waste. The online grocery store Spud offers imperfect produce at 50% of the price and donates what it can’t sell to charities. Since 2009, the non-profit Move For Hunger has delivered 32 million pounds to food banks across the United States and Canada, equivalent to more than 26 million meals, but that’s two million meals a year, or only 5,500 meals a day. And it still requires people to go to food banks. Across Canada, only 4% of the surplus edible food is being redistributed to charitable organizations. That means 96% is still being thrown away or turned into animal feed or biofuel.

In Italy, the city of Milan has launched three food-waste hubs. They look like regular grocery stores, but all the food is donated by local businesses and supermarkets, and families in need can use a prepaid card to buy what they need. Between them, the hubs recover 130 tonnes a year, around 260,000 meals, saving 30% of the city’s food waste.

An app from Too Good To Go, a certified B Corporation founded in Copenhagen, now in 17 countries (including Canada), seems very promising. It enables bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants and hotels to put surplus food in a bag, and consumers use an app to pre-pay for a bag at a third of the normal price. In Canada, it has saved 1.4 million meals through 5,000 partners, helped businesses to earn $5.5 million on food that would otherwise have gone to waste, and helped consumers to save $16.3 million on food they would otherwise have had to buy at full price. What would it take for every store to get on board?

5. Promote and adopt a plant-based diet

There are many reasons why we should reduce our consumption of meat and dairy, chief of which is that the livestock industry accounts for 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions,  according to a University of Illinois paper. The reason for including it here is that meat is expensive, and a plant-based diet is a good way to reduce your grocery bills (as long as you avoid some of the more trendy plant-based brands).

One analysis found that the savings for a vegan are $4.50 a day, or $1,500 a year, entirely neutralizing the increased cost of food. A Harvard study put the saving at US$750 a year. Around 2.8 million Canadians describe themselves as primarily vegetarian, and 1.7 million as primarily vegan. That leaves 35 million Canadians who could be reducing their grocery bills by adopting a plant-based diet.

6. Stop food profiteering

Canadians for Tax Fairness reports that Loblaws’s markup increased from 32.5% in 2010 to 46.7% in 2022, and profits rose by 10%. “If they had maintained their 2019 markup, that would have saved Canadians almost $900 million,” economist D.T. Cochrane told the Toronto Star. Loblaws has 27% of Canada’s grocery retail market, or some 10 million Canadians, so that’s $90 per customer – or $1.73 a week. The price of two tomatoes. Not exactly a crisis-solver.

Loblaws’s recent quarterly profits also rose by $529 million, which the company says stems from the growth of non-food sales (such as clothing, personal care products and financial services). But even if it came from increased food prices, it’s only a dollar a week for their 10 million customers: half a cucumber. Parliament held hearings last week into possible grocery store profiteering, but I suspect that this may be a red herring ($1.72 for a tiny 3.5-ounce can of herring) as the evidence seems to show that if they have been profiteering, it’s on a very small level.

On the other hand, a report by Oxfam International found that 62 food capitalists became billionaires during the pandemic, amid record profits for the industry titans, whose wealth increased by 42% while global food prices soared by 33%. A small handful of corporations, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever and Del Monte, control the market share of 80% of the food products we buy, so governments need to cooperate to take a close look at monopolistic collusion in the industry, to find ways to reduce it.

A new Greenpeace report found that globally, 20 of the world’s biggest food corporations reaped such big profits in 2021 and 2022 that they were able to return US$53.5 billion to their shareholders. The United Nations, meanwhile, has recently issued an urgent humanitarian appeal to raise US$51.5 billion to help 222 million people who face acute food insecurity, including 45 million who risk starvation. Something is very rotten in the state of global food capitalism.

Back here in Canada, those of us who can afford the increased cost of food may not be worried. So, remind yourself: almost one in three Canadians are eating less healthy food because of rising costs. If we are to continue to think of ourselves as a caring people, our ministers of agriculture must step up: this is the time for big moves.

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In a few billion years, the sun will begin turning into a red giant, which will make Earth uninhabitable, but in the meantime, solar technology is getting cheaper and more efficient every year and bringing more and more jobs along with it.

Here are eight reasons why solar is a great long-term investment.

1. It’s an essential climate solution for the new industrial age

Unlike oil, solar power doesn’t create smog, devastating spills and war. In fact, the Ukraine war and bans on Russian fossil fuels are propelling the world toward greater use of solar and other renewables, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the production of a solar energy system are 25 to 100 times less than they are for fracked gas, which produces 325 grams of GHGs per kilowatt-hour (kWh) from burning the gas, plus all the methane emissions that escape during fracking. The energy return on investment of a solar power system is such that over its life it will produce nine to 10 times more energy than is needed to make it.

2. It’s on a roll

In 2020,  the global production of solar PV energy increased by 22%, mostly in China, Europe and North America. If this acceleration continues, by mid-century it could provide a quarter of the world’s electricity, becoming the second largest source after wind. That acceleration is driven by the falling price, increasing efficiency and a better return on investment. In 2010, the levelized cost of utility-scale solar PV was 38 cents/kWh. Natural gas, by contrast, currently costs 27 cents/kWh due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Australia, where solar costs 3.2 cents/kWh, the Renewable Energy Agency wants to lower it to 1.5 cents by 2030.

3. It’s a safe investment

If you live in Ontario, a 4-kW rooftop system will cost you $2.50 a watt, or $10,000, and generate 4,664 kWh a year, about half of the average household use. (In New York, a similar 4 kW system will cost you US$3.21/watt, or $9,500 after the federal tax credit.) Over 30 years, your system will lose efficiency at 1% a year, so it will generate 120,000 kWh, costing you an average 8.3 cents/kWh (all numbers are for Ontario). Compared to grid electricity at 14 cents/kWh, rising by perhaps 2% a year, each solar kilowatt-hour will save you six cents now, rising to 17 cents in 30 years, or an average of 11.5 cents/kWh, totalling an average of $460 a year, earning an average 4.6% on your investment, if you did not need to borrow the capital. With PACE financing (property-assessed clean energy), you can borrow the money for a solar system with no down payment. The loan will be attached to your property title, and if you sell your home, it will be transferred to the new owner. Ottawa has a PACE financing program, but the rest of Canada is dragging its heels. American studies show that a home with a 6-kW system costing $15,000 will have an increased value at sale of between $22,000 and $30,000.

4. Community solar is an even better investment

A solar installation on top of a factory in Ontario will cost less per kilowatt-hour . A utility-scale solar plant in Ontario, costing $1.60/watt and generating power for 4.6 cents/kWh, will bring a 6.8% return on investment. Ordinary people can share the bounty and help solve the climate crisis by pooling their funds to invest in community-owned solar, including renters and people who live in high-rises, such as Solshare in B.C. and the Métis village of Green Lake, in Saskatchewan. In Germany, 100,000 people are buying power from a community solar co-operative such as Elektrizitätswerke Schönau, while similar initiatives are happening in Switzerland, Italy and France. In Brazil, where it’s known as “solar by subscription,” an investment of US$10,000 to $16,000 will generate solar energy to supply a family of four and take four to six years to pay for itself from savings on the electricity bill.

5. There are creative places to install it

In India, solar power is being used to cover canals. The panels are more efficient due to the cooling effect of water, and they reduce evaporation from the canals. In various countries, “floating solar” is being installed on hydro reservoirs, with production estimated to reach 10 gigawatts (GW) by 2025.

In France, the government is requiring all larger parking lots to be covered with solar systems within five years, and farmers are installing them suspended on cables above their crops. The panels follow the path of the sun to maximize solar gain. They can shift vertically to let the rain pass through and move horizontally to limit damage from a hailstorm, or to make the soil temperature rise or fall. In Turkey, the soccer club Galatasaray installed a 4.2-megawatt (MW) system with 10,400 panels on the roof of its stadium. It saved around €385,000 between January and August 2022, when grid electricity costs rose due to the war in Ukraine. Plans to build solar farms on land devastated by Turkey’s open-cast coal mines could generate power for seven million people.

Solar panels are coming to cars, too. Putting solar on the roof of an EV can generate around 10% of the power it uses. The American company Aptera is taking orders for a two-seater solar EV with a 1,000-mile range that can do 40 miles a day on sunlight. Students in Holland have built a solar-powered camper van that does 700 kilometres a day on sunlight.

6. It provides more jobs for women

The IEA recently declared that the world was entering the “dawn of a new industrial age” and estimated that jobs in clean-energy manufacturing will grow to 14 million (from six million) by 2030.

Globally, the solar industry employs 4.3 million people, 40% of whom are women. While this still isn’t enough, only 22% of workers employed in oil and gas are women, and only 21% in wind energy. The solar workforce breaks down to 47% women in manufacturing, 39% in service provision, 37% in development, but only 12% in installation, where men from the construction industry still rule the solar roost. The Florida company Women in Solar, the American organization Solwomen, and Solar Energy International’s Women in Solar Power program are working to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive solar workforce.

7. It works well in remote communities

In Inuvik, the Indigenous-owned and operated Nihtat Energy is developing a 1 MW solar farm that will generate 1,435 MWh a year while reducing the risks from ocean-shipped diesel, and the GHGs and air pollution caused by burning it. In Fort Severn, Ontario – 850 kilometres north of Thunder Bay – the Cree First Nation has built a 300 kW solar farm, permitting a 20% reduction in their use of flown-in diesel, saving up to $360,000 a year. As a bonus, when sunlight is reflected off adjacent snow, the yield from a solar panel can increase by as much as 50%, as measured in winter on a solar system in the District of Highlands in B.C., near Victoria.

8. We can regulate our way to solar success

The European Union once bought as much as 40% of its gas from Russia, at a cost of more than US$110 million a day. In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the EU is speeding up its energy transition, requiring that solar panels be installed on all new buildings by 2029 – commercial, public and residential. Its goal is to install 20 GW of solar PV by 2025 and 60 GW by 2030, making it the largest electricity source in Europe, with more than half coming from rooftops.

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, every province that generates coal- or gas-fired electricity should make PACE financing available to everyone and require solar rooftops on every new building, and on every large car park, starting in 2024. Governments could create a 100% solar tax rebate in those provinces to encourage owners. The price is right, the need is great, the time is now to regulate.

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The current bout of inflation started with supply-side disruptions. COVID-19 disrupted everything, especially goods originating in China. Climate-worsened droughts disrupted farming. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin went and disrupted Ukraine. Supply chains broke for critical items such as oil, wheat, fertilizer and microprocessors, causing shortages that enabled producers to increase their prices.

Once inflation had started, some businesses took the opportunity to increase their prices, bringing the second cause: profits-push inflation. This is when companies use their market power to boost their prices. Average Canadian profits, which ran at 5 to 10% between 1960 and 2000, rose to 20%, while corporations enjoyed their lowest-ever tax rate.

The third cause of inflation was the increased price of oil that came with the invasion of Ukraine and seeped into many products. The fourth cause was increased mortgage and rental costs. Prices went through the roof when the Bank of Canada printed money in response to the 2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic, distributing it to the banks – combined with historically low interest rates in a relatively rigid housing market.

Conservatives and Republicans like to claim that inflation is caused by increased government spending, but this is true only when a corrupt or incompetent government prints money instead of raising taxes to pay for its cronies or its wars. In normal circumstances, every dollar that a government spends comes either from taxes or from loans in the form of bonds, and in both instances, money is taken out of the economy to pay the taxes or buy the bonds, so there is no impact on aggregate demand (the total demand for all goods and services in an economy).

Money created by central banks, on the other hand, does increase the money supply, risking an increase in aggregate demand and hence inflation, if supply is constrained. During the early days of COVID-19, central banks also used quantitative easing to buy  government bonds, creating money that was distributed as support cheques. They pumped £895 billion (US$1 trillion) into the U.K.’s $3-trillion GDP economy with the explicit purpose of sustaining aggregate demand, and the Bank of Canada did likewise.

The Bank of Canada believes that it needs to cool demand, enabling supply to catch up, and its way of doing this is to increase interest rates, even if it causes a recession, increases unemployment and makes those essential green investments harder. In The Causes of and Responses to Today’s Inflation, however, the economists Joe Stiglitz and Ira Regmi show that there is no excessive aggregate demand in the United States, that real personal consumption has been largely below trend, and that the U.S. is not facing a wage-price spiral. The close linkage between our economies suggests that the same is true in Canada.

Rather than simply watching as central banks raise interest rates, what should governments do, given that those who suffer the most are those who are only just getting by?

1. Increase wealth taxes

Between 2008 and 2022, the world’s central banks gave US$41 trillion in quantitative easing to banks and corporations, which did inflate asset prices in the housing and stock markets, which is where the money ended up. An analysis by the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that increased aggregate demand in the United States is a fifth contributing cause of the current inflation but that 40% of the increased demand is coming from the wealthiest 1% and 75% from the wealthiest 10%, who made immense gains in personal wealth during the pandemic, mostly as a result of this same quantitative easing, and are now busy spending it.

We don’t need to cool general demand; we need to cool demand by the wealthiest 10%. This is best achieved not by raising interest rates but by increasing taxes on those who are already rich, for whom inflation is not a problem. At the same time, governments should encourage more green investment by developing a sustainable activities taxonomy, similar to Europe’s, favouring lending at low interest for critical items such as affordable housing and climate solutions.

2. Impose a windfall profits tax

When Canadian economist Jim Stanford analyzed profits in 52 Canadian business sectors, he found that compared to before the pandemic, the combined after-tax profits of the 15 most profitable sectors had increased by 89%, while profits in all other sectors fell. The big culprits are the oil and gas companies, followed by banks and financial intermediaries, mining, groceries, and home maintenance companies. Together, they took $143 billion out of the pockets of businesses and consumers (4.5% of Canada’s GDP), causing more than half of the current inflation. This then had a knock-on effect, further increasing prices for food and other consumer goods.

The same thing happened in Britain, where corporate profits were 73% higher in 2021 than in 2019, and in the United States, where the quarterly profits of corporations were 50% higher in 2022 than during the eight years before the pandemic.

These businesses have been able to profiteer from inflation because they do not face enough competition. In Canada’s food sector, five supermarket chains control most food distribution, and at least three seized the opportunity to increase their prices. Industry-wide, their average margins are 75% higher and their net incomes are 120% higher than they were before the pandemic.

If companies knew they would be taxed heavily on their windfall profiteering, they would be less likely to do it. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has promised a 3% surtax on banks with profits greater than $1 billion, and the NDP has called for a 15% tax on larger companies with higher-than-normal profit margins. In the U.S., Bernie Sanders has called for a 95% windfall profits tax. In Portugal, parliament has approved a 33% tax on windfall profits by energy companies and food retailers, and the Czechs are proposing a 60% excess-profits tax on energy companies. The European Union wants to raise 140 billion euros by taxing the windfall earnings of energy companies to help households and businesses pay their massive gas and electricity bills. To stop future profiteering, governments need to use anti-trust regulations to break up oligopolies.

3. End the affordable-housing crisis

Between 2021 and 2022, apartment rents in Canada rose by an average 11%, from $1,676 to almost $2,000 a month. Rental inflation was 37% in London, 30% in Calgary, 19% in Vancouver and 17% in Toronto. In these cities, tenants are paying $600 to $1,000 more every month. In the United States, mortgage costs have risen by 18.8%, rents by 17.6%. For many mortgage-holders, the higher interest rates are really hurting.

I have suggested solutions to the housing crisis here and here, so I won’t repeat myself. Among other things, we need to control the spread of short-term rentals, and we need a massive increase in affordable home-building. Increased interest rates will make this harder.

4. Reduce our dependency on oil

The solution here is to speed up the transition to sustainable transportation. If you drive an electric car, or if you get around by foot, bike or public transit without need for a car, the price of oil has much less impact. The annual increase in the carbon tax, reaching $170 per tonne by 2030, is essential as a persuasive mechanism. The federal government could advance the 2035 ban on the sale of new gasoline vehicles to 2030 and phase out heavy-duty vehicles by 2035, in collaboration with the U.S.

5. Give workers the pay they need to keep up

Once inflation had set in, workers needed wage increases to keep up, and employers who couldn’t find staff offered more pay, contributing a sixth supposed cause: wages-push inflation. Since 2017, prices in Canada have risen by 20%, however, so low- and middle-income workers whose wages have not increased are actually contributing to reduced demand. Central banks often blame the inflation on workers’ wage demands, rather than the five other causes, which is where it belongs.

Nearly two-thirds of Canadian workers’ wages are falling behind the rate of inflation, according to a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA); the economist Robert Reich has shown that most U.S. the purchasing power of workers’ paycheques is also shrinking. The CCPA report found that public-sector workers’ wages over the past two years grew by less than the rate of inflation. Last year, healthcare and social-assistance workers got 2.1%, educational workers got 1.6%, and public administration workers got only 1.5%. Underpaid workers are actually dampening inflationary pressure, since their lack of income means they consume less. For the lowest-paid workers, this means less food, less heat and more risk of eviction. It can’t be right to seek to tame inflation by placing the burden on those who are least able to carry it.

6. Invest in immigration, childcare and seniors’ care

Canada has a record number of job vacancies, causing employers to increase wages to attract workers. The solution is to expand the labour market, by increasing immigration beyond the current record level of 450,000 a year, including more investments in training opportunities while accelerating the construction of affordable housing and expanding affordable childcare and seniors’ care, enabling more parents and caregivers to return to work.

7. Help low-income families

Businesses can pass their increased costs on, but families can’t. The lower your income, the more you suffer. Canada has doubled the GST rebate for 11 million low-income families and individuals and offered $500 in rent relief. The U.K. is giving £1,200 each to eight million vulnerable families. Italy is paying up to 5,000 euros to help low-income people cope. In Canada, most federal income supports are indexed to inflation, but provincially, while most minimum wages are indexed, most child, seniors’ and social-assistance benefits are not. Only in Quebec are all five major supports for low-income citizens indexed. In Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, none are.

Why do central bankers insist on raising interest rates? Is it because their economists have been trained in neoclassical economics, which teaches that the market always knows best and government intervention is to be discouraged? And yet raising interest rates is an intervention. Or is it because raising interest rates happens to bring more profits to bankers and investors, who have the most power, and dump the pain on low-income workers and families, who have the least? There’s a lot to untangle here.

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Since 1990, we have lost 90% of large fish, such as sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlin, groupers and cod, according to scientists in the Future of Marine Animal Populations program. Using highly sophisticated equipment, fishing fleets have taken so much life from the ocean over the years. We are the ultimate predator, attacking prey in the ocean at up to 14 times the rate of other predators.  

On December 19, governments from 188 countries reached an agreement at COP15 in Montreal to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030. While this is a significant achievement, given negotiators were at loggerheads a few days earlier, this is just the beginning of efforts to restore and protect our oceans. Here are seven ways governments can ensure that life in the world’s oceans can thrive.  

1. Put 30% target into action

The great thing about marine areas that exclude all fishing, dredging and bottom-trawling is how abundant they become with life. Nature bounces back quickly. A 2018 meta-analysis shows that compared to non-protected waters, such reserves have six times more biomass of fish and 15 times more sharks. Marine organisms are also reportedly 28% bigger.  

Protected areas seed the nearby ocean with increased fish and biodiversity, making life easier for local fishers. They become the mothers of ocean abundance, just as large old trees become the mother trees of the forest. In the Caribbean, when marine reserves closed 35% of St. Lucia’s waters, National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project reports that within five years fish catches around the reserve increased by between 45% and 90%. When Cabo Pulmo in the Gulf of California, Mexico, became a no-take marine park, the village became a tourism and diving mecca and the adjacent waters saw a 463% increase in marine biomass within 10 years.  

The goal that negotiators agreed to at COP15 (to protect 30% by 2030)  is a scientific target, not a political one. And it’s one that will take meaningful, swift action to reach. Only 2.7% of the world’s oceans is highly protected, according to a 2021 study. Less than 1% of Canada’s territorial waters are highly protected from fishing, according to the Marine Conservation Insitute. But the federal government said last summer it had protected 10% of its marine and coastal territory. 

2. Appreciate the economics of marine reserves

Fishing communities tend to start with the assumption that creating a marine reserve will destroy their livelihoods, but the data might surprise them. In the Cabo Pulmo marine reserve in Mexico, the spectacular recovery and a flourishing diving industry has made the local community quite wealthy. Off Australia, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has generated 36 times more revenue than was previously gained from commercial fishing, according to Enric Sala, the director of the Pristine Seas project. Studies show that if we protect 29% of the global ocean, we could preserve two-thirds of all possible biodiversity benefits, and increase the annual global fish catch by 8.3 million tons, while eliminating 27% of the carbon emissions caused by bottom trawling.  

3. End all fishing in the high seas

The high seas are all the ocean area outside the 200 nautical miles of territorial waters that nations claim as their own. It yields just 4% of the global fish catch, mostly for gourmet dishes such as tuna sashimi and shark fin soup. Sala and his team at Pristine Seas have analyzed the high seas fishing fleets using satellite technology and calculated their costs and revenues. Most are profitable but depend on forced or slave labour and receive US$4 billion in annual subsidies from governments. If the human rights abuses and subsidies were to end, half of the fisheries would not be profitable, Sala’s work has found. If the world’s nations were to craft a treaty to end most high seas fishing, they could create a High Seas Reserve that would cover much of the global ocean.  

4. Ban bottom trawling and deep-sea mining

Bottom trawling has been compared to dragging a massive net across the Serengeti National Park, killing everything. It disrupts or destroys all life on the ocean floor, including corals, anemones, sponges and urchins. It crushes soft-bodied animals such as worms, amphipods, clams, crabs and lobsters, and it leaves behind a barren area that can take years to recover.  

Species fishers aren’t targeting animals, such as sharks, turtles and dolphins, which are thrown back into the sea as bycatch. Bottom trawling is happening in Canadian waters, too. In Europe, Greenpeace crews have been dropping boulders into the North Sea and the English Channel to try to stop the trawlers from destroying the sea-bed. It needs to end. 

Deep-sea mining is also disastrous for biodiversity. The International Seabed Authority has issued 31 licences for deep-sea mineral exploration, covering an area twice the size of France, and it is getting ready to receive applications for much more. This is despite an urgent warning from 600 scientists who have called for a pause because of the loss of unique and ecologically important species and populations that would result from the degradation and destruction of seafloor habitat. They want a cast-iron commitment from global leaders that they will protect the ocean, top to bottom.  

5. End the harmful fisheries subsidies

Every year, governments give US$35 billion in fisheries subsidies, $20 billion of which researchers say are harmful, supporting vessels that would otherwise be unviable, mostly from Europe, the United States, Japan and China. These subsidies have enabled them to sail farther and harvest more fish. Small-scale and artisanal fisheries employ 90% of all fishers, but the subsidies fund the big fleets. The responsibility to end the subsidies rests with the World Trade Organization. The Stop Funding Overfishing coalition, which represents 182 non-governmental organizations, is leading the campaign to end these subsidies. 

6. Protect territorial waters fisheries 

The territorial waters within 200 nautical miles of land generate 96% of the world’s catch. To protect these areas, one solution might be to establish local ocean trusts that are accountable to nature and future generations, giving non-fishers a majority on their governing boards with a duty to ensure that the inshore marine ecosystem remains healthy. The marine property rights would be placed with the trust, and local and Indigenous fishers would be invited to organize cooperatives to manage the coastal fisheries on behalf of their communities. 

7. Teach all children to appreciate the oceans

For most people, the ocean is a realm we know almost nothing about. And our ignorance has let the long-liners, bottom trawlers and pair trawlers do such damage. If schools and parents accepted the challenge to inspire all children about the beauty and abundance of the ocean and teach them about the wounds inflicted by humans that are destroying marine life, we would have a better chance at saving it, enabling nature to recover.  

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible.

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It has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and 50% of plants. Between 1970 and 2016 alone, humans wiped out 68% of the world’s mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. The world’s governments support this destructive activity with subsidies worth between US $1.8 trillion and $6 trillion a year ($5 billion to $16 billion a day).

The insurance giant Swiss Re Group has warned that half of our global GDP depends on high-functioning biodiversity and that a fifth of the world’s economies are consequently at risk of ecosystem collapse. Meanwhile, almost every country is missing its targets on biodiversity protection. It’s unclear whether the thousands of delegates meeting in Montreal this week for the latest United Nations biodiversity conference, COP15, will make any significant progress. But here are seven steps they can take to ensure that nature is included in all financial decision-making.

1. Require every business to report on its impact on nature

Governments require annual financial reporting, but there’s no column for “impact on nature.” More than 330 businesses and financial institutions in 52 countries have urged world leaders to make this mandatory by 2030 and are pushing for governments to agree to this at COP15. This would be good but not sufficient. Every business needs to become nature-positive, meaning that it does more to restore nature than it does to harm it. The assaults on nature will continue as long as this remains voluntary.

2. Add a circular economy tax to most products

Since 1970, globally, our use of fossil fuels more than doubled, our extraction of biomass has almost tripled, our extraction of metals has increased fourfold, and our production of plastics has increased 11-fold. In total, this comes to 100 billion tonnes a year of materials, some 15 tonnes per person. All this extraction exacts its toll on nature, and only 8.6% of the materials we use is being recycled. France has developed an anti-waste law for a circular economy, including the principle that whoever creates a product should be responsible for its demise. Amsterdam is aiming to reduce the amount of new raw materials it uses by half by 2030, and to become a fully circular city by 2050.

Every large company should be required to develop a circular economy and damage-to-nature scorecard for its major products. Governments could then enact a circular economy accountability act, with an annual scorecard that would require companies to report their scores, along with how they’re going to make progress, as Scotland is proposing to do. They could then impose a circular economy tax on all major products, graded by their scores, using the revenues to pay for recycling, composting and the restoration of nature. Products that are easy to repair or recycle, and that do no harm to nature, would carry no tax.

3. Make ecocide a criminal offence

It should be criminal to wipe out life on the ocean floor with massive trawler nets,  or to destroy a tropical rainforest to produce palm oil. The ongoing campaign to add ecocide as a crime to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court began 12 years ago, following efforts by the Scottish lawyer Polly Higgins. In November 2022, the Belgian government proposed writing ecocide into domestic law.

Pope Francis, Britain’s Labour Party and the International Corporate Governance Network (an investor-led organization managing US$70 trillion in assets) have all called on governments to criminalize ecocide. The European Union has launched a feasibility study on the issue. If corporate executives knew they could be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against nature, they might think twice before approving another assault.

4. Reward landowners who are champions for nature

Today, only 15% of the world’s land, 15% of freshwaters and 7% of our oceans are protected. The COP15 goal is to protect 30% by 2030 and 50% by 2050, so there’s a long way to go.

Recognizing the critical role of Indigenous land stewardship and developing more Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas is an essential beginning. Private landowners also have a role to play. What if all landowners with more than 1,000 acres were required to submit an annual report on their impact on nature? Those impacts could include deforestation, tree planting, the use of chemical pesticides, the protection of endangered species, rewilding, native species restoration and more. Landowners who scored high on positive initiatives would qualify for a tax break as a reward for being a champion for nature. Once established, the tax could be applied to smaller landowners.

5. End nature-destructive subsidies

Every year, governments globally give out US$700 billion in farm subsidies, according to a 2019 report by the Food and Land Use Coalition, and 90% of those subsidies have been deemed harmful to nature by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. They also give US$620 billion a year to the fossil fuel industry, US$320 billion a year to harmful water management, US$155 billion a year to unsustainable forestry and US$35 billion a year to harmful fisheries, according to a 2022 study by Earth Track. Phasing out these environmentally damaging subsidies should be the bare minimum that countries agree to at the COP15 talks, says Li Shuo, a policy advisor at Greenpeace China.

6. Use central bank credit guidance to direct investments

As long as people can continue to profit by investing in nature’s destruction without any repercussions, the disaster will continue.

The European Union has developed a sustainable taxonomy to inform bankers and investors which activities are harmful to nature and the climate, and which are not. Like everything, it is vulnerable to political distortion, but it lays down an essential principle: that we should draw a line in the sand that says “do not invest here.”

If governments and central bankers truly registered what deep trouble we are in, they would work together to issue credit guidance, warning banks not to invest in red-listed activities and withdrawing privileges such as deposit insurance and central bank assistance from those that ignore the guidance. The Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, has begun considering these concerns through its report Indebted to Nature, which it released in 2020.

7. Use stronger legislation to protect nature

Targets are useless without legislation to back them up; Canada has missed almost every biodiversity target it has set. It is because of the weakness or absence of legislation that nature continues to be harmed. Forest companies are allowed to continue clear-cutting (roughly a million acres of boreal forest a year) and farmers are allowed to continue poisoning birds and bees (Canada backed away from an outright ban on toxic neonicotinoids in 2021).

Voluntary measures only reach those who are willing to put nature above profit. Governments must pass stronger laws. For Canada, this means a strong nature and biodiversity act. Activists are calling for similar pieces of legislation in Australia, Britain, the European Union and elsewhere.

To make these seven steps a reality, we need a resounding call for action from citizens, schools, colleges, businesses and local governments. COP15 is Canada’s chance to show leadership, or let the biodiversity of the planet vanish.

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible.

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 Meanwhile rising inflation is driving growing discontent, as a third of us are unable to pay our bills on time, and polls show that 39% are worried about the rising cost of living. The economic landscape is grim for young people who are locked out of the housing market. It is even grimmer for many people of colour and Indigenous people , one in four of whom live in poverty, including 40% of their children. Is it any wonder that many people have concluded that the world is stacked against them and democracy is failing them?  

To reduce this injustice, we need to address inequality’s root causes, which lie within traditional practices of money creation and land ownership. We need to implement ways to change the reality that when the return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth, as the French economist Thomas Piketty has been at pains to point out. And we need to do this now, while the windows of change are wide open: popular support for reducing inequality is at an all-time high of 82%.  

It may seem overly simple to whittle this immense issue down to a list of a few solutions, but hear me out. These are the distillation of complex steps to solve a complicated problem.  

1. Fair banking for all

How many businesses can create a new product for no cost at the simple click of a mouse?  

You might think this isn’t possible, and yet this is how banks operate. They create money as loans and charge interest on it. When the Bank of Canada raises interest rates and a homeowner with a mortgage sees their rate increase to 6% from 3%, the banks double their income with little additional effort.  

Those who have capital to invest or who own shares in a bank get richer, thanks to those who are now paying more on their mortgages. The solution is to make banking a community, cooperative or public service that can create money at very low interest, or at 0% with a fee to cover costs and losses. In Western Europe, public banks hold US$12 trillion in assets. In Germany, 40% of all banking assets are held by public or community banks. 

Central banks also create new money, adding it to the economy to head off a crisis without need for repayment. If that new money was distributed equally to everyone, or preferentially to people on low incomes, it would have the same effect of stimulating demand and reducing financial fear, but that’s not how it’s done.  

Since 2008, the world’s central banks have given US$33 trillion in newly created money to banks and corporations by buying risky assets off them; they have not given any of this money to the public. This has been the primary driver of the recent dramatic increase in inequality.  

It has caused stock markets and housing prices to soar and those who own such assets to get richer, while those on the borrowing side of the divide who don’t own property have continued to struggle. This has created a permanent distortion in the economy, favouring the wealthy. The solution is for the federal government to change the Bank of Canada’s mandate, requiring it to exercise its money-creating powers for the benefit of all Canadians, not just for those who are already rich. 

2. Universal basic services for all

Universal basic income sounds nice. The idea is that regardless of need or work status, every citizen is given a monthly sum from the government. But British authors Anna Coote and Andrew Percy have found no evidence that universal basic income can live up to the ambitious claims made for it. They argue that it makes more sense and is more affordable to invest in universal basic services, including affordable childcare and adult social care, affordable housing, affordable public transport and affordable broadband.  

 If the cost of rent can be held at $700 to $1,000 a month, rather than $1,500, that’s a basic income equivalent (BIE) of between $500 and $800 a month. If a community has affordable transit, great cycling and walking trails, as well as a car-share cooperative (so that you don’t need to own a car), that’s a BIE of between $300 and $500 a month.  

 Childcare costs $1,000 to $1,500 a month, so $10-a-day childcare becomes a BIE of $800 to $1,300 a month. All combined, excluding affordable adult social care, these measures come out to between $1,600 and $2,600 a month, which is a pretty good basic income. 

3. Social inheritance bonds for all 

 Most of the wealth we enjoy today stems not from our efforts, but from those of our ancestors. It is a social inheritance.  Inheritance laws, by contrast, assume that we earn it all, resulting in huge payments to the children of the rich. In Canada there is no inheritance tax, further widening the inequality divide.  

 The solution is to tax all inheritances above (for instance) $250,000, to invest the income in a Social Wealth Fund managed by the government, earning a typical 3% a year, and to use the income to establish social inheritance baby bonds. These bonds would give every newborn child a gift of $1,000, and up to $2,000 for babies in the lowest-income families, to be topped up by that much again on each birthday. When the child reaches its 18th birthday, these bonds could be withdrawn for a list of allowable uses such as studying, starting a business or buying a home. During that time, the nest egg for a child from a low-income family would grow to around $46,000, entirely transforming that person’s sense of opportunity.

4. Higher education for all  

When people don’t have equal opportunity to learn career skills through higher education, it makes the inequality divide ever wider

Around 62% of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 64 have some kind of higher education – the highest in the world – but that still leaves 38% who don’t. The solution is to make higher education free for all who can’t afford to pay, as it used to be in the 1970s and as it is in many European countries, and for full-time students who are residents of Quebec. Early childhood education is another way to increase equality of opportunity. In prosperous Canada, there are spaces for only 27% of our children. The solutions are quality training for early childhood educators, as in Finland, where they require a bachelor’s degree, and quality affordable $10-a-day childcare, as B.C. is introducing.  

5. Affordable housing for all  

On one side of the inequality divide, two-thirds of Canadians own a home. On the other side, a third of Canadians either pay an average monthly rent of $2,043 (15.4% more than last year), or they live with their parents, or have no home at all. Two earlier “Big Solutions” columns laid out the solutions, including transitioning rental properties to community ownership, so I won’t say more here.  

 Let me just pose a question. How many MPs, MLAs and MPPs own their homes? If our legislatures reserved a third of the seats for lower-income renters, think how different our housing policies might be. 

 6. Fair work for all

Those who are already wealthy get more income by investing it, as the French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The rest of us need to work.  

 Canada’s average wage may be $36 per hour, but this means that many working Canadians earn much less. In 1998, 5.2% of Canadian workers earned only the minimum wage. By 2018, this had doubled to 10.4% (15% in Ontario), almost half of whom are over 25. The first essential solution is more participation by labour unions.  

 During the 1950s and ’60s, Canada’s CEOs earned 30 times more than their employees. In 2020, Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs were paid an average of $10.9 million a year, 191 times more than the average worker.  

 When employees play an active role on company boards through their unions, there is a smaller range of salary scales, greater investment by workers in their firms’ strategies, and higher productivity. In Germany, workers elect representatives to a third of the seats on the boards of companies with between 500 and 2,000 employees, and half the seats in companies with more than 2,000 employees.  

 The second essential solution is employee ownership, making it easy for an owner who wants to retire to sell to the employees. The way to achieve this is through an employee ownership trust, which Toronto-based Social Capital Partners is working to achieve, and which the federal government has said it will create.  

 An American study found that household wealth is 92% higher among employee owners than among employees in traditionally owned firms. In the U.K., 200 companies have been sold to their employees by this means, creating 20,000 new employee owners. 

7. Fair taxation for all

According to polling conducted by Abacus Data, 62% of Canadians feel that the country’s tax system is unfair, and 89% of us support the idea of an annual wealth tax on Canada’s richest people.  

 A 1% annual tax on wealth over $10 million, 2% over $100 million, and 3% over $1 billion would generate $26 billion a year, according to an analysis conducted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. A 25% tax on the foreign profits of Canadian corporations would generate $20 billion a year.  

 Increasing corporate income tax from 15% to 20% would generate $11 billion a year. A tax on 100% of realized capital gains, instead of allowing 50% to be tax-free, would generate $20 billion a year. A similar tax on corporate capital gains would generate $19 billion a year.  

 Along with other measures, these changes could generate $100 billion a year, which would go a long way toward funding free college education and universal basic services for all. If we could also end personal and corporate tax avoidance, this would generate an additional $13 billion to $30 billion a year. I could add declaring a debt jubilee, but that’s complicated, so I’ll leave it for another time. 

 Taken together, these solutions would lessen those feelings of injustice and build a Canada that is fair for all. What would it take to make them happen? Far greater coherence and a wider reach of imagination in policy debates about poverty and inequality. A willingness by politicians to show leadership in this realm. And far stronger demands from ordinary Canadians. The level of inequality that has crept up on us is hurtful, harmful and politically dangerous.  

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible.  

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1. Tell the whole truth about the climate crisis

Most people are living in what I call climate limbo-land. They know climate change is pretty serious, but since almost no government is treating it as the crisis it is, they assume it’s all right to keep on flying, driving a gas-guzzling SUV, eating beef and complaining about the price of oil. If people knew the half of it, they’d be full of climate anxiety and demanding rapid urgent action, just as the young climate strikers are.

The Canadian government, for its part, is generally saying the right things, but its communications around the climate crisis need to have even more urgency. Through their actions, governments should be ringing alarm bells about the reality of the situation.

Alarm bell #1: We’re heading for a world that will be at least 2°C to 3°C warmer by century’s end. The last time it was that warm, three million years ago, sea levels were 16 metres higher.

Alarm bell #2: These climate events – more destructive floods, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts, quick-spreading wildfires and more prolonged heatwaves – will all get worse. And they will cost us. In Canada, losses caused by the climate crisis are projected to cost $2.8 trillion a year by the end of the century under a 2°C warming scenario, according to Queen’s University’s Institute for Sustainable Finance.

Alarm bell #3: By 2050 there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees seeking a safe place to live. So please – tell people the truth!

2. Electrify everything

All our energy except geothermal and tidal comes from the sun, that amazing ball of fire a million times larger than our tiny Earth. For more than a million years, we have used its energy by burning wood grown by sunlight. For 300 years, we have burned fossilized wood, plants and marine organisms that grew from the sun’s energy, in the form of coal, oil and gas.

Today, we know how to use the sun’s energy directly through solar, wind (the sun’s heat creates pressure differentials, which generate wind) and other renewables. Solar and wind are already the cheapest forms of new energy, and renewable technologies will only improve and get cheaper. Battery technologies are improving every year, as engineers develop new ways to store energy that don’t require lithium and other rare minerals. No more air pollution, no more related illnesses, no more tanker disasters, and no more wars over oil. Why hang on to the past? It makes no sense.

3. Stop burning fossil fuels

Around 75% of the climate crisis is being caused by our continued use of fossil fuels. Every time we burn coal, gas or oil, we pour fuel on the crisis, making the future worse. No one is saying “Stop burning all fossil fuels today,” but the climate scientists who understand the alarm bells are saying we do need to stop investing in new oil and gas infrastructure and exploration. The only reason for fossil fuel expansion is to continue to squeeze out more profits for investors, at the expense of our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives.

Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from fracked natural gas is not better than coal, as its promoters claim, since the process of fracking releases methane, which traps 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 20 years, making its climate impact as bad as coal.

Governments should sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, as the European Parliament recently did. There are a thousand ways for civilization to flourish without burning fossil fuels. Thank you, fossil fuels. You served us well, but your time is over.

4. Spend what it takes on climate change solutions

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, nobody in the U.K. asked whether they could afford to fight the war. They did whatever it took. They borrowed, increasing the national debt to 200% of GDP. (Canada’s debt today is just 45% of GDP.) They issued Victory Bonds. They invested massively to save their very future.

Investments in solar, wind and other renewables will pay for themselves through utility bills. Retrofitting buildings to replace gas with heat pumps and better insulation will require grants and tax breaks. Investments in transit, bike lanes, walkable communities and tree planting will improve our quality of life. Investments in research and development will produce better batteries, new ways to make concrete and steel, and new circular economy materials.

The world’s nations spend US$2 billion a day on direct fossil fuel subsidies, while the oil industry has made $3 billion a day in profits every day for the last 50 years. Imagine what we could achieve if governments were to invest those subsidies in climate solutions, and levy an oil industry windfall profits tax.

5. Stop eating meat

It’s one of those realities we need to accept. The livestock industry, which produces meat and dairy, causes as much climate pollution as the entire world’s transportation. It comes from a combination of rainforests being destroyed to raise cattle, fertilizers and manure producing nitrous oxide, and cattle constantly burping methane. A kilogram of beef generates 63 times more climate pollution than a kilogram of wheat. Pork generates eight times more; chicken six times more.

The belief that if cattle are grass-fed, that “grazing is amazing,” as burger chain A&W claims, is simply not true: the cattle keep burping methane and releasing nitrous oxide through their manure.

Instead of beef and dairy, there’s a whole world of vegetarian and vegan cuisine to explore, full of taste and flavour.

6. Leave no one behind

When French president Emmanuel Macron introduced a new fuel tax in 2018, it was quickly derailed by angry people wearing yellow vests who felt they had been unfairly targeted. Canada’s carbon tax, by contrast, is returned to most Canadians in their taxes as credits or rebates. But we need to go further. We need a truly just transition in which any worker whose job disappears as a result of the reduction of fossil fuels will be assured financial support and training to find a new job (of which there will be plenty). Indigenous people all across Canada must be included in the many opportunities that open up.

7. Restore climate stability

Is all this enough? Alas no, for the climate crisis is caused not by our current emissions, but by our accumulated emissions over 200 years. Before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). In May 2022 it reached 420 ppm, a level not seen for four million years, and it increases by two ppm every year as we continue to burn fossil fuels, destroy forests and eat beef.

To restore climate stability and cease our canter to catastrophe, we need to suck the surplus carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. We can do this by protecting Earth’s forests; restoring farmland soils and wetlands; planting a trillion trees; using the world’s oceans to grow carbon-storing seaweeds, seagrasses and mangroves; making synthetic limestone; and through other means, all of which the Foundation for Climate Restoration is pursuing.

The pursuit of “net-zero” is a delusional folly: it uses nature’s solutions such as these to justify continued climate pollution. We need to do both: to cease pouring fuel on the fire and to bring all that excess carbon back down to earth, where it will no longer trap heat.

So please, leave limbo-land. Come into action-land. We need all hands on deck.

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible.

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All around the world, people on the cruel side of the affordable housing crisis need our help. Something needs to be done to aid those who don’t have shelter, who struggle to pay sky-high rents, who are living in tents and cars and for whom the hope of ever buying a home has long gone. Financialized capitalism, bereft of kindness, has created misery for millions, turning housing ownership into an asset class, ripe for the squeezing of struggling tenants.

What has caused the crisis? An abundance of money pouring into the market from various sources has met a shortage of supply, driving up rents and prices. Lower-income people who do not receive inheritances have been pushed into the housing gutter, while governments have washed their hands and looked the other way. Finally, politicians are waking up. Last week, I looked at immediate, rapid solutions. This week I suggest fundamental changes that could end the housing crisis, forever.

1. Make a binding commitment

The data tells us that we need to build 3.5 million new units of affordable housing by 2030. That’s 350,000 units a year – seven times more than the federal Liberals, NDP or Conservatives have proposed. A quarter of these need to be for people on very low incomes, renting for less than $750 a month. Governments at every level need to declare an emergency, call for all hands on deck, form collaborative partnerships, and ensure that this much housing gets built – all of it green and sustainable, using heat pumps, not natural gas, and ideally with Passive House design. The annual investment – some $95 billion a year – does not need to come from taxation, since it’s a bankable investment, a self-supported debt. In 2021, Canada’s banks and credit unions created $454 billion in mortgages. A Canadian public bank similar to Germany’s KfW bank or Holland’s NWB bank could create $95 billion a year at zero or very low interest, and make it available proportionally to every province.

2. Create carrots and sticks

To build so much new affordable housing will require committed leadership and the mass production of manufactured and modular homes. To tempt developers, governments could waive corporate taxation for the builders of genuinely affordable housing and continue the 100% GST rebate. They could waive income tax for tradespeople who work on affordable housing and for anyone who creates a new secondary suite. Every municipality could be required to set up an affordable housing agency as a condition of getting funds; to set yearly targets to build sufficient new affordable housing based on local data; to relax exclusive zoning; to accelerate the approvals process, as Victoria has done; and to build to green standards in walkable communities within easy reach of transit.

3. End exclusive zoning

When an area is zoned exclusively for single-family housing, it shuts out the townhouses, fourplexes, cottage courts, apartments and multi-family housing that offer affordable housing for people on lower incomes. This type of housing is known as the “missing middle” because it’s neither single-family homes nor big tower blocks. By ending this exclusivity, as they’re doing in New Zealand’s five largest cities, and doing so with care, many new opportunities will arise to build affordable housing. If some neighbours are fiercely opposed, allow a street to opt out. Single-storey commercial strips can be rezoned to allow three-storey living above the stores. Secondary suites can be allowed in every single-family home. Whenever a developer buys a property with development in mind, they should be required to build a percentage of the units as affordable housing. In Vienna, the proportion is 66%; in Vancouver, it’s only 20%. There should also be a guarantee of tenant protection, as in Burnaby, or tenants’ democracy, as in Denmark, and a density bonus offer if they include special-needs housing. Alternatively, they could pay into an affordable housing fund.

4. Empower non-profit developers

If you live in a housing co-operative whose members have paid off their mortgage, your annual costs should be low, just as they are for a similar homeowner. If co-ops and similar forms of non-profit housing became the norm for affordable housing, the entire concept of rent, which causes divisive conflicts and drives inequality, could be gradually retired. In Vienna, one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world, two-thirds of the residents live in municipal, co-operative or publicly subsidized housing. This can work for transition units for people experiencing homelessness, for social housing for people on income assistance, for below-market affordable rental units and for regular market rental units. To stimulate non-profit developers, in addition to the incentives above, projects could be exempt from development cost charges and be given a 10-year property tax waiver. Ending mandatory parking requirements for new buildings would also help, since parking can cost up to 20% of a new unit, yet most low-income people don’t own cars.

5. Turn tenants into owners

To build a fair, equitable society, and ensure that everyone has a secure affordable home to live in, we need to end the financialization of housing. Between 2015 and 2019, for every new affordable unit created at public cost, 15 units renting below $750 a month were lost to real estate investment trusts and similar investors. A home is a fundamental human right, not a speculative commodity. We need to steadily convert most rental units to co-operative or non-profit ownership, excluding homes owned and rented out by a single person. This could be achieved by giving community organizations the first right of refusal and the financial means to buy a rental apartment or mobile home park, to protect it from speculative investors by placing ownership with a community land trust, and by allowing pre-emptive compulsory purchase when it is in the public interest. In 2021, Berlin voted to buy 15,000 city apartments from two large corporate landlords, placing them under public ownership. In a subsequent referendum, Berliners approved instructing the city to buy a further 240,000 homes from large real estate companies, moving 15% of the city’s housing stock into public ownership.

6. Level the financial playing field

How fair is it that Canada’s seven largest real estate investment trusts, which together own 145,000 rental units, have avoided paying $1.5 billion through special tax breaks? How fair is it that someone can buy a house in 2015 for $500,000 as an investment (not a principal residence), gather $18,000 a year in rent, sell it for $1.2 million in 2022, pay 25% in capital gains tax on half of the increased value, and walk away with a $612,500 gain? This is how inequality, and the divide between owners and renters, increases. Canada’s richest families now hold a quarter of the country’s wealth. The bottom 40% own hardly more than 1%.

Canada’s new property flipping tax is a start but not enough. As well as taxing empty houses, we could end property speculation by gradually increasing the taxable portion of capital gains on land to 100%, less the value of improvements, and use the income to support below-market affordable housing. Finally, to slow the fountain of money that the banks keep pouring into the property market, inflating prices, the Bank of Canada could require more conservative loan appraisal rules, as Germany does, linking a loan to the rentable value of a property, not its speculative value.

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Canada’s housing crisis is causing distress for millions of people who are struggling to find affordable places to rent. It’s causing trouble for business owners, too. In Qualicum Beach, B.C., the town’s most popular restaurant – Lefty’s – had to close in 2022 because its staff couldn’t find anywhere to live nearby. In some of Canada’s cities, employees have to spend two to three hours a day commuting from the closest place there’s a home they can afford. 

The long-term solutions are clear: end exclusive single-family zoning; massively expand the rental housing supply, with special emphasis on public and non-profit housing and cooperatives; and tax land wealth. But all this takes time. What can governments do now, to produce rapid results? 

1. Protect and encourage mobile homes

Every local government could upgrade its bylaws to cease being so restrictive when it comes to mobile homes. Let tiny homes have wheels. Let them have sleeping lofts. Let them have composting toilets. Allow people living in RVs to park places other than official RV parks. Instruct your bylaw officers not to ticket or evict people living in unapproved suites and dwellings, as they are doing on Salt Spring Island, at least until the housing crisis eases. Allow mobile homes on private property, as Oregon has done, as long as they follow health and safety standards. Make permitting quick and easy. Let them be clustered in villages, as Victoria has done. Allow colleges to create them for students. Municipalities should write tiny-homes village zoning bylaws, enabling landowners to apply to rezone. We should also urge governments to pass legislation to prevent profit-driven private equity funds from buying mobile home parks and increasing the rents and fees.  

2. Restrict short-term vacation rentals

Shall we rent our second home to a permanent tenant, or earn more by turning it into a short-term vacation rental unit? In too many places, owners have chosen the latter. In Greater Victoria, where the vacancy rate for an affordable two-bedroom unit is a miserable 0.2%, causing massive distress, Vrbo boasts of having more than a thousand units for rent, while Airbnb has hundreds more. Across Canada, Vrbo offers 32,460 vacation rentals. Toronto and 10 U.S. cities have passed laws banning or restricting short-term rentals. In B.C., the City of Victoria and Salt Spring and Galiano islands have stopped allowing short-term rentals in secondary properties. Sechelt has decided to cap the number at 15, out of a possible 250. In Vancouver, when short-term rentals were limited to a person’s home and required a licence, listings fell by 50%. In Ontario, condo boards have been given the right to ban short-term rentals. These controls could be lifted once the local rental vacancy rate hits 3%. 

3. Impose a speculation and vacancy tax

In 2017, Vancouver introduced an Empty Homes Tax, which now stands at 5% of a property’s assessed taxable value. By 2019 it had led to a 26% reduction in vacant properties and encouraged 5,920 condo owners to offer their units for rent. By 2021, it had raised $86 million for investment in affordable housing. In 2019, the B.C. government introduced a separate speculation and vacancy tax in various regions, which encouraged 20,000 condo owners to rent their units out instead of leaving them empty. It has also generated $231 million that is being used to build affordable housing, 86% of which came from non-B.C. residents. Foreign owners of vacant homes in a designated area must pay 2% of their property’s assessed value annually; B.C. owners pay 0.5%. Beginning in 2023, Ottawa and Toronto will introduce a 1% vacancy tax. 

4. Allow secondary suites in most homes

It’s an obvious way to create more rental housing, but too often an application takes months to wind its way to approval. Oak Bay, on Vancouver Island, now allows secondary suites without need for parking. To speed up permitting, Quesnel has pre-approved five designs for suites. Toronto allows such suites in townhouses, detached homes and duplexes. Local councils should allow homeowners to have both a boarder and a secondary suite, and up to six unrelated people in a home. To encourage homeowners, the federal government should create a 10-year tax-free allowance on the income from renting a secondary suite.  

5. Buy motels

In 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s federal government earmarked $1 billion to help cities and housing providers to buy hotels and motels to keep people from becoming homeless, enabling BC Housing to buy several hotels. In California, 120 sites, mostly hotels and motels, were converted into 5,900 affordable homes for low-income renters and people who were previously homeless. It has to be done carefully, for when motels are used to shelter people who were previously unhoused there are sometimes reports of property damage, theft, drug use, and abusive behaviour toward staff. It’s a quick solution, if it’s done right.  

6. Protect tenants from eviction

The best way to stop a looming eviction for tenants who can’t afford their rent is prevention. B.C. has established a rent bank that offers interest-free loans and grants to renters who are at risk of eviction because of financial challenges. Of those whom the BC Rent Bank was able to help in the spring of 2021, 94% were able to maintain or improve their housing situations. CMHC research shows that preventing an eviction in this way saves the tenant $2,932 and saves the landlord $8,663. Burnaby has developed Canada’s best tenants’ assistance policy for renters who face “demoviction” due to a landlord’s property renovation.  

There are good tenants and bad tenants, good landlords and bad landlords. If you volunteer in a tenants’ advisory centre, you’ll hear complaints about landlords who harass their tenants out of their homes, landlords who use renovation as an excuse to evict a tenant and charge a higher rent to the next one, and fixed-term leases that allow a landlord to evict you at the end of your lease. In September, a property company called Q Residential demanded $3,000 from around a third of tenants at 1244 Donald Street, Ottawa – a huge, grey 16-storey concrete block with 250 units that houses new immigrants, Syrian refugees and low-income people who either live on disability pay or work in low-wage jobs. They were told it represented a retroactive rent increase approved by the Landlord and Tenant Board (which Q Residential says covers “costs associated with required infrastructure improvements for resident safety”), and they had until November 1 to pay up. How many will be forced to leave? 

In B.C., housing advocates are proposing vacancy-control policy as a solution that connects the rent to the unit, rather than the tenant, and prevents a landlord from increasing the rent when a tenant leaves, which is what financialized real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been doing as they look for ways to pay their shareholders a 10% annual dividend. Financial firms own 340,000 units in multi-residential rental buildings and an estimated 20 to 30% of Canada’s purpose-built rental housing. Tenants’ associations support the idea, but landlords say it would discourage developers from building new rental apartments. Provinces can also limit rent increases to 2% a year, as B.C. has done.  

These remedies are all doable, but until those suffering the brunt of the housing crisis find a way to organize, the solutions will probably get bogged down in political inertia. Canada needs a strong citizen-based affordable housing alliance with a clear platform for change and chapters in every community.  

Correction, October 20, 2022:
A previous version of this story erroneously stated that Q Residential demanded $3,000 from every tenant at its property in Ottawa. The increase applied to a third of the building’s residents. Corporate Knights regrets the error.

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