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To add some personal flavour to the divestment issue, we asked one of the architects of the movement – climate activist, author and 350.org co-founder, Bill McKibben – to chat with us about how he invests his own money for our inaugural Money Talks column.

What sparked your initial idea of asking institutions to drop their investments in fossil fuels?

Naomi Klein and I were reading the same somewhat obscure report from a London-based think tank, Carbon Tracker Initiative. It showed that these companies had far, far more carbon in their reserves than any scientist thought we could ever burn. Both of us thought: viewed this way these are rogue companies, trying to profit off unfathomable destruction. Since we’d both been active in the anti-apartheid divestment movement a generation earlier, we figured maybe it might be appropriate here.

Who was the first person you were able to convince to divest?

Pride of place goes to tiny Unity College in rural Maine. The president got up during one of the roadshows of the Do The Math tour to make his announcement  – an $8 million endowment, I think. Now that we’re at $8 trillion it doesn’t seem so big, but it got us going.

What’s been your biggest win so far?

The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund? The nation of Ireland? New York City’s pension fund? Half the universities in the UK? The first win that really started to change things fast was perhaps the Rockefeller family, who divested their charities. If the original oil fortune was done with oil…

Why do you think there are so few Canadian organizations on board with divestment?

Because Canadians, pleasant and conflict-averse, can’t bring themselves to say to Alberta, ‘you simply can’t dig up all that oil and burn it, it by itself will use up a third of the planet’s carbon budget.’  So they’ve never been able to really grapple with climate change. Look at the tragic positions that Justin Trudeau has gotten in trying.

The Canadian responsible investing sector has focused more on shareholder engagement to push for change from the inside. What are your thoughts on this tactic?

Works with many kinds of companies, but not fossil fuel ones. Because there’s not a small flaw in the business model–the flaw is the business model.

Petroleum producers have, not surprisingly, tried to discredit the divestment movement. What’s the biggest myth being propagated about divestment?

That it doesn’t accomplish anything. The industry has pushed it with great diligence (which should tell you something right there) but by now we’ve seen Shell having to declare it a material risk and Peabody Coal listing it as a factor in its bankruptcy. In Politico a few weeks ago, one coal exec after another explained they couldn’t raise capital anymore because there were too few funds left willing to invest

Your focus has been on convincing institutions to divest, but many individuals reading this will be thinking of doing the same. Do you think the ripple made by an individual’s decision to buy or sell a stock or fund makes any difference in the grand scheme of things?

Well, it’s more important to move institutionally, but to the extent that changing your light bulb matters, divestment would matter more.

Have you divested your personal investments to reflect your values?

I’m a…writer and volunteer organizer. What investments I have reflect my values.

Can you give us a rundown on which investments you hold?

Nothing that burns.

How has investing with your values worked out for you financially?

Living in the woods has worked out for me financially.

How has divesting worked out financially for those governments and institutions that have chosen this tactic?

Yes, anyone who divested has made out like bandits – the fossil fuel sector has badly underperformed the larger market. So, for instance, the New York State pension fund would have $19k more dollars per pensioner had it done the right thing when all this started.

What’s next for the divestment movement?

I think we’re aiming for $10 trillion by next year.

The post Bill McKibben on investing in “nothing that burns” appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What are the specific metrics/calculations that go into the ranking?

There are a total of 21 performance metrics covering resource management, employee management, clean revenue and supplier performance. The mix and weighting used is tailored to each sector/peer group. See our 2019 Global 100 Methodology for more information.

Is it valid to rank companies from such vastly different sectors against each other?
Rankings are based on high-level metrics – carbon emissions, pay equity and diversity, for example – that are recognized as broadly relevant to corporate sustainability, and that lend themselves to objective measurement. The mix and weighting of metrics is then tailored to each sector/peer group. So while carbon emissions matter to all companies, they have a greater bearing on the ranking of a mining company than of a bank. For the 2019 ranking, further refinements were made to peer group definitions to better ensure they are a basis for apples-to-apples comparisons. A fixed number of slots on the Global 100 is also assigned to each peer group, based on the relative size of its global market capitalization.

What is meant by “clean revenue”, and why does it account for so much of the ranking?
Corporate Knights uses an open-source and evolving taxonomy to define products and services that are socially and environmentally beneficial. This taxonomy is informed by a wide range of research and recommendations drawn from numerous governmental, academic and other sources.  A full list of products and services is available at the “2019 Global 100 methodology” link at: corporateknights.com/reports/global-100/ Generating clean revenue is seen as a strong indicator of both contributions to addressing key social and environmental challenges, and of likely corporate longevity.

Is there an application/nomination process?
No. Corporate Knights conducts the analysis on as comprehensive a basis as possible, including all publicly listed global companies with annual revenues of US$1B or more, and who pass the screening criteria. Qualifying companies do not have to apply or be nominated, and are assessed whether they wish to be or not. No submissions are required, although Corporate Knights offers shortlisted companies an opportunity to validate data. This year, the total sample assessed included approximately 7,500 corporations.

What was the basis for a company’s inclusion on this ranking?

Refer to our spreadsheet providing specific scoring for all ranked companies in 2019. See Global 100 Results (available January 22, 6am GMT +1).

How have companies been ranked in the past?
Rankings from past years are available at: corporateknights.com/reports/global-100/

How do companies compare to their peers?

Peer rankings are available for all ranked companies in 2019. See Global 100 Results (available January 22, 6am GMT +1).

Who is the organization behind the ranking?
Corporate Knights is a publishing and research firm based in Toronto, Canada. It publishes the world’s largest circulating magazine focused on sustainability and responsible business; and its research division develops corporate ratings, and investment product ratings and tools. Its research also powers various external initiatives including the Global Green Financial Index. Corporate Knights was founded in 2002 and is an employee-owned B Corp.

How long has this ranking been in existence?
The Global 100 ranking was first produced in 2005, and has been updated on an annual basis ever since. This most recent ranking is the 15th version to be released.

What makes this ranking credible?
The Global 100 is a comprehensive and well-established ranking, and is closely tracked by institutional investors and other stakeholders interested in corporate sustainability. The methodology is fully transparent and has been continually refined to improve the comparability and precision of the outcomes, and to leverage evolving data availability and understandings of key determinants of corporate sustainability. The Global 100 is based on an objective, replicable assessment of publicly available data, rather than on any subjective determinations. While there are various similar rankings, the Global 100 is distinctive in its scope, and has earned third-party recognition for its rigourousness. A panel of independent experts regularly provides input to guide further refinement of Global 100 methodology.

When does the ranking come out?

The 2019 Global 100 Results  will be available January 22, 6am GMT +1.

The post Global 100 ranking FAQ appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But despite playing such a big role in our everyday lives, there remains remarkably little interest in funding public research to demystify this topic. The general public itself remains confused, a knowledge gap author Nicola Temple is attempting to rectify with her new book, Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food.

A Canadian scientist now based in the U.K., Temple worked for years as a biologist studying fish in a number of remote places around the world before turning her attention to explaining science to a broader audience. Her previous book, Sorting the Beef from the Bull, explored the forensics of food fraud.

Corporate Knights recently sat down with Temple to discuss the myriad factors that popularized the use of processed foods, where the latest cutting-edge technology is heading and how to become a more informed consumer.

CK: You demonstrate in the book that food preservation itself is far from a new concept for humans.

Temple: There’s evidence that we’ve been processing milk into cheese for about 9,000 years. It is, possibly, why many of us acquired a mutation that allows us to digest milk into adulthood. The fact that we started to cook and cut our food meant that our faces could shrink because we didn’t need to put so much energy into growing huge jaw muscles, so it has literally shaped us as humans and contributed to our success as a species.

Now there’s obviously a difference in eras – 4D printers seem much less natural than cooking a chunk of meat over a fire, so we’ve dramatically changed the ways in which we process food. What I try to get around in the book is that the more we explain some of the processes that are happening, it’s not for me to judge but at what point does it seem all unnatural and cross a line in terms of what you’re comfortable with? For every person that’s going to be different, but we’ve got to start having the discussion at least.

CK: Corporations are the bogeymen of processed foods, but what other factors have contributed to their proliferation?

Temple: Rapid urbanization due to the industrial revolution was momentous, because suddenly food started to travel larger distances and processing it to extend shelf life became much more important. It was one of the reasons why we suddenly had more tasteless block industrial cheese. Originally, all the different dairies would be making their own cheeses that were unique-tasting to all of those places. But with people living in urban centres, you’re starting to transport milk in. They would mix all of that milk together so that you’d have a more uniform product. The retailers themselves realized that they preferred the more consistent nature of the cheese.

War is another big catalyst, bringing about developments such as tinned meat. Soldiers had been dying from malnutrition in Napoleon’s army back in the early 1800s, so he offered a generous reward for a better way to preserve food. Wars also caused shortages of supplies, which is why you get Nutella and margarine. Cocoa access was restricted, so they thought to mix in hazelnuts. Same with margarine – looking for vegetable alternatives to butter because they didn’t have as much access to animal fat.

The role of governments can’t be dismissed either. The pasteurization laws in North America that said you had to pasteurize all cheeses made cheese less flavourful, so manufacturers had to find new ways of introducing those flavours back into cheese. The technology had advanced so much that they were able to isolate the flavour compounds that made a mature cheese taste mature, and then take those amino acids and reintroduce them into the cheese or find new ways to promote the natural bacteria of creating those amino acids.

Sometimes, unrelated legislation had a knock-on effect on food culture. In the late 1800s, most middle-class homes in the U.K. had a young girl who did all of the cooking and cleaning. This corresponded with the introduction of labour laws that required domestic servants to have a half-day off. To work around this temporary absence, the concept of a dinner in a bag was created. A maid could make the entire meal and place it into a greased paper bag. The woman of the house would just pop it into the oven so she didn’t have to do any prep work or cleaning. This was one of the first easy meals but was brought about because of other changes in labour laws.

Even when corporations decided to innovate around food, it was often by accident. The first TV dinner was essentially born out of the fact that Swanson had a massive oversupply of leftover turkey after one American thanksgiving, and they were brainstorming about what to do with it. A huge industry in food convenience eventually emerged, but it first stemmed from the simple desire to maximize surplus product.

CK: What are the different gradations of food processing?

Temple: If you can’t think of the raw ingredients that went into that product, then it’s probably ultra-processed. Some of the cereals where it’s been oozed out, where it’s some sort of paste, that might be classified as ultra-processed. Going down the range into things that are canned to increase their shelf life – if you feel like you could do that sort of processing in your kitchen, then it’s processed. Then there’s lightly processed, like cut vegetables.

Now as I mention in the book, these things are not always as they seem. Processed cheese, for example, is not something that I think that I could make in my kitchen, nor would I want to. But the reality is that it originated as cheddar cheese, stirred vigorously, and you could make that in your kitchen if you wanted to.

Then there’s the process that some of the apples go through – I don’t know if it’s the same in Canada, but here in the U.K. they’ll be photographed a hundred times to measure the red to green blush content, and then sorted accordingly. That’s definitely considered light processing, but it’s far more technical, I think, than most people would expect it to be.

CK: What are some of the newest, cutting-edge forms of food processing?

Temple: 3D and 4D printing – I don’t think a lot of people know about how common 3D printing is becoming. Lots of restaurants will have them to do chocolate garnish work, for example. Scientists are also researching all sorts of new ways of creating foods under pressure. So far, it’s not been economical and has changed the product more than desired, but that’s definitely something they’re working on.

Nanotechnology is being explored both in the actual food and the packaging. Using nanotechnology to create a sensor that turns your package red once the food is no longer good, or when it detects a certain threshold of bacteria or an indicator that says it’s not as fresh as it says that it should be. Nanotechnology could also be used to deliver nutrients more effectively or to apply nanosugar – increasing the surface area so you don’t have to use as much sugar to get the same level of sweetness. Of course, cultured meats are more and more in the headlines as well.

CK: While the slow-cooking movement has certainly taken off, processed foods appear here to stay. How can they form part of a more environmentally sustainable and healthy future?

Temple: That is a gigantic question. Processed foods have their role to play, but we should ensure that food is a huge part of education from the beginning so the next generation doesn’t lose the skill of being able to cook. My grandmother used to make her own clothes, but I can barely sew on a button. In two generations, with ready meals and convenience foods, do we run the risk of losing the skill of cooking too? I wouldn’t want that to happen, so there still needs to be this food education component. Let’s teach our children about healthy foods so that when they do read labels, they will understand what healthier choices are.

On the other end of things, I think that if we become more rational consumers we can avoid unnecessary public health scares. There was one recently about the fact that manufacturers put glycerol in our tortillas, which sounds dreadful. But in fact, it’s an absolutely natural compound that is found in all plant and animal fats. If we can have more cogent conversations as consumers, I hope that this would open up space for the industry to be more transparent on some of the processed foods and what they do.

Then there’s also this incentive for government to work harder towards making healthier choices among processed foods more obvious, which I don’t really have a silver bullet solution for.

CK: What advice do you have for people looking to act as informed consumers?

Temple: Everyone has their own priorities when they’re going to the supermarket, whether it’s ethics, health, cost or time. When you’re looking at foods and have really decided that you need a convenience food, then take a few minutes to look at the ingredient list. If there’s a whole bunch of things on there that you don’t understand or recognize, see if there’s a better option in the same food category.

Now there are some counter-intuitive factors when making decisions. People tend to look down their noses at frozen foods, but from an environmental perspective and often from a nutritional perspective they might be a better choice than chilled meals that look fresher. Those chilled meals have often had to travel quite a distance and may have more additives to help increase their shelf life. They’re kept in these open chillers, which are not efficient in terms of refrigeration, so from an environmental perspective they’re not a better choice versus frozen. Frozen foods also don’t need many additives to keep them preserved – they’re frozen.

The final thing is I’d ask people to be realistic about whether you don’t actually have time, or whether you’re choosing to not spend time cooking. Because I think that’s a big issue – people often say “oh, I don’t have time to cook,” and that’s fine if it’s the case. But perhaps you actually don’t enjoy cooking, don’t feel like cooking or would rather spend time on Facebook, whatever your choices are. But be honest about it.

The post Preservation nation appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It is these areas that urban planners Markus Moos and Robert Walter-Joseph have spent years focused on, through research projects like the Atlas of Suburbanisms and their most recent book Still Detached and Subdivided? It aims to move past the simple notion that suburbs are simply subdivisions in need of urbanization, taking into account their unique challenges and lifestyles.

Corporate Knights recently sat down with Moos to discuss the non-homogeneous nature of Canada’s suburbs, why the current model of growth needs to be adjusted and some promising projects currently in the works.

CK: The news is filled with stories about explosive growth in downtown cores across Canada. Is this really the case?

Moos: In the book, we map out where growth is happening in major Canadian and U.S. metropolitan areas and found that the vast majority is happening at two opposite ends: downtown, but also at the suburban fringe. It’s this latter group where you see the highest growth rates, but also the most absolute growth in terms of the numbers.

It’s certainly true that you can see the number of units and the growth increasing in the downtowns, but when you look at the sheer number of people living in suburban areas and also the amount of growth that is happening, it almost gets dwarfed out. Downtown living, in a metropolitan context, is still something of a minority, as opposed to how it is sometimes portrayed.

CK: Doesn’t this prove that the suburbs remain a very attractive place to live?

Moos: The argument that people are voting with their feet and moving to the suburbs, while an easy argument to make, overlooks several important factors. The reason prices are so high in the downtown areas, or the secondary nodes where transit is available, is because these places are becoming more accessible. It’s where most amenities are within walking distance. A growing number of people want to live there, and this higher demand is pushing up the price. Because most of these central areas are fairly high-priced, many people don’t have a choice but to live in some of these more dispersed areas. One can debate whether that’s a choice or more a decision that they’re making within the context of where the most housing currently exists.

Whether that would have been their first choice if they’d had a reasonably priced alternative is actually a question we don’t really know the answer to, because people are making decisions about housing based on what’s on the market. We’ve been quite bad, I’d say, at adding a diversity of housing in walkable, urban environments. There’s a bit of path dependency – you’ve been building low-density housing for a long time, so that’s where people now tend to move to. The housing market isn’t quite as responsive as the market may be for T-shirts or other goods.

Now this price discrepancy is exacerbated by the various ways in which we’ve incentivized suburban growth over the past 60 years through both hidden and less hidden policy preferences. Pamela Blais’ book Perverse Cities really nicely outlines the various incentives that are basically working against planning policies that densify and constrain sprawl, such as flat-rate fees for development charges.

CK: Your book argues that our common conception of Canada’s suburbs is incomplete.

Moos: We tend to think about the suburbs as this sea of low-density single-family homes with white picket fences outside of the downtown, but that’s incomplete for a couple of reasons. There’s long been higher-density and high-rise living in suburban areas. In part, it’s an outcome of housing policy in Canada in the ’60s and ’70s, even a little bit into the ’80s, where a lot of the affordable housing was built in high-rise forms of what are now the older, inner suburbs of Toronto and Montréal. So there’s always been a sort of high-rise form, and a denser form of housing in the suburbs than what people visualize.

A new kind of housing diversity is also emerging with a growing emphasis on creating what planners call nodes and corridors, where you try to create secondary growth centres that are connected by transit. You’re seeing these pockets of high-rise [buildings], now more likely to be market condos, that are growing in parts of the suburbs.

Then there’s also a reverse phenomenon, if we’re thinking about suburbs as not just a place but as a way that people live their lives. It’s simplifying it to a certain extent, but the basic attributes of suburban living are the automobile, home ownership and detached homes. Not on the detached front, but at least on the home ownership and automobile front, you see suburban ways of living in some downtown neighbourhoods.

CK: What are some of the reasons why the current model of suburban growth is in need of some fixes?

Moos: What’s important is that for planners and policymaking in general, we can’t just put forth a model for what our personal preferences may be. Sometimes I feel that that’s a bit of a misperception out there, that planners are promoting urbanization because they like cities. But if we look at the current model of low-density suburbanization, it’s based around the automobile and consuming a large amount of land. The lower density you build, the more dispersed your network of infrastructure becomes and the more expensive it becomes to service.

There’s, of course, the big impact of automobile use on air pollution, with smog a big public health concern in many large metropolitan areas. That takes a toll on public health. There’s also the carbon emissions that are contributing to global warming. More car-dependent communities are less walkable and linked to higher incidents of obesity and other health concerns associated with less active lifestyles.

CK: How can we reduce the judgmental terms in which this debate often happens?

Moos: Part of the solution is just to change how we frame the conversation. If it is city versus suburb, I don’t think it’s going to get us very far. At this time, we have over 70 per cent of the GTHA [Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area] population living in areas that have densities that would fall below a minimum transit service threshold.

I would ask myself, what is the objective? Is it urbanization in its own right, or is urbanization a tool to solve other problems like climate change, environmental and health issues? It makes sense to try to solve those, but it seems that urbanization of the suburbs is not going to get us there quick enough. We’re probably going to have to think about other ways to start greening the suburbs and making them healthier as well. Building high-rise towers around transit stations and adding medium density can’t happen fast enough to get a majority of people out of their cars within a time frame to help meet the Paris climate change targets, for example.

I think of density and transit-oriented development as necessary but not sufficient. Often, when I make these arguments I get a lot of pushback from the planning communities and urbanist communities, but we’ve got to think about how we can make the suburbs more green and sustainable that doesn’t rely on a fast pace of redevelopment that we’re just not likely to see in some of the low-density suburban neighbourhoods. We’re not going to erase all of the single-family homes that are there, so yes, let’s keep intensification going at as high a rate as we can, but what are we going to do with the rest of the population that is not within reach of those areas?

CK: What are some examples of suburban transformations currently underway?

Moos: The first thing to point to, if you’re looking at places like New Westminster and Burnaby Metrotown in Vancouver, for instance, you’re basically getting high-rise development around transit in suburban areas. Quite successfully – you’re seeing rises in transit share and growth in the high-density housing stock, and so those are good examples of suburban transformations, I think.

But those also aren’t very recent, in terms of the planning that has gone into it over several decades to designate growth centres, invest in the SkyTrain and establish agricultural land reserves that act as a growth boundary. Here in Kitchener [Ontario], there’s an area in the south-west corner of the city that has, over the past couple of years, conducted a very encouraging secondary plan. Instead of planning it for low density because of what’s already around it, they actually mapped out a future node, designated different levels of density within their secondary plan along major arterials and are proposing to transform more of those suburban arterials into more boulevards that have room for all kinds of different transportation users.

There is a lot of planning now happening, shaped by the ideas that have now been around for the past 10 or 20 years, that will see the suburb of the future look quite different from what we’re now still seeing be built. It takes decades for current plans to actually be built out. What we’re seeing being built today is the outcome of a planning process several decades ago, while the planning we’re doing now is only looking forward.

CK: How does the incredible diversity in Canada’s suburbs play into this?

Moos: There are two issues to keep in mind as we discuss intensifying the inner suburbs. Some of the older and inner suburbs have become where a lot of the lower income population has been pushed, because of the heavy gentrification of downtown areas. So if you were going to intensify some of these areas and renew them, how would we do so without jeopardizing the affordability of housing in those areas? You’re going to lose more rental stock – would we lose some of the older housing that remains, at least somewhat, more affordable to some of the newcomers?

These current residents are also generally living more sustainable lives because, to a large extent, the amount of driving and our related environmental impact is a function of our income. If they’re the ones being pushed out of those areas through intensification efforts, you’re creating another problem while also undermining some of the population that has already been reliant on transit, walking and cycling.

The other issue relates to the ethnic diversity and different generations of immigrants that are making up the suburban areas. It used to be much more the case that immigrants would move into inner city reception or arrival areas, and then build income and wealth over time and then move to the suburbs when they could afford it. And partially due to the changes in Canada’s immigration laws, when we moved to the points system, you also started to get a slightly higher income and certainly better educated/credentialed immigrants who would move straight to the suburbs when they arrived, in the Canadian context.

As John Lorinc and others have written about, the suburban strip mall now has the variety that Jane Jacobs used to talk about in the inner city. It’s the lowly strip mall where you’re seeing a variety of stores, where you’re seeing some of that classic entrepreneurial mom and pop shop where people are trying to make a living. Most importantly, it’s where rents are relatively lower than they would be in some of the inner-city areas.

How can this flexibility, diversity and entrepreneurial spirit be maintained in the suburbs as they’re retooled?

The post Retooling the suburbs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

His book Maximum Canada delves into this very question, detailing Canada’s long legacy of what he calls “minimizing” policies during the century after Confederation – high trade tariffs, limited immigration from outside of the British Isles and an overemphasis on immigrant farmers over entrepreneurship, all of which have resulted in our current population of only 35 million.

Other periods in Canadian history have seen the growth of “maximizing” policies, including over the past 50 years or so. The country should expand its ambitions even further, argues Saunders, and shoot for a population of 100 million by the end of the century. The book details the myriad benefits that would result, but one of his more intriguing arguments involves a substantial environmental dividend.

Corporate Knights recently sat down with Saunders to discuss the need for bigger and denser cities, the growing immigration shift to second-tier cities and the international development gains from migratory ties, among other things.

CK: Can you outline the ecological benefits Canada stands to gain from a larger population?

Saunders: Canada has a low population density, spread across a very large geography. Now, this is due in large part because we developed accidentally. We developed our cities not by planning to have concentrated, dense cities that were centres of business and invention, but rather as an afterthought. Well into the 20^th century, Canada viewed itself as a rural country and a country of resource extraction, and we saw the cities as being side effects of that. As a result, our cities did not grow from concentrated centres outward, but they grew as collections of housing, with a few churches in between.

We have very large areas of extremely low population density housing and, much more frustratingly, those are the areas where new immigrants settle now. Immigration is a suburban experience now in Canada, almost 100 per cent, and it happens in places with big empty spaces, with apartment blocks with huge empty spaces between them within places with single family housing. Now, these neighbourhoods, and this form of development, not only create problems for the improvement of human conditions through transit efficiencies and mixed-use neighbourhoods and so on, but are also extremely ecologically inefficient.

By my calculation, about half of Canada’s carbon output comes from the effects of low population density in cities. This includes passenger vehicles in urban areas, which we rely on overwhelmingly because of our lack of transit both within and between cities that’s high speed and efficient, as well as our inefficient heating of buildings, itself a consequence of low population density with our reliance on single-family houses that are inefficient to heat. There’s also our reliance in several provinces on emissions-heavy energy sources, which is much easier to physically transition away from when you have a higher population density.

Canada’s cities are small compared to other countries, and have not yet made the transition to what is called the ecological Kuznets curve. This is when you get above the population of Canada’s six largest cities. Each addition of population decreases the per-capita carbon footprint and creates efficiencies. Now, a lot of those efficiencies have to do with green policy; they’re the consequence of shorter travel distances, of economies of scale, of shared resources and so on.

As the studies I highlight in the book point out, a city of eight million is twice as ecological as a city of four million. Economies of scale are important, not just for economic and for business reasons, not just for the clusters of knowledge and expertise and entrepreneurship that they create, but also because of the ecological efficiencies they create.

Now, as much as Canada needs to make that transition towards being carbon neutral much sooner than we anticipate, we also need to be able to make ourselves resilient to whatever climate change effects do happen. Those types of infrastructure investments, particularly if they’re going to be done in a green way, are best done in places with a high population density.

CK: One relatively new concern being raised by urban studies theorist Richard Florida and others is the growing economic gap between superstar cities and the rest of the population, in both the U.S. and Canada. He argues that overly strict land-use rules and NIMBY sentiments, by artificially restricting the supply of new housing, have increased housing prices so much that it has slowed this gap from growing even further. As immigrants tend to settle in the biggest urban environments, won’t increasing levels of immigration only increase this gap between white, rural and smaller cities and super-diverse superstar cities?

Saunders: Canada’s five or six largest cities will continue to be major places of population growth, and generally it’s to be encouraged. These cities are not overcrowded; they suffer from low population density. However, that housing market effect that Richard Florida mentions does have some interesting consequences in Canada.

We do have a crisis of housing supply in our largest cities, that’s quite obvious. We need to address that, and in large part it’s due to a bias towards the single-family house. Apartment living should be destigmatized and accepted as a normal way of living – we’re the only country in the world that has a word for living in an apartment, “condo”, that is a form of ownership tenure and not a form of building, and somehow, we treat that as a stigmatizing term.

That said, the place where we start to see the interesting effects of that divergence in housing markets is in the very interesting effects that are happening in what get called the second-tier cities in Canada. These are post-industrial cities that have suffered from population loss, aging and therefore a loss of tax base and shops and economic activity, but that are becoming the new hubs for immigration and for population growth because they happen to have post-secondary institutions in them.

What immigrants want in Canada are known business, employment or entrepreneurial opportunities. Second of all, they want clusters of people from similar cultural or linguistic backgrounds to help them integrate and build up a network. Thirdly, they want post-secondary institutions, because about six out of 10 immigrants to Canada have a university degree and need their skills upgraded. And fourth of all, they want housing they can afford.

Immigrants will always drop the last point if the first three are available; people will settle in a place they can’t afford to live for a while if it has all the other factors. But the fact that housing is getting close to unaffordable in the largest cities is causing a big shift in immigration settlement to post-industrial second-tier cities with post-secondary institutions and reasonably decent connections to larger markets.

So Kelowna, Lethbridge, Kitchener/Waterloo, Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa, Trois-Rivières, Moncton, Halifax, St. John’s – those are the places that are going to become really significant centres of growth because of the interesting combination of affordable housing costs and post-secondary institutions. And we need to recognize that these places are ideally situated to become dense clusters of knowledge, invention and expertise, and they are also places that can become really green, ecologically efficient cities. We need to be investing in electric rapid-transit links in and between those second-tier cities and the established larger markets. We need to be investing in data infrastructure in those places, and we need to be investing in green housing and building initiatives as well.

CK: Andrew Griffith and others have hypothesized of resistance from Indigenous peoples and Quebecers to a large increase in Canada’s population due to the likelihood of a reduction in their relative political clout.

Saunders: What makes Canada different from a lot of former colonies is that Indigenous nations see themselves as being leaders in population growth now. The century during which Canada was subject to what I call the minimizing impulse, where Canada pursued a bunch of isolationist policies, was a period that was devastating for Indigenous nations. The attempts to settle Canada by filling the land with people rather than by creating cities and economies from the 1850s to the1970s, that period saw Indigenous nations’ population fall to about a tenth of its previous level.

Now today, Indigenous nations are the population growth leaders in Canada. They have by far the highest rate of population growth in Canada, and there’s a broad consensus that this leading level of population growth is an important part of Indigenous nations becoming independent and so on.

That’s key because Indigenous nations are having their own internal debates around population density. The fact that schools on reserves and in remote communities are horrifically bad and under situated is in large part because of a lack of commitment from the federal government to this, but it’s also because the population density is too low in these places. The absolute population is much too low. Now we’re starting to see solutions emerge – on-reserve population growth has been much higher than the population growth off reserve over the last two decades. And the record-breaking levels of population growth in Indigenous communities will serve them very well in the future, by creating much more concentrated communities in these places.

In Quebec, similarly, there was a big debate in the 1940s-’50s about whether francophone Quebecers should see their challenge as being one of relative population or one of absolute population. And there was, for a time before the 1950s, a belief that relative population was what French Canadians should seek – which was, they should do whatever they could in regards to Quebec policies but also in terms of Canadian national policies to ensure that Quebec has the largest proportion of population in Canada, so that Quebec maintains its share of MPs, PMs, etc.

This butted up against a vision of Quebec that said no: absolute population is what’s important here. We want to have a robust enough population that we can have an autonomous economy, that we can have a robust and well-published Quebecois culture, and that we can have the resources and institutions that we need within Quebec to stand on our own (whether your view is sovereigntist or nationalist, this debate took place in both).

By the end of the 1960s, there was a very broad consensus that absolute population matters more than relative population in Quebec. There’s a great understanding that Quebec is underpopulated – you could say that francophone Quebecois are a generation ahead of English Canadians in recognizing the shortfalls of absolute population and the need to have a more robust population.

CK: Most of the pro-immigration arguments in both your book and in the broader public discourse in Canada centre on the economic gains from immigration. What about the global development gains?

Saunders: Canada’s migratory links to the global south are Canada’s most important form of international development. Just the remittance flows from families living in Canada alone are many times higher than all of the foreign aid spending Canada has ever contemplated.

The way immigration works is that you have networks of people in clusters of villages or in urban districts in ascending countries who link themselves up permanently to clusters of people with similar cultural backgrounds in specific urban areas in Canada. And they form lasting links – they send people back and forth, credit, money, knowledge, and they contribute to the development of those places.

A big part of that development is creating ecological efficiencies. Take, for example, the Philippines, which has been the largest centre of immigrants to Canada for the last decade. The Philippines, if you look at the clusters of villages in Luzon, the big island that most Filipinos in Canada come from, those areas that have migratory links to the western world have seen much higher standards of living, lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy, but are also more likely to have made the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture.

Most importantly, they’ve also been much more successful in making the fertility transition, going from having six children per family to fewer than two children. So, you could say that Canada, in creating migratory links to places in the developing world, is helping those places develop in terms of human development, in terms of economic development and in terms of ecological development, because stabilizing population growth is probably the most important ecological target.

The post Maximizing Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

He began by detailing the uncertain but escalating economic costs of dealing with climate change. Absent efforts to deal with global warming, these would likely run into the tens of billions of dollars on an annual basis by the 2050s, he said. As it pertains to the bank’s broad mandate for financial stability, a combination of physical, policy and liability risks could result in “stranded assets,” the rapid re-pricing of things like oil reserves that would in turn be negatively reflected on balance sheets.

Lane described the two tools to navigate the low-carbon transition in Canada as carbon pricing, which aligns incentives in the real economy, and green finance, which accelerates the transition. While many challenges remain, including uneven pricing of carbon globally and information gaps as to how companies are positioned to lead or lag this transition, Canada is well positioned to seize the opportunities by leveraging our large stores of renewable energy and growing capacity for clean innovation.

This summer, Corporate Knights caught up with Timothy Lane over the phone from his office in Ottawa to flesh out some of these themes.

CK: The Financial Stability Board (FSB) Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures issued its final report this summer recommending better climate disclosure, including for banks, to disclose their credit exposure to carbon-related assets.

It also proposed that investors disclose their portfolio exposure to carbon-related assets, as well as climate opportunities, as part of their standard annual financial filings. Are these suggestions under consideration in Canada?

Lane: As a member of the FSB, we endorsed the task force’s report. In terms of implementing it within Canada, it falls mostly to the securities administrators, including the provincial securities authorities. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions also has a role, to the extent that it involves federally regulated financial institutions.

CK: What is the role for finance as it relates to the low-carbon economic transition?

Lane: There are two phases. The current phase is more at the level of socially responsible investing. There are certainly many investors that have an objective of making their investments support more responsible climate outcomes, a group that includes quite a few individual investors but increasingly some of the major institutional investors as well. In this phase, having clear standards for what constitutes a green bond, having funding that’s dedicated towards that kind of investment is useful as it harnesses some of that sense of social and environmental responsibility to actually develop some of these projects that will help mitigate climate change.

Where things could change is once carbon pricing becomes a bigger factor. With appropriate carbon pricing, green investing is basically a profitable investment too. Even investors that are not particularly socially responsible would start caring about how carbon pricing is going to affect the returns on their investment.

At that point, green finance becomes mainstream and you have funding being channelled in an appropriate way into those green investments. But I think during the first phase, when carbon pricing isn’t yet creating the incentives for those green investments that are in line with their broader economic benefits, there is still a benefit to having a framework for something like green bonds that harnesses the environmentally-responsible investment dollars.

CK: Other countries like China and France have issued green bond standards to kick-start green financial flows to some considerable success. Is this something Canada should look at?

Lane: A green bond standard makes sense. Standards are really important because you don’t want a situation where anybody could label anything green. Investors need to know that there is some consistency around these things, and certainly I think that’s why that was emphasized in the G20 report as well.

CK: One major trend we’ve observed over the past several years has involved global oil majors selling their oil sands assets to Canadian oil majors, underwritten in most cases by Canadian banks. From a financial stability perspective, is this exposure a point of curiosity for the Bank of Canada?

Lane: Our assessment has been that Canadian banks are well diversified, despite the fact that they are making substantial investments in certain industries like oil. They have investments or loans that are distributed widely across different parts of the Canadian economy. Three years ago, when oil prices dropped from around $120 to the neighbourhood of $30 a barrel, there was very little effect on even the profitability level, let alone the solvency of the Canadian banks.

We don’t think it is a major concern at the moment, but over time, as the economy shifts to a lower carbon basis, it is going to involve some significant changes to the structure of the financial system and what kind of activities get financed. There are a number of oil investments that look profitable with the current sort of energy and carbon intensity of the economy that would not be getting financed under a low-carbon economic scenario with lower oil prices.

CK: Could climate change be an opportunity for Canadian finance?

Lane: The Canadian financial system has a number of attributes that position it well for success in a changing environment. We have very resilient financial institutions and a lot of relevant expertise. There are many opportunities for Canada, not only on the financing side but also on the real side, including the development of new technologies as well as the implementation of those technologies and managing the changes in other aspects of the economy that might flow from those.

This is an area where there could conceivably be synergies with activities that are already important in the Canadian financial system, where there could be opportunities for Canadian institutions to engage in different types of activities that would be opened up.

CK: Given Canada’s big focus on clean growth and the prowess of our financial sector, do you think Canada hosting next year’s G7 could play a special role in advancing green finance?

Lane: The plans for the 2018 G7 are still under construction, but clearly [green finance] is one of the priority topics for the world economy. These are common issues and they do cry out for a common global mindset.

I think they are ideally suited for international groups to talk about them and to come up with solutions.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post Bank statement appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Just 26 years old at the time, Adèle Hurley teamed up with fellow Canadian Michael Perley to help found the CCAR and act as its chief lobbyists and executive co-ordinators. Starting out with 12 core organizations, the group eventually encompassed 58 member groups representing over two million Canadians. It was also one of the first times that Canadians had set up a public advocacy campaign in Washington, D.C.

With the passage of amendments to the U.S. Clean Air Act in November 1990, the establishment of the Acid Rain Program and commensurate regulatory action on the Canadian side, the group was disbanded. Since then, Hurley has been heavily involved in a variety of cross-border air and water issues. She has served as the Canadian co-chair of the International Joint Commission which oversees the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 between Canada and the United States, as well as the director of the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

She was awarded the 2017 Corporate Knights Award of Distinction in June for her tireless efforts to protect Canada’s natural resources. She recently sat down with our editorial team to reflect on the acid rain years and the CCAR’s legacy.

CK: How did your involvement in the CCAR first come about?

Hurley: I was working at the time in the Ontario legislature as a researcher, and went specifically to hear a presentation about acid rain by Dr. Harold Harvey out of the University of Toronto. A few professors like Dr. Harvey and Dr. David Schindler were trying hard to convince politicians, even in the early days, and journalists that something was amiss in the lakes.

Harvey was showing the research that he and his graduate students had assembled from Killarney (on the shore of Georgian Bay in Ontario), using secchi disk readings and acidity data. He explained to the committee how stories about people catching huge fish on lakes in the area were painting a false sense of security. That what you really wanted to find was the young-year classes of fish, because the fear was that those newly hatched fish were being killed off by the acidic runoff in the spring. Fish from those young-year classes were going missing and, as Dr. Harvey explained, those older, larger fish you were seeing were actually slowly “marching off into extinction.” That phrase caught in my mind.

CK: There’s something so vivid about the threat posed by acid rain.

Hurley: A great quote came years later from Margaret Atwood, when she was asked by some Americans why Canadians were so up in arms about that acid rain problem. And she said, in her droll way, “It’s the cottage.” Well, what does that mean? “The cottage is childhood,” she said.

Cottagers became incredibly important for this issue over time, in terms of helping to mobilize support but also in terms of fundraising. Many of the cottagers were Bay Street by day and cottagers in the summer. I don’t think many people grasped that for many years. This was crucial because if you were going to comply with foreign agent legislation in the U.S., we couldn’t have government funds. Private fundraising was paramount for a Canadian non-profit operating without any government support in the U.S.

CK: How did CCAR navigate within the ecosystem of interests and power centres that were ultimately pivotal in successfully combating the acid rain threat?

Hurley: From the outset, Michael and I and our board pretty much agreed on what we thought would be the important components involved in the set-up and operation of this campaign.

The first was the decision to form a coalition. This was critical, as it contained varied strengths that you could pivot and draw on at any given time. You could pull in tourism outfitters at certain points, forestry people, environmentalists, health experts, First Nations, cottagers, etc.

Sometimes we’d say that you’re better being your own mug, as the saying goes. Today we should speak as a coalition, or maybe we’ll put these three organizations together for their own statement. If it was a situation involving Quebec, Acadia or New England it would be our Quebec members talking to one another, and Michael would handle that completely in French. It gave us the ability to leverage that continental reach into Washington, Ottawa and Quebec media all at the same time.

Another pillar was not presenting ourselves as Canadians. I don’t mean that we were hiding this fact, but we simply appeared before Americans with the understanding that our meeting time was about enlightened self-interest. So if you’re from Pennsylvania, that’s all we’re talking about. And not the state in general, but your district in particular.

We also studied Congress extensively. We knew which votes we’d always have and could bank on – all we did was provide them with the most up-to-date science. There were also the ones we’d probably never get, and we tried to be respectful and not spend a lot of time on that. Most of all, we focused on the swing votes, and worried about the ones that might walk.

CK: How were duties split between you and Michael Perley?

Hurley: Our roles seemed to evolve quite naturally. I tended to focus on the overall strategic direction, after which Michael would fill in the necessary research details and take the lead on communications.

He’s a very organized speaker. He thinks before he speaks, and would always lay out our core message in quick bullet points at the top of any appearance. When you’re on an issue for that many years, the media comes to have a certain expectation, and even joy, if this was going to be the person explaining the latest development on the Hill or at a bilateral meeting. So he built up a following, because he managed to establish firm credibility in the eyes of the media. Excellent writer, articulate, no cheap shots, a little bit of light humour from time to time, but mostly just the facts.

That left me time to be on the Hill doing office meetings, sitting down with U.S. NGOs, reading the congressional record and publications like Business and National Affairs because every morning the information poured in. I’d go to committee hearings during the day, but the best time to work with the staff was around 6 p.m., when members of Congress were off on the cocktail and fundraising circuit and staffers were preparing for the following day.

That’s where we formed relationships with people who eventually started to count on us for the latest updates regarding their district. Obviously they’d fact-check it but after six years, if you hadn’t been making any mistakes, they were waiting. That’s why the congressional system needs to be monitored so carefully, because it really is open. Votes can flip pretty quickly.

CK: What were some unconventional strategies employed by the CCAR?

Hurley: One example of this was we put together a group toward the mid-to-latter years called the American Friends of Muskoka. It became essential because we saw the importance of the delegations from the Midwest. Many of the American Friends of Muskoka were influential senior Republicans from that region, who found themselves downwind in the summer from their own emissions back home.

American cottagers were writing to one another on the lakes in the summer, bringing each other up to date on the science and on the politics of acid rain in both countries. Several were CEOs and leaders of multinational companies, including heavy industry. At one point they convened a lovely summer cocktail reception, and invited the secretary of transportation in the Reagan administration to come and deliver remarks while he was in Canada fishing.

Very convivial, antique boats and people enjoying themselves, but a strong message was being sent directly to U.S. Midwest congressional leaders and Washington that this was important and not solely a Canadian or New England issue.

CK: Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May has argued that Canadian government leadership and civil society engagement has never occurred as successfully as it did in that era.

Hurley: It certainly became a successful continental collaboration over time.  Interestingly, a level of difficulty occurred once it was Canada’s turn to clean up. After all the work we did in the U.S., it turned out that Ontario Hydro was one of the toughest emission control orders to nail down.

After many years of Canadians having had their noses pressed to the glass, furtively following what was going on in the U.S. it was time for us to clean up our contribution to acid rain in our own country. I recall that we weren’t very popular in some quarters at the time. It sometimes felt like we were handing out detentions.

Eventually, Canada’s approximately 50 per cent contribution to emissions that were causing acid rain in this country were brought under control and, together with the U.S. emission reductions, have protected moderately sensitive regions of this country.

On November 19, 1990, the CCAR happily threw a farewell party at Casa Loma in Toronto. Hundreds of supporters turned up and were charged admission because, as the invitation said, “We got smart but we never got rich.”

The post Who stopped the (acid) rain? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Economists broadly agree that carbon pricing is the preferred method for reducing emissions with the lowest economic cost, but resistance to the idea at the federal level has led to the territory being seceded to the governing Liberal party. As Republicans learned repeatedly during the Obama era, while failing to engage constructively on controversial issues can be a political winner it often leads to “worse” policy outcomes (from a conservative perspective).

This has not been the case at the provincial level, where former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s 2008 revenue-neutral carbon tax has been widely viewed as a success story. The Progressive Conservative premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister, is in the midst of designing a carbon pricing system that will likely be revenue neutral, and Ontario Progressive Conservative opposition leader Patrick Brown has made similar pledges.

Conservative MP Michael Chong, known as a more independent-minded politician than most, is bucking his federal counterparts by making his “revenue negative” carbon tax plan the centrepiece of his leadership campaign. The Wellington-Halton Hills MP has outlined a detailed plan to introduce a national carbon price that would reach $130 a tonne by 2030, and which includes a restructuring of the tax code to ensure the plan acts as an overall tax cut. Corporate Knights recently caught up with Chong to discuss the proposal in greater detail:

CK: You’ve been busy making the conservative case for carbon pricing across the country.

Chong: The most economically efficient way to reduce emissions, the cheapest way to reduce emissions and the most conservative way to reduce emissions is through a revenue-neutral carbon tax. This allows government to harness the power of free markets to reduce emissions, while at the same time shrinking the size of government by phasing out various green regulations, programs and subsidies as the carbon price rises.

The second point is that my plan for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is one of the largest income-tax cuts in Canadian history, an $18 billion cut that we would deliver in our first budget of spring 2020 that would actually leave more money in the pockets of Canadian consumers and Canadian companies. It’s an income and corporate tax cut that is worth almost 1 per cent of GDP. It’ll be one of the largest income tax cuts in Canadian history.

CK: There’s a shifting landscape for conservatives regarding carbon pricing across the country when it comes to provincial leadership – embodied by Brian Pallister in Manitoba and to a lesser extent Patrick Brown in Ontario. How do we turn this into a debate over the best way to institute carbon pricing, not whether or not to have it?

Chong: Well I think the debate as to whether we should have a price on carbon is over. Carbon pricing is here to stay; it’s been in place in Quebec and B.C. for almost a decade. I believe my plan is the right way to proceed. The wrong way is a cap-and-trade system, where the government spends a portion of the revenue on government programs. So that’s, I think, a very important point.

To your earlier question, I would also add that increasingly, conservatives are starting to understand that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the way to go. Gordon Campbell had a piece in the Calgary Herald recently endorsing this and pointing to the successful policy he implemented in B.C. about 10 years ago. Even the Fraser Institute now supports the B.C. carbon tax. In fact, if you google it, on the Fraser Institute’s website there’s an article titled “Cheap: The B.C. carbon tax, but only if it’s revenue neutral,” showing that it’s managed to grab a broad spectrum of support.

So this revenue neutrality is not only economically important, but it’s also politically important. We need to have broad public support to reduce emissions, so delivering rebates and tax cuts to offset the price of carbon is incredibly important.

CK: Why did you release such a detailed plan? Leadership races are often littered with vague ideas and concepts.

Chong: Leadership races are the time to have big debates on policy, not the third week of a federal election campaign. If you’re going to have a debate on party policy and on taking the party down a new path, you introduce a policy far in advance in a leadership race, where the merits of the policy can be debated.

I think that this is a political winner for conservatives, one of the critical elements that we need to have in place to win the 2019 election. If you look back at history, the Conservative party was the party of anti-free trade from John A. Macdonald onwards. In the 1983 leadership race, one of the debates centred on free trade. And one of the candidates, John Crosbie, proposed to change party policy and adopt a pro-free trade stance, and four years later it became party policy. Brian Mulroney campaigned in the 1988 election on free trade, won the election on that issue and the rest is history.

For me, this is a similar landscape. We are confronted with one of the biggest challenges that this country faces, which is how to reduce emissions without harming our economy. I don’t think the current federal government or Ontario’s government is taking the right approach on this. I think British Columbia’s $30 a tonne revenue-neutral carbon tax is the right approach, and what I’d like to see is the B.C. model applied across the country.

We need to be part of this debate and helping to shape it. Conservatives have the most to contribute because it’s conservatives that believe in the power of free markets, and by coming forward with a credible policy to reduce emissions that’s based on conservative principles, free markets and smaller government, we can provide a path forward that will allow us to reduce our emissions and grow the economy at the same time.

CK: Let’s get into the specifics of your plan.

Chong: Justin Trudeau’s government has put in place a $10 per tonne price on carbon starting in 2018, and increasing at $10 per year until it reaches $50 per tonne by 2022. My plan mirrors that approach, but where my plan differs is in three aspects: First, my plan continues out until 2030, when it will hit $130 a tonne, because that’s the number we need to achieve in order to meet our Paris commitment to reduce greenhouse gases by 30 per cent. I think that only planning until 2022 is a fault in their plan, because companies need time to prepare. It’s a big shift in our economy, and the longer time horizon we can give companies to plan for the shift, the better. The current government wants to stop at 2022, and it’s unclear what is going to happen after that.

Secondly, my plan has a federal component and a provincial one as well. Trudeau’s plan is entirely provincial, with all revenues from the $50 per tonne collected by the federal government returned to each province. My plan splits the economy into two. On the consumer side of the economy, the provinces would get the first $30 per tonne, and the federal government would get the next $100 per tonne. That’s why, on the consumer side of the economy, it’s a combined $130 per tonne.

On the other side of the economy are the large emitters – the oil and gas sector, export-oriented and trade-exposed industries and other large emitters in the country. Here, the provinces are expected to collect all of the revenue. These targets are intensity-based, so while they too will be at $130 a tonne by 2030, that price will be applied on a sliding scale of increasing intensity targets. So the reason why that’s done is because they’re trade exposed, and they need time to adapt to these new prices in order to ensure that we don’t negatively impact their ability to export.

CK: Output-based subsidies for large emitters play a key role in the Alberta carbon pricing plan that went into effect in January, and seems to have been an important reason why Suncor and other oil sands players have been supportive thus far.

Chong: My plan syncs with provincial plans with respect to the oil and gas sector, other major emitters, and other trade-exposed, export-oriented industries.

Now there’s also a third difference and this is possibly the most important one: My plan mandates revenue neutrality for the $100 per tonne federal carbon tax, and it incentivizes provinces to make their carbon pricing schemes – whether it’s a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax – revenue neutral as well. It does this through a revenue-neutral carbon incentive, a new federal transfer that would be given annually to provinces that have used their carbon revenues to cut income taxes or provide direct rebates to consumers and to companies. It would be the equivalent of 10 per cent of the provincial income taxes for rebates provided, and would be a permanent transfer.

So, for example, if a province has $1 billion in carbon revenue, and they’ve used all that revenue to cut provincial income taxes, we will transfer, on a permanent basis, $100 million a year. And this will serve as an unrestricted transfer – they can spend the money on whatever they wish. On the federal side, the carbon tax is strictly revenue neutral and all the money will be used to cut income taxes, and on provincial pricing schemes it provides a significant incentive for provinces to move towards revenue neutrality.

Now this issue of tackling climate change by reducing emissions is more and more an economic issue, and how we do this is turning into more of an economic question than an environmental one. We are a 750-megatonne economy, roughly. On the current government’s plan, by 2022 we are looking at approximately $37.5 billion in carbon revenues, whether through a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax. This amounts to almost 2 per cent of our GDP, a huge chunk of change, and if even a portion of this revenue is spent on government programs, we are going to put a huge burden on Canadian consumers and companies.

But if they are used instead to introduce deep income-tax cuts, we could actually grow our economy while reducing our emissions. Because if we take the latter approach, we are in fact achieving an economic outcome that governments have long tried to achieve: to shift taxation away from income taxes towards other forms of revenue such as consumption taxes.

CK: The biggest argument put forth against revenue neutrality – or, in your case, an overall reduction in revenues – is that carbon pricing, while an important pillar of tackling climate change, needs to be combined with an additional suite of policies, regulatory reforms and investments to transform sectors like transportation.

Chong: Well, I think they’re wrong. History proves that government is terrible at picking winners and losers, and we just need to look to Ontario’s Green Energy Act as evidence. It’s not an efficient way for resources and capital to be deployed when governments are making decisions. I think the free market is very efficient at supplying capital in the most efficient and productive way possible, and that’s why I think the arguments against a revenue-neutral model don’t hold up. It also has the added benefit of offsetting some of the increased costs associated with burning fossil fuels through deep income-tax relief.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post Dissent in the ranks appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This has occurred despite one regulatory relic that Vancouver has been loath to change: RS zoning, which is single-family residential zoning for detached homes. With detached housing only available to current owners or millionaires, these regulations have created a great house reserve that occupies more than three-quarters of Vancouver’s residential land base.

As a sociologist focused on demography and the formation of families, Nathanael Lauster has found his work repeatedly drawn back to housing. After moving to Vancouver, he began speaking to city residents about how housing affects people’s ability to form a family, and how it feels to likely never be able to afford a single-family house. He soon realized it was inextricably tied into the history of zoning, which had evolved to regulate the built environment. This blend of Lauster’s interviews with residents living across a diverse range of housing forms and his exploration of housing regulation morphed into a book titled The Life and Death of the Single-Family Home.

Corporate Knights recently caught up with Lauster to discuss the history of Vancouver’s planning decisions, the continued primacy of the single-family home and how residents are learning to adapt to alternative housing options.

CK: Let’s start with the origins of the single-family home in urban environments.

Lauster: Zoning comes out of the industrializing cities of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, where you see the sorts of problems that come about through rapid growth. In many respects these are market-governed cities at this time, where a slaughterhouse could be built next door to a house. So middle-class residents, and also white privileged people, were quite uncomfortable with this dynamic.

That was one impetus behind planning cities in a more coherent way. Of course, you had other factors too, in terms of public health codes and the need for real infrastructural upgrades. But one of the big solutions the nascent planning profession settled upon was single-family houses. They wrote this into zoning codes, locking away most of the land surrounding our urban cores for single-family homes alone. This meant defining in bylaws what constituted a single family and what embodied a house (separation in terms of detachment from any other surrounding structure). There was this codification of the “proper” way in which people should live in cities.

That, effectively, hemmed in most of these older urban cores, which involved a variety of housing options. It prevented this model from expanding further outward, while allowing these single-family house neighbourhoods to keep expanding into the rural hinterlands.

CK: What was the role played by restrictive zoning in Vancouver in terms of racial and socioeconomic discrimination?

Lauster: You see covenants still written into old housing deeds, restrictions that are no longer legal but point to a previously racially-restrictive housing past. Anti-Asian mostly, although there was a historic black neighbourhood that was destroyed in an attempt to build a freeway, not to mention First Nations groups… So it’s intertwined with a lot of these zoning laws. Single-family zones, in particular, were meant to keep out the rabble, which included anyone who couldn’t afford a single-family house. This included the poor, as well as most immigrants and other groups that would be inclined to subdivide up houses into multiple apartments or take in boarders.

CK: So what did Vancouver start to do to break out of this mold?

Lauster: The rejection of the downtown freeway in the early 1970s through a citizens’ revolt marked a big turning point for the city. This opened up, by virtue of how much land freeways occupy, a lot of post-industrial land to be developed into something else.

We then had successive administrations of different parties focusing on livability and densification within the city by promoting alternatives to the single-family house and making it more attractive for people. At the same time, in the 1970s we also saw a provincial NDP government come in and establish the Agricultural Land Reserve. That prevented further outward sprawling of these single-family house neighbourhoods.

There are two additional regulatory constraints that curbed sprawl as well. Up into the mountains of course it had to do with parks, but on the slopes it involved antiquated snow-clearing rules across West Vancouver that prevented development.

CK: So the crux of your book is how people have begun to adjust to this new housing reality. What did you find?

Lauster: It’s a mixed bag. I certainly talked to many people who saw themselves as never wanting to live in a house. They didn’t like what I call the isolation of the single-family neighbourhoods, the reduced walkability and focus on the car. There are a number of people who internalize these environmental messages and feel ethically responsible for how they’re living. Other people really just rebelled against the idea that they should have a house and need a house, but they still want to have a family. They want kids and they want to raise them in the city.

But I also met people who were somewhat miserable in the city, because they still felt [that] to be a success in life, to be an adult, they needed to have a house and it was out of reach for them.

And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle. They probably would live in a house if they lived in any other city, but they can’t afford one here in Vancouver and they’re okay trying out a different path. And in many cases they find that as they settle in, the lifestyle is pretty nice, and that maybe they don’t need a house after all. The fact that they don’t have as much space means they pay a lot of attention to what kind of stuff is brought into the house, and felt that it simplified their lives. By virtue of being unaffordable, Vancouver really does force people to explore alternatives. And a lot of them are pleasantly surprised.

CK: Can you expand on the societal pressure regarding single-family home ownership?

Lauster: In terms of how most people feel about it, it is that cultural pressure. But it’s also the case that single-family homes solve a lot of problems for us in terms of everyday life – more space, being able to make as much noise as you want, having more control over your housing. People tend to associate having a single-family house with ownership, although of course you can detach these things from one another.

There are also a series of complications people encounter in city living that they feel would be solved by living in a single-family house instead. At the same time, they don’t see the common problems that come with the single-family home when making this case. It’s a lot of maintenance work, it takes significant time and energy. In many cases it means that you have to commute a lengthy distance to get to work to actually make the money needed to keep up your house. It’s in Vancouver where you start to see people working through that tradeoff.

CK: One of the arguments against city living is that it’s not viewed as family friendly. What feedback did you get on that question in your interviews?

Lauster: One of the things that’s exciting, in many respects, is there are families living in all kinds of situations in Vancouver and making a go of it. It really varies, in that there isn’t a single standard for what’s needed. Obviously more bedrooms will get you more possibilities in terms of larger families feeling comfortable, so building in bedroom requirements isn’t a bad thing for new builds. Two and three bedroom units are popular on the market. But you really do see people going for smaller living as well. To some extent we need to ensure that there is a diversity of options on hand for people, and then we need to encourage how they end up assorting themselves among that diversity.

CK: What role does city politics play in this debate?

Lauster: Over the past four decades there was a lot of urban land available for redevelopment through deindustrialization. Vancouver turned it quite aggressively into new residential spaces, and while we’re still doing that, there’s not a lot left. Many people think that it’s important to keep what industrial land remains for the good of our diversified economic base – the Vancouver port, for example.

So that’s turned development pressure to the places that aren’t as thoroughly protected through zoning legislation as single-family homes, which are areas where you already have apartment buildings. That’s one place where you’ve seen the replacement of a lot of these low-rise apartment buildings with high-rises, generating substantial neighbourhood opposition.

What we haven’t seen as much attention paid to are the places zoned for single-family houses. We still have, effectively, about 80 per cent of our residential land base locked away for single-family houses owned by millionaires – despite the ongoing affordability crisis sweeping the city. Only 35 per cent of Vancouverites are able to live in these areas.

This is where the politics comes in. You can’t change this solely through neighbourhood consultations, because local residents are not going to let you. If you want your planning process to have democratic legitimacy, you need to make it a full city-wide process. Community groups should have a seat at the table, but they can’t be the sole deciders of how their neighbourhood is going to change. The very reason it hasn’t changed is because it was built to be exclusionary in the first place.

That’s not how a city should be run, in terms of thinking about the good of all its residents. We need to think of ways of incorporating within these planning processes the voices of people all across the city – especially the voices of those who are marginalized and have terrible housing options. Their voices need to be brought to the fore, in terms of making this a more socially just and democratic process. And this wouldn’t even take major changes; you could just allow townhouses in there, low-rise structures. You don’t need to have towers everywhere. It would be transformative, making housing more affordable for a broader swath of people and allowing them to embrace a denser, sustainable lifestyle.

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