The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, has the appearance of a prime-minister-in-waiting, but Canadians have little sense of what his government’s climate policies would look like.

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With a headlining address from President Javier Milei, the new darling of the global far right, and, reportedly, Donald Trump’s “favourite president,” it also exposed a particular facet of libertarianism in the South American nation: very young, and very male.

Milei catapulted to fame and into the presidential office of the second-largest economy in the region last year on the shoulders of a youthful voting block. Young men, who had spent years consuming clips of his televised tirades on the internet, became envoys for his message, helping convert their family members into supporters. Proportionally speaking, they dominated the conference room at the Buenos Aires Hilton that hosted CPAC, in a sea of blue suits and, in some cases, red ties and red Make America Great Again caps, in a nod to Trump.

The gathering offers a window into the increasingly hostile rhetoric that is quickly spreading around the world, with the help of organizations like CPAC. The Argentina event included right-wing and libertarian speakers from across Latin America, as well as members of Spain’s far-right Vox party, representatives from Hungary’s nationalist government, and the son of former right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently indicted in his country for his alleged role in a coup plot.

“It is not enough to organize politically,” Milei said during his speech. “It is also necessary to fight a cultural battle, and in that CPAC has a fundamental role, and that is what will help us to coordinate internationally so that the leftists do not get in anywhere.”

For Milei, that cultural battle extends from feminists to climate change activists. In a bold move last month, he pulled Argentina from the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, and then announced that his government was reviewing its place in the Paris Agreement climate accord.

Milei has previously called the climate crisis a “socialist lie,” and since taking office he has shuttered the Ministry of the Environment, among eight other ministries; established new incentives for oil and gas projects; and set his sights on rolling back protections for forests and glaciers.

He has lived up to his campaign promise of taking a chainsaw to the state, cutting expenditures in real terms by almost a third, firing tens of thousands of public employees, cutting subsidies on everything from transit to utilities, and undertaking a major campaign of deregulation.

“We in America look to Argentina to see what we can accomplish,” said Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor turned Republican politician, who spoke at the conference. As far as the Trump administration is concerned, Milei’s radical prescriptions offer a road map, in particular when it comes to slashing government spending. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, a boisterous cheerleader for Milei, now heads up Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency alongside pharmaceutical billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote on X that what the United States needs is “Milei style cuts, on steroids.”

Conference attendees seemed giddy at the prospect of a new alliance. “We must stand together, establishing channels of cooperation throughout the world,” Milei said to a cheering audience. “We could call ourselves an international right wing, a network of mutual assistance made up of all those interested in spreading the ideas of freedom around the world.”

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That includes voting “nay” to bills crafted to hold mining companies accountable for environmental damage, move Canada closer towards achieving its climate targets, create high-quality jobs in low-carbon industries nationwide and align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, an international framework also known as UNDRIP.

Poilievre’s anti-environment record also includes voting “yea” for legislation designed to weaken environmental safeguards on new industrial projects and accelerate expansion of the oil and gas industry, Canada’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

During his two decades in Parliament, Poilievre voted in favor of the environment and climate action just 13 times, DeSmog calculates based on a comprehensive list detailing every House of Commons vote he’s made as a federal politician.

“Those numbers say to me that he doesn’t believe we need to actually roll up our sleeves and work on climate change in a meaningful way,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, a national labour organization that’s been supporting ongoing federal legislation to foster climate-friendly union jobs.

“I’m very concerned about what a Pierre Poilievre government would look like,” she told DeSmog.

Poilievre’s office didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his environmental voting record. The Conservative leader, which some polls suggest is favoured by Canadians to be the next prime minister, stated earlier this year that as far as climate policy goes he’s in favour of “technology, not taxes,” without providing concrete details.

He is meanwhile enthusiastic about oil and gas expansion. “We’re going to clear the way for pipelines,” he has promised. “I am going to support pipelines south, north, east, west. We will build Canadian pipelines.”

A 20-year Voting Record

Poilievre was first elected as a Conservative MP in 2004. His first anti-environment vote took place that fall when he opposed a bill recognizing land claims of First Nations in the Northwest Territories in order to allow them more say over lands and water on their territories. The entire Conservative opposition also voted against it.

The following year he voted along with Conservative and Liberal MPs against legislation giving the province of Quebec greater resources and a mandate to implement the Kyoto climate accord.

After Conservative leader Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006, and until Harper was voted out in 2015, Poilievre voted in lockstep with his party on a barrage of regulation-eviscerating bills, according to federal Green Party leader and MP Elizabeth May.

“Any chance that Pierre Poilievre had to vote against the environment, he always took it,” May told DeSmog.

That included his party’s passage of Bill C-38, an omnibus bill that May described at the time as “the Environmental Destruction Act.” That legislation, officially known as the “Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act,” among other things repealed and replaced the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, weakened national water protections, killed implementation requirements for the Kyoto Protocol and exempted oil and gas pipelines from the Navigational Waters Act.

More than 100 of Poilievre’s anti-environmental votes came from opposing amendments and challenges brought forward by May and other opposition MPs attempting to lessen the bill’s pollution and climate impacts, according to records reviewed by DeSmog.

That legislation was followed by Bill C-45, another Conservative omnibus bill that in its attacks on water protections and Indigenous sovereignty helped ignite a nationwide First Nations-led protest movement known as Idle No More.

Obstruction Under Trudeau

Following Liberal leader Justin Trudeau becoming prime minister in 2015, Poilievre has consistently voted, along with other Conservative MPs, against climate action and other environmental protection measures. That includes dozens of votes against the Liberal government’s carbon pricing initiatives.

During that period the federal Liberals have failed to put Canada on track to achieving climate targets agreed to at the 2015 Paris negotiations, however. A big reason for that is the party’s ongoing support for the oil and gas industry, including purchasing the $34 billion Trans Mountain oil sands pipeline and backing gas export projects such as LNG Canada, which climate experts say will tap a massive gas field in British Columbia and Alberta that represents the world’s sixth largest “carbon bomb.”

“There’s no indication Conservatives will do anything other than destroy climate policy,” May said. “But we don’t have a credible climate plan now from the Liberals.”

Poilievre cast a rare “yea” vote of climate action in 2017, voting alongside 277 MPs from all major political parties in favor of a motion stating that “despite the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, Canada remain committed to the implementation of the Agreement, as it is in the best interest of all Canadians.”

Poilievre over the years has also voted in favor of legislation protecting whales and providing cleaner drinking water for First Nations communities.

But any positive votes he’s cast are more than offset by a 20-year legacy of privileging polluting and atmosphere-warming industries over the environment, May said. Poilievre this spring cast more than three dozen votes to stall and prevent the passage of Bill C-50, a bill the Canadian Labour Congress claims “will create new sustainable jobs, help shift energy workers into sustainable jobs, and decarbonize good jobs to make them sustainable.”

“We’re incredibly disappointed with the Conservative approach to delaying this act,” Bruske, the organization’s president, said. “Putting such obstacles in the road to passing legislation tells me the Conservatives actually have no interest in addressing climate change.”

This article was first published on DeSmog. Read the original story here. 

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As for the Conservatives, they see a wedge issue they can stir up to their political benefit, and their “Axe the tax” slogan is tailor-made for riling up their base: it rhymes, it fits on a baseball cap, and it supports their “divide and conquer” strategy for electoral victory. Combined with the Liberals’ intransigence on the issue, the stage is set for a shouting match over the carbon tax at a time when we urgently need a grown-up conversation about how to address the climate emergency while securing Canada’s place in the emerging new-energy economy.

Canada is one of the most decentralized federations in the world, and achieving consensus on national policy is difficult at the best of times. In addition, unlike most of its OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) trading partners, revenue from oil and gas exports is important to the national economy and the economic lifeblood of the producing provinces. While the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal government has the constitutional right to put a price on carbon, it has proven a formidable political challenge to find a solution that responds to the climate emergency while reconciling the interests of producing and consuming provinces as well as the competing imperatives of short-term gain and long-term prosperity.

The result is the revenue-neutral, two-part federal carbon-pricing policy we have today: a carbon tax on fuel rebated to households and most of the economy, and an output-based regulatory pricing and trading system for emissions-intensive industries (the big polluters). Both systems share a common carbon price that increases to $170 per tonne by 2030 from its current level of $80 per tonne. Provinces and territories may opt in or out of either or both parts by substituting their own approach as long as they are consistent with the federal government’s carbon-pricing schedule. The result is a patchwork with four tax regimes and nine separate industrial pricing systems that could all come apart at the seams if national and provincial leaders keep turning up the heat.

The Canada Carbon Rebate — now you see it, now you don’t

The first part of our carbon-pricing system is the one most familiar to Canadians: a “tax and dividend” approach in which fuel distributors pay the carbon levy and pass it on to consumers. The revenue – about $8.3 billion in 2022/2023 – is returned to the provinces in which it is raised, mostly in the form of quarterly rebates that are based on the total carbon emissions of the province but not on the emissions of individual households. For most households, the rebate is larger than the tax paid, and the idea is to provide an incentive for them to reduce their carbon emissions so that they can continue to come out ahead as the carbon levy increases year by year.

Polling from Nanos indicates that nearly half of Canadians don’t believe that the carbon tax is effective, and as the people whose behaviour it is designed to influence, they should know. The impact that the tax has at the gas pump is less than the routine variation in gas prices to which Canadians have become accustomed. The impact on heating bills is more noticeable but not by itself sufficient to cover the capital costs of the deep retrofits and heat pump conversions needed to get the buildings off fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the government is faltering on public relations; indeed, a large portion of the population does not realize that the quarterly rebates are related to the carbon tax, and many do not even know they are receiving the rebates, which are mostly delivered via direct bank deposits. The government’s recent rebranding of what was previously called the “Climate Action Incentive Payment” as the “Canada Carbon Rebate” signals a renewed commitment to shoring up sagging support for carbon pricing.

Economists have oversold the effectiveness of carbon pricing in the real world.

Skepticism about the impact of the carbon tax is fuelled by assertions that it is the most efficient and effective way to reduce emissions, which fly in the face of common sense. Economists have oversold the effectiveness of carbon pricing in the real world, where fuel prices are a relatively small portion of the cost of services and amenities. Lower-income households feel its pinch more than others, but they are also in a weaker position to make the investments needed to reduce their energy use.

From building codes to vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, examples abound where rules and regulations win hands down over carbon or energy pricing in bringing about efficiency and emission reductions. In 1987, U.S. president Ronald Reagan was able to trigger a dramatic increase in refrigerator efficiency with a new set of appliance rules for the manufacturers. It boggles the mind to imagine just how much fuel tax it would have taken to raise the price of electricity high enough to achieve the same results.

Carbon pricing has been on the policy agenda since the 1980s, but in the last few years the technological pathway for decarbonizing buildings, transportation and electricity has come into sharper focus, and the urgency of addressing the climate emergency has increased. At worst, the Canada Carbon Rebate is an innocuous, zero-sum shell game. At best, a continuously rising carbon price will have a marginal direct effect on emissions while increasing the receptivity and success of the quicker, targeted and more direct measures that are needed now to address the climate emergency.

The biggest polluters pay the least

If you think the Canada Carbon Rebate is complicated, buckle up: there are hundreds of pages of rules and regulations governing the various federal and provincial systems for industrial carbon pricing.

In a nutshell, the second part of Canada’s “carbon tax” system works like this: Each facility covered by the federal output-based pricing system (OBPS) is permitted to freely emit greenhouse gases up to an annual limit. That limit depends on the facility’s emissions output and an emissions-intensity standard specific to the product being made in the facility, be that cement or steel, et cetera. If the facility’s emissions exceed this cap, then the company must either pay the carbon price on the additional emissions or submit what are called surplus allowances – effectively, credits it has banked from previous years when it didn’t exceed the cap or bought on the secondary market from other companies.

Still with me?

Those free emission allowances are adjusted to protect the viability and competitiveness of Canadian producers in global markets, so that, say, a steel company in Northern Ontario doesn’t drown in carbon taxes trying to compete with cheaper steel from abroad. It’s a system built for gaming, and a small army of consultants and lobbyists work hard at minimizing the costs that companies are paying for their emissions. Large emitters pay the carbon charge on only a portion of their actual emissions and so end up paying less for carbon than the average Canadian family. Suncor Energy, for instance, one of the largest oil companies in Canada, paid just $1.67 per tonne of greenhouse gases in 2020 when Canadian families were paying $30 per tonne. (Suncor estimates it will pay $8.97 per tonne between 2021 and 2030, less than a 10th of the $103 average price of carbon during this period.)

Large emitters end up paying less for carbon than the average Canadian family. Suncor Energy paid only $1.67 per tonne in 2020, when families paid $30.

Although transparency was a stated design objective of the OBPS, the carbon market that it spawned is a muddy swamp, causing headaches for regulators and uncertainty for investors. As Dave Sawyer, the Canada Climate Institute’s chief economist, notes, “It’s astounding that systems are not in place to track how these markets function and whether the market price holds.”

The rationale for granting these emission allowances to large emitters like pulp and paper mills is that they’re considered “trade exposed,” or at an unfair disadvantage in global markets against competitors that aren’t similarly taxed. This argument is stronger from some industries than others: in the case of steel or cement, paying a carbon tax of $50 per tonne doubles the costs of production, while in the case of oil extraction, it adds only a few dollars per barrel – enough to incentivize pollution reduction but not a competitiveness deal-breaker.

But the tide is turning now as the green transition moves forward, industrial processes evolve, and the European Union and the United States move to impose tariffs on carbon-intensive imports (so-called carbon border adjustment mechanisms). In other words, carbon pricing is coming for these industries, one way or another, and these industries need to decarbonize to survive. To be effective, the current output-based pricing system must be evenly applied across the country, driven by a carbon price aligned with international best practice, and integrated with other government initiatives for industrial decarbonization.

Ultimately, carbon pricing is a small component of the full suite of government spending, lending, and regulatory and tax instruments that are needed to effectively respond to the climate emergency while securing a place in the global low-carbon economy. The last thing the country needs is a “take no prisoners” battle to the death over the carbon tax that could set back what climate progress has been made. If the Liberals did an about-face on the retail portion of the tax while doubling down on the industrial pricing, it would lower the temperature on the climate conversation at a time when the world can’t afford any further warming.

Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights.

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The environment is often a forgotten issue once politicians are on the campaign trail. But this time, propelled by the catastrophic wildfires in British Columbia this summer and the dire conclusions in the recently released sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate change sits at or near the top of the list of issues most important to voters. Yet Justin Trudeau’s early election call may have set the stage for a major setback on climate action.

The election call was met with immediate questions about its rationale, given a minority but relatively stable and productive Parliament, the crisis in Afghanistan and a mounting fourth wave of COVID-19.

Polls are suggesting that after a weak start, Trudeau’s Liberals are only just catching up to Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives.

This is likely due to O’Toole’s largely successful repositioning of his party towards the political centre, including a belated recognition of the reality of climate change and the need for some form of carbon pricing.

But it’s important to look beyond the rebranding and consider what a Conservative win might mean for Canada’s approach to climate change.

Climate action in motion

Progressive voters have been left confused and more than a little annoyed by Trudeau’s election call. The Liberal minority government that resulted from the October 2019 election was dependent on the support of Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and, to a lesser extent, Yves-Francois Blanchet’s Bloc Québécois to survive. The result had been considerable action on climate change and a host of other issues.

The Liberal government, bolstered by a series of court decisions culminating in a March 2021 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that upheld the validity of its backstop carbon pricing system, had implemented the federal system, as promised, in those provinces without adequate carbon pricing systems of their own.

The federal backstop charge on heating and transportation fuels now applies in Ontario, Manitoba, Yukon, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nunavut. An output-based pricing system for industrial emitters is in place in Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Nunavut and partially in Saskatchewan.

Although the carbon pricing system goes far further than any previous federal government has gone to implement substantive climate policies, it’s not without significant weaknesses.

The burden of the pricing system falls overwhelmingly on individual consumers and households rather than industry. In addition to that unfairness, the effective cost to industrial facilities is far too low to significantly affect their behaviour. What’s more, the standard applied by the federal government to provinces seeking exemptions on the basis of their own systems has been profoundly inconsistent.

Liberal climate commitments

At the same time, the Liberals had committed to moving the carbon price to $170 a tonne by 2030 and revising what’s known as the Nationally Determined Contribution to reduce emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The Liberals originally committed to a 30 per cent reduction by 2030 and increased it to a 45 per cent reduction. It also adopted a broader net zero emission target for 2050.

A national phaseout of coal-fired electricity has been accelerated and new programs for funding public transit, electric vehicles and energy-efficient renovations for buildings are under way or proposed.

In a reversal from the government’s previous contradictory position of both pursuing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the expansion of fossil fuel exports, Trudeau has reaffirmed the commitment implied in the Liberals’ December 2020 climate policy paper to capping and reducing emissions from the fossil fuel sector.

Beyond the environment, the government has also adopted legislation recognizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and has been moving forward with a national child-care plan.

Low voter turnout?

The risks in this context are enormous. The unpopular and unwelcome election call, in combination with the continuing threat of COVID-19, is a potential recipe for low voter turnout. Under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, there’s the potential for irregular electoral outcomes.

The core Conservative voter is generally loyal and reliable, giving O’Toole a significant advantage in such a scenario.

Other factors may also favour the Conservatives, including the Bloc Québécois’s potential for growth in Québec. Although the federal Greens have diminished as a factor outside of a few specific ridings, the risks of vote-splitting between the Liberals and NDP exist.

The situation could lead to a Conservative victory and even a majority.

O’Toole has, so far, done a skillful job moving his party from the right to the moderate centre, but major questions still have to be asked what sort of government he would actually lead. Although acknowledging the reality of climate change, his party’s climate policies, particularly on carbon pricing, remain weak shadows of what’s being proposed by the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens.

Conservatives more popular in the West

The Conservatives may see some gains in Ontario and Québec, but they’re still fundamentally grounded in Alberta and Saskatchewan where many voters are hostile to climate action and dependent on resource development industries.

A Conservative cabinet would likely include more than a few holdovers from the Stephen Harper era, which was defined by the abandonment of Canada’s international climate change commitments, particularly the Kyoto Protocol.

A new Conservative federal government would likely draw heavily on Jason Kenney’s government in Alberta, and Doug Ford’s in Ontario, for political staff and advisers.

Both governments have been unwilling to act on climate change and have been criticized for their poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic. They remain overwhelmingly pro-industry, carbon-intense and development-friendly.

This all makes for some very difficult choices for voters concerned about climate change. Many would prefer a Liberal minority government dependent on the NDP, Bloc Québécois and/or Greens for support.

Such outcomes are, however, notoriously difficult to engineer from the perspective of individual voters.

O’Toole’s recent stumble on gun control may significantly weaken his party’s appeal to moderate voters, particularly in Québec and in urban areas.

But Canadians are still faced with an unwanted election, that has placed climate progress at unnecessary risk.

Mark Winfield is a professor of environmental studies at York University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In the first week, however, the spotlight shone on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the ongoing debate about whether the government should require certain employees to be vaccinated as another wave of COVID-19 infections swells. Canada’s role in safeguarding future life on this planet has yet to be broached in a serious way. That is likely to change.

This campaign is bookended by a summer in which the climate emergency became increasingly apparent and the UN climate summit this fall – to be hosted in November by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – in which nations will be expected to make more ambitious commitments to head off global environmental disaster.

Each of the political parties has made sweeping promises for climate change action, and voters need journalists to ask probing questions about their adequacy and credibility.

Journalist Markham Hislop recently commented that the Conservative Party of Canada’s climate change policies as outlined in their platform effectively “close the gap” with the Liberals’ stance on the issue while suggesting that the New Democrats offer a slightly more ambitious plan than the one put forward by the Trudeau government.

The result, he suggested, is less opportunity for wedge politics in which the Conservatives are painted as Neanderthals, as they were under Andrew Scheer during the 2019 campaign.

There is some truth to Hislop’s contention, especially when journalists are preoccupied with other priorities that create more clearly defined wedges. Still, there are yawning differences among the parties with regard to climate ambition. There continue to be deep cleavages in terms of how they would treat the oil and gas sector, which is responsible for 25% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Liberals remain vulnerable 

In the past nine months, the Liberal government moved the yardsticks on climate ambition. They announced a tougher 2030 target and commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, passed legislation that provides some accountability on meeting GHG-reduction targets, and announced plans to raise the carbon price to $170 a tonne by 2030. They also announced more than $15 billion in spending to commercialize and adopt clean technologies that will help Canada meet its commitment and create jobs in the zero-carbon economy.

Still, the Liberals remain as vulnerable as they were in the 2019 election among voters who rank climate change high on their list of priorities and are unhappy with the Trudeau government’s ongoing support for the fossil fuel industry.

In addition to support for the Trans Mountain oil pipeline and export facilities for natural gas, the Liberal government provided some $1.9 billion in subsidies to the industry in 2020, the International Institute for Sustainable Development concluded in a report this year. Activists say that figure dramatically underestimates federal assistance by excluding things like pandemic-related wage subsidies and Bank of Canada bond purchases.

Conservative climate platform falls short 

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, meanwhile, is determined to give his party more credibility on climate change policy, but so far he has had mixed success.

His platform promises $15 billion in spending over several years to support the development and adoption of low-carbon technology. It includes a modest carbon price of $50 per tonne but would allow consumers to keep the proceeds of the levy to spend on a variety of energy-saving devices. The move may appeal to voters, but it would do little, if anything, to encourage less fuel consumption. The Liberal program provides cash payments to Canadians to ease the burden of the levy but is not tied to their actual spending.

When O’Toole released his climate plan last spring, analysts concluded it was a “serious” plan that could, if fully implemented, achieve GHG reductions that would put Canada within reach of our initial target of reducing emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. It’s a target that may have been reasonably laudable when it was initially set by former Conservative PM Stephen Harper in 2015.

However, that target is clearly insufficient to put the country on course for achieving net-zero status by 2050. The Liberals will no doubt remind climate-conscious voters that the Conservatives have not endorsed the net-zero target.

In April, the Liberal government increased its ambition to reduce emissions by between 40 and 45% by 2030 and hit that mid-century, net-zero goal. The New Democrats would set a target of 50% GHG reduction by 2030, while the Green Party of Canada says we need to go further and cut GHGs by 60% in the next decade.

O’Toole has the least ambitious targets, while at the same time, his party lacks credibility to implement the plan for a number of reasons.

Environmental economist Nic Rivers – who was quoted in the platform as lauding its seriousness – notes that many of the proposals are conditional on a number of factors, often requiring identical American action. While the platform has some serious policy proposals, it is easy to be skeptical about whether there will be seriousness in implementing them, Rivers says.

Conservatives remain deeply divided about the importance of GHG reductions. At a spring policy convention, the delegates voted down a resolution that would recognize the reality of climate change and the need for Canada to address it.

The party has oil in its DNA. Conservatives have worked hand-in-glove with the industry’s leaders in recent years to oppose Liberal climate and environmental policies, and their platform calls for continued expansion of oil and natural gas exports.

While Conservatives have endorsed technology to capture carbon emissions in industry, that approach faces serious limitations. Chief executives at Suncor Energy and Cenovus Energy say it would require $75 billion to decarbonize the oil sands, and they want the federal government to pay. It would take additional billions to capture carbon from conventional oil and natural gas production. None of this would address emissions that occur when the oil or natural gas is burned as fuel.

One telling item, as reported last week by The Narwhal’s Fatima Syed: the Conservative platform proposes to criminalize civil disobedience actions that would interfere with oil and gas projects. Conservatives – both federally and in Alberta – have waged war on environmental groups that oppose oil pipelines and liquid natural gas facilities as unsustainable fossil infrastructure. Former PM Stephen Harper and his cabinet minister Joe Oliver targeted environmental groups, including increased audits of their charitable status by Revenue Canada.

Still, the Conservatives are clearly hoping mainstream voters will see a “serious” enough plan to check the climate box as they consider their election options. Liberals, meanwhile, have upped their ambition considerably since 2019 and want to persuade Canadians that theirs is an urgent but pragmatic approach.

Avid climate voters, including young Canadians who rank it as a high priority, will have to decide whether Liberal actions are sufficient or opt for a more ambitious NDP environmental platform that would intrude heavily in areas of provincial jurisdiction. The Green Party has the most ambitious climate agenda and could attract ardent environmentally minded voters. However, internal battles derailed its campaign before the election even started.

In a tight contest, the parties’ ability to manage the climate agenda could be one key to electoral success.

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Naturally, the PM took a pasting for thinking too small.

“This announcement doesn’t remotely meet the scale of the jobs emergency or the climate emergency,” said Labour MP Ed Miliband. “France and Germany are investing tens of billions of euros. This provides, at best, £4 billion of new money over several years.”

Caroline Lucas, the U.K.’s sole Green Party MP, called Johnson’s plan “a shopping list, not a plan to address the climate emergency. It commits only a fraction of the necessary resources.”

Compare BoJo’s climate budget to U.S. president Joe Biden’s proposed US$2 trillion over four years, or US$500 billion a year, and Johnson’s critics do have a point.

Still, Greenpeace was slightly kinder, saying Boris’s announcement “signals the end of the road for polluting cars and vans, and a historic turning point on climate action.” But the organization criticized the plan for being “fixated on other speculative solutions, such as nuclear and hydrogen from fossil fuels, that will not be taking us to zero emissions anytime soon, if ever.”

Feedback is our friend. Three weeks after releasing his green plan, the PM and leader of the Conservative Party upped the ante, pledging to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (based on 1990 levels) 68% by 2030 – the deepest GHG cuts in the Group of 20 nations.

The constructive criticism continues. As climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins told BBC News, “Mr. Johnson’s target is ambitious – but we need action to back it up, right now.”

Mind you, many would be pleased to see Canada’s Conservative leaders share Johnson’s ambition. But with Jason Kenney in Alberta pitching pipelines, Ontario’s Doug Ford dismissing the federal carbon tax as “some green scam,” and federal Tory leader Erin O’Toole saying he’ll consult the provinces on climate policy – we won’t hold our breath.

Update: Johnson has since committed an additional £3 billion in climate finance to support biodiversity protection. But gaping holes remain in Johnson’s green agenda: his government recently decided not to block a new coal mine and last week approved the use of bee-harming neonic pesticides banned in Europe.

“New coal mines and pesticides… the UK’s so called ‘green industrial revolution’ is off to a great start, “tweeted 18-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Very credible indeed.”

A version of this brief appears in the upcoming Winter Issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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Incorporated in 2016 by Michael Binnion—an Alberta accountant turned energy entrepreneur who has been trying for years to persuade Quebeckers to let his company frack in the St. Lawrence  Lowlands—MMN exists, publicly, as a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a bare bones website. Its mandate is to “educate” the public about hydrocarbon-based energy. According to the Globe, MMN’s board includes other Calgary oil and gas activists, including Patrick Ward, who heads Painted Pony Energy, and Susan Riddell Rose and Mike Rose, who head Perpetual Energy and Tourmaline Oil respectively.

The organization, such as it is, operates out of the headquarters of Binnion’s firm, Questerre Energy, and its other directors include two Questerre employees. At first glimpse, MMN looks to be scarcely more than a ripple in a sea of social media turbulence — an Astroturf advocacy operation with a curiously anachronistic handle. Even some veteran Tories outside Alberta haven’t heard of either MMN or Binnion, who did not respond to numerous requests for an interview with Corporate Knights.

Yet in the oil and gas industry, which has a great deal riding on the outcome of an excruciatingly close race, Binnion is an A-list operator, and his expressed views are well reflected in the Tories’ platform. As chair of the Manning Foundation (which is a separate entity from the Manning Centre, a conservative networking organization based in Calgary) and a member of the board of governors of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the sector’s lobby group, according to media accounts, he was also one of 146 attendees at a private fundraiser for Scheer, held in June in a Calgary hotel.

The MMN, moreover, stepped in as a lead sponsor of the Manning Centre’s “networking” conference held last March in Ottawa that featured many of the leading figures in Canadian conservatism, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Ford Treasury Board president Peter Bethlenfalvy, and Stephen Harper’s former Finance Minister Joe Oliver. Karl Rove, the mastermind of George Bush Jr.’s 2000 election, was the keynote speaker.

A year earlier, in fact, Binnion figured even more prominently at the 2018 Manning Centre talk-fest, boasting during a panel discussion that the notes on a scrap of paper he had in his hand laid out key elements of the Conservative’s energy platform, the centrepiece of which was replacing the Liberals’ carbon tax with tax incentives for emitters to invest in clean tech. “I want to tell you right now that this [is the]official list for the conservative movement on the options that we’re going to discuss,” he said, according to Maclean’s. “We’ve now got an agreed list.”

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Photo from Twitter.

 To those who know Michael Binnion, MMN offers but one glimpse of a well-connected and determined insider’s campaign to change our national conversation about both fossil fuels generally and carbon pricing in particular.

In contrast to energy luminaries like Gwyn Morgan, he’s a somewhat unlikely figure to be carrying this torch, given his business track record. Questerre was co-founded in 2000 by Binnion and Norwegian businessman Peder Paus, who served as chairman until 2015. (As a side note, Paus’ niece, Olympia Paus, is married to Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, which helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. There is no evidence Binnion and Nix have any association beyond the Paus family). The stock price of Questerre, has been tanking for some time. And its revenues for the first six months of fiscal 2019 dropped by a quarter from the comparable period in 2018, resulting in a $3 million loss, compared to a modest profit the year prior.

Questerre stock, much of which is held by a handful of Norwegian and Swiss institutions, trades these days for about 20 cents, well down from its early 2018 price of more than $1. Much of the company’s steadiest cash flow comes from a handful of Western Canadian wells. But two of Binnion’s bets — tapping shale reserves in Quebec and Jordan — haven’t panned out, despite assists from well-connected politicians, including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose consulting firm provided Binnion with strategic advice, Maclean’s reported.

Away from the demands of the company, Binnion has been relentless, publicly and privately, in advancing his case for eliminating the federal carbon tax, based on a claim that the Liberals’ pricing policy will lead to what he calls “carbon leakage.” The gist of his argument is that if Canadian natural gas is more costly than American energy, domestic distributors and industrial consumers will import what they need, causing jobs, production and economic activity to shift to the U.S.

“As a result,” he opined in a 2017 essay in Policy Options, “America’s emissions increase, meaning Canadian carbon leaks across the border as well. This offsets the environmental benefits of Canada’s climate action.” Calling last year for a “common sense” climate strategy, he accused carbon pricing proponents of ignoring the leakage issue and called for more research on the phenomena.

Binnion, says his longtime business associate Bruce Edgelow, a Calgary investment banker, is “really good…at building relationships and figuring out who should be at the table.” “He’s the kind of person who moves the dial,” adds former Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who first met Binnion about a decade ago, when Questerre was looking for permits to start drilling in a vast shale gas deposit along the north shore of the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec City. “I would be among those who feel it’s worth figuring out what he’s saying.”

Binnion is but one voice among the many Tories and oil patch insiders intent on toppling Trudeau and reversing the policy shift towards carbon pricing across Canada. But what seems increasingly clear is that figures like Binnion — who donated to the campaign of libertarian candidate Maxime Bernier in the run-up to the 2017 Conservative Party leadership convention — have been hard at work behind the scenes, hacking away at what seemed, not so long ago, like an emerging consensus about the effectiveness of using a market-based mechanism, like carbon taxes, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 If one had to pinpoint the beginning of that hesitant consensus, it might trace back to about 2014, when Reform Party founder Preston Manning came out in favour, in principle, of market mechanisms like carbon taxes to contain climate change. Intellectual cover came from the University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz, who argued in a 2008 paper that the federal fuel excise tax should be converted into a broad-based environmental tax.

At that point, only B.C. had a broad-based carbon tax, which was introduced in 2008 by the right-of-centre provincial Liberals and has remained in place ever since. In 2015, of course, Trudeau swept into office pledging to phase in carbon taxes in those provinces that hadn’t put their own in place. In response, Ontario, Alberta and Quebec rolled out or tweaked their own versions.

In early 2018, further evidence of a growing consensus came from then Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown, who promised to support carbon taxes as part of his bid to defeat Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals with a centrist platform. Most of his caucus, including MPPs who are now ministers under Premier Doug Ford, “signed on,” he points out. “To say you believe in climate change and not be willing to do anything about it seems inconsistent,” adds Brown, noting that he believes the “vast majority” of the public feels it is a serious issue. Citing the policies and stances of previous and current Tories from Brian Mulroney to MP Michael Chong, Brown feels “there’s an appetite for doing the right thing.”

That may be true, but the orchestrated political backlash against climate action from the right has come swiftly, and it accelerated substantially after an alleged sexual abuse scandal swiftly toppled Brown in early 2018.

At the time, allegations of assault surfaced in the media but questions soon arose about some of the victims’ accounts and Brown, who was subsequently elected as mayor of Brampton, Ont., is suing CTV for defamation. The accusations encouraged those on the party’s fringes to push for his removal, he says. “The hard right — the religious right and the climate dinosaurs — took advantage by realizing they needed a leader who would not support progressive environmental policies.”

 Brown’s demise, of course, paved the way for Ford to swiftly grab the helm with an explicitly populist anti-carbon tax agenda that included cancelling the province’s levy and using the courts to fight the federal legislation, citing jurisdictional overreach.

While Ford was facing off against a long-in-the-tooth government headed by an unpopular premier, his campaign got a big assist from Ontario Proud, a third-party group that spent almost $450,000 on advertising, mainly social media attack ads. Some its largest backers were developers like Mattamy Homes and members of the non-union contractor lobby, Merit Ontario. The group now claims about 400,000 followers.

In office, Ford has made common cause with Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick. Jason Kenney’s spring victory over Rachel Notley doubled down on this backlash, featuring loud denunciations of carbon taxes and threats of more legal action. (In the spring, a Saskatchewan superior court dismissed that province’s move to challenge the constitutionality of the federal carbon tax.) Both Ford and Kenney have ratcheted up the rhetoric, warning that carbon taxes will either trigger a recession or sink the oil patch.

The attack has been joined by others. Late last year Jack Mintz took to the op-ed pages to accuse the federal Liberals of botching the design of their carbon tax policies. Charest, who favours the carbon tax, contends that the opposition to the current system — which imposes a levy on carbon and provides tax rebates to individuals — is rooted in a growing mistrust of the federal Liberals and their failure to get buy-in from the opposition.

With the current election, Ontario Proud has morphed into “Canada Proud” and has been pumping anti-Trudeau attack ads and memes onto social media that reach hundreds of thousands of accounts. Canada Proud shares some contributors with Ontario Proud, but its most deep pocketed backers include Alberta billionaire Ronald Mannix, his investment company Coril Holdings and the national non-union contractors group, Merit Canada. New Brunswick Proud, meanwhile, was set up with $15,000 in funding from the Manning Foundation and the Modern Miracle Network, The Globe and Mail has revealed.

Binnion, meanwhile, has continued to tell anyone who will listen, including successive Quebec governments, that policy measures to restrict fossil fuels will create unintended consequences — what he calls a “green paradox.” While he freely admits that climate change is real, he also insists that no one has ever come up with compelling evidence that carbon taxes contribute to a solution. “[M]any conservatives have let themselves be convinced that carbon pricing is an efficient, market-based policy,” he wrote in the National Post last year. “An acceptance of the theory without examining the practice is what got them there.”

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Michael Binnion moves in the overlapping circles that encompass Alberta’s oil and gas entrepreneurs and the conservative policy networks that radiate from Calgary. Besides running Questerre, he recently became a part owner of a B.C. heli-ski resort called Silvertip Lodge.

Unsurprisingly, he and his second wife, Maria, give substantial sums to conservative politicians. In the past three years alone, according to election filings, they’ve contributed $35,500 to Jason Kenney’s various campaigns, almost $15,000 to the Conservative Party of Canada and, somewhat awkwardly, $6,100 to the failed Conservative Party of Canada leadership run of Maxime Bernier, an outspoken opponent of carbon taxes who has actively courted the climate denier crowd during this election. (No Binnion donations ended up with the winner, Andrew Scheer.)

“Michael is one of those congenitally optimistic people blessed with boundless energy,” says University of Calgary political science professor emeritus Thomas Flanagan, a former advisor to Stephen Harper. He cites one Binnion venture: an annual Christmas party for friends and employees at Calgary’s River Café, including carol-singing, raffle tickets and a silent auction, with proceeds to a foundation Binnion established to support disabled skiers. “Just thinking about him tires me out.”

While his public pronouncements stress the importance of engaging in policy dialogues and are occasionally seasoned with nods to the advocacy work of environmental activists, Binnion in private comes across as a hard-driving ideological libertarian, recalls one person who met him recently to discuss a partnership opportunity and took note of all the Ayn Rand tomes in his office. “This is someone who understands how change happens.”

Binnion wasn’t always as politically active as he is now. After stints with the accounting firm, Clarkson Gordon in Toronto and then a real estate company, he’d moved to Calgary by the early 1990s to work for a succession of junior oil and gas firms with assets in northern B.C., the Republic of Georgia and other remote locales. He established Questerre Energy in the early 2000s, and took the company public in 2003, partially on the strength of 16 natural gas exploration licenses in the St. Lawrence Lowlands in Quebec.

The story of Binnion’s epic campaign to convince Quebec officials to let him pursue a massive shale gas strike offers glimpses of not only his strategic approach, but also his persistence in attempting to shift public opinion. “Michael has been a leader in trying to organize oil and gas producers into an effective political force,” observes Flanagan. “It started with his frustration in Quebec, after he made major gas discoveries there that he has never been allowed to produce.”

“Michael has been a leader in trying to organize oil and gas producers into an effective political force.”

-Thomas Flanagan, a former advisor to Stephen Harper

In 2008, as the Bakken shale gas boom in the U.S. Midwest was beginning to catch fire, independent geologists reported that they had identified huge volumes of natural gas trapped in the so-called Utica shale deposits in the region of Quebec where Questerre and a few other larger energy firms had resource permits. In the spring of 2008, the company’s shares shot up and Binnion began the regulatory slogging involved in securing approvals to begin a $100 million pilot project, which would only be the beginning.

In interviews, Binnion talked enthusiastically, and perhaps unwisely, about eventually establishing 10,000 wells between Quebec City and Montreal. Others, including a large Quebec utility, enthused about the prospect of energy independence for a province that had been pumping in its gas from Alberta for decades. As the Calgary Herald noted, the area potentially contained about five times more than Alberta’s current proven conventional gas reserves. The Geological Survey of Canada later estimated a seven trillion cubic feet reserve, potentially worth $93 billion in GDP to the province, trapped in the shale deposits beneath the Lowlands, Anticosti Island and parts of the Gaspé peninsula. “I just can’t fathom what kind of numbers we’re talking about,” Binnion said at the time.

Nor, apparently, could Quebeckers. In the wake of a damning University of Toronto study about the potential risks to groundwater, local opposition to fracking in Quebec crystallized and then surged through 2009 and 2010. Binnion attempted to ease fears using the time-honoured technique of whataboutism. “In full development,” he told a reporter at the time, “the industry is estimated to use less water a year than car washes in the province and about one half of one percent of the water used by the pulp and paper industry in Quebec.”

It didn’t work. The then-Liberal government had gotten caught offside, partially because the province had “no culture of oil and gas,” observes Charest. “Quebec was a difficult environment in which to convince decision makers to even try pilot projects. We assumed this was something people would want to see. It was a classic political mistake.” In late 2010, Questerre and its partner, Talisman Energy, moved hastily to postpone the proposed test wells. But their tactical retreat made no difference: the province imposed a moratorium the following year that has survived, more or less intact, ever since.

Binnion tackled the political culture in Quebec head on, getting out of Calgary and embarking on a hearts-and-minds campaign aimed at securing that most elusive natural resource: social license. He was a driving force behind (and then headed) a nascent Quebec oil and gas industry association, whose board has included political insiders. Most conspicuously, though, Binnion set out to learn French and address Quebeckers directly, beginning with a blog documenting his thoughts on all matter fracking, energy and politics.

“If I had not learned French,” he said in 2014, “I never would have had deep and emotional discussions with many Quebecers about what their language and culture means to them and how they see the history of our country.” He claimed to see key links and parallels between Quebec and Alberta. “I believe that Canada’s oldest culture and its newest [Alberta] have something to learn from each other.” In other blog posts, he’s even publicly expressed agreement with statements about shale-gas drilling from Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation.

Binnion tried to make the case for fracking using a range of rhetorical and policy tactics. Besides pitching the pocket-book appeal of a new industry that can create jobs, GDP growth and welcome tax revenues, he’s prodded Quebeckers by cheekily pointing out that the province’s imports of fracked gas represent “carbon leakage,” i.e. methane emissions related to fracking do take place, but just in another jurisdiction. What’s more, Binnion has been touting the rather general results of an IPSOS poll commissioned by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which has also stepped up by condemning the Quebec government’s recalcitrance. (The IPSOS poll found ample public support for natural gas, but didn’t ask respondents about shale drilling in particular.)

The company, which describes its Quebec projects as examples of “clean tech” investment, has also sought to line up political support from the two regional rural municipalities in the St. Lawrence Lowlands, Lotbinière and Bécancoura campaign that has included offers of three percent profit sharing with the host communities.

But over nearly a decade, and through three different governments, Quebec hasn’t shifted meaningfully in its opposition. Even the new right-wing premier, François Legault, has offered little room for optimism.

The reason, as in other regions like Nova Scotia and New York State, has everything to do with public nervousness about the techniques required to extract shale gas. This kind of drilling has triggered seismic activity in earthquake-prone regions, but the most contentious aspects involve water — the sheer quantity that must be pumped into these reserves to force out the gas, as well as concerns about the downstream health impacts of the chemical additives generally used to make the water more viscous.

Allan Fogwill, the CEO of the Calgary-based Canadian Energy Research Institute, which published an upbeat assessment of Quebec’s reserves in 2015, says shale gas firms increasingly recycle water in their wells and rely on more biodegradable chemicals. Says Fogwill, “It comes down to a risk-reward decision for Quebeckers.”

Not surprisingly, Quebec anti-fracking activists strongly dispute such claims. Éric Notebaert, an ER physician in Montreal who is president elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, says a recent literature survey shows that there is an association between fracking and many health issues including low birth weight babies, some congenital defects (heart and neurological), leukaemia and pulmonary problems (asthma and chronic bronchitis).

A few years ago, Binnion sought to demonstrate the safety of the process by drinking some fracking fluid. While Notebaert and others acknowledge that recent toxicology and epidemiological studies fall short of demonstrating a causal relationship between fracking and health impacts, he warns that stunts like Binnion’s public quaffing falsely suggest the additives are safe. “We just don’t know,” he states.

Others question Binnion’s attempt to grease the wheels by offering to share profits with local municipalities. Carole Dupuis, spokesperson for the Mouvement écocitoyen UNEplanète, condemns this approach as a subversive wedge tactic, one that’s not intended to obtain social license but rather “local” licence, to make it much more difficult for neighbouring municipalities to say no to drilling proposals. “This ‘local’ license trick is immensely important because the industry manifestly wants to use it as the ‘sesame’ to open large territories which would otherwise be difficult to penetrate.”

What happens in the months to come remains to be seen, although it seems increasingly likely that the next front in this war of inches could play out in a court, given Legault’s post-election pledge to prevent drilling in populous regions.

Indeed, in the final months of the Liberals term, former premier Philippe Couillard’s energy minister effectively banned gas fracking in the province.

Questerre, which continues to spend millions acquiring acreage in Quebec, has filed a motion for a judicial review, and Quebec’s Superior Court decided to allow a hearing. Binnion has said little publicly in recent months. As a company presentation to investors released early in the year tersely warned, “Only if it becomes necessary will Questerre evaluate a legal claim for expropriation.”

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Time will tell whether Binnion is a Svengali-like figure with a preternatural ability to manipulate public policy, or little more than the natural gas industry’s answer to Don Quixote — a deluded oilman tilting at metaphorical wind turbines.

Patrick Brown, who claims he hasn’t heard of either MMN or Binnion, thinks Canadians “should be treating the environment as a non-partisan issue.” Others on the right evidently disagree. Bruce Edgelow, who was Binnion’s investment banker back when he turned up in one of Calgary’s junior oil and gas firms in the 1990s, points out that shifting far-reaching policy conversations is “slow work. This is not overnight.” But, he adds of the Modern Miracle Network’s efforts to methodically convene opposition to the federal government’s carbon tax policy, “There have been a lot of beachheads that have been firmed up.” McGill University economist Chris Ragan, who chairs the soon-to-be-folded Ecofiscal Commission, told me earlier in the summer that he fully expected climate change and the carbon tax to be front and centre in this fall’s federal election. A Nanos/Globe and Mail poll released in May indicated that more than 60% of Canadians oppose provincial attempts to block federal climate change policy, and other polls have shown growing public concern about emissions. Ragan welcomed a political showdown over carbon taxes. “I’m not discouraged at all that we’re debating this.”

Has it happened? Despite two court rulings upholding the federal carbon pricing policy, new measures that refund taxes directly to individuals and the energy unleashed by the climate strikes, Trudeau’s Liberals have mostly avoided climate policy so far in this race, and they are running neck-and-neck with Scheer, who is promising to tear up the carbon tax and replace it with clean tech tax credits.

For Binnion, that seismic shift in our politics may be the true modern miracle.

The post How one gas company CEO is fuelling Canada’s climate politics appeared first on Corporate Knights.