Complaining won't soften the rock and hard place of the need for a reduced-carbon future for Alberta

You can understand that mayors and councils of towns that rely on coal mining for economic activity are concerned about the province's recently-announced program of carbon taxes and the 15-year phase-out of coal fired electricity. That's their job, their duty, to advocate for the interests of their communities.

But it's something else for groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to declare the planned phase-out a “war on coal” and the carbon tax as an attack on Alberta families.

That's far too narrow a view. In the big picture, the plans are meant to save the oilsands industry by making it politically possible for new pipelines to be built to carry our bitumen to new markets. Oh, and to reduce the province's carbon footprint in the face of science declaring it would be advisable to do so.

Communities whose economic lives revolve around coal mining and coal power generation recently sent a joint letter to the province outlining their concerns for their towns' future.

They have every reason to do so. There are many towns in Canada that in our history have withered and died when the local mine closed, or the local industry was shut down. It's not a pretty picture. One day, you're a vibrant community, the next, the jobs disappear, people leave, homes get shuttered and local businesses close, one by one.

But if you believe that Alberta needs to do its part in reducing greenhouse gas pollution — and to be seen by the world as doing its part — something's got to give.

It's totally ironic; according to government figures, there is twice as much energy in Alberta's coal reserves than there is in all our other non-renewable energy sources. As fossil fuels go, coal is energy in it's densest form. You have to burn a whole lot more “clean” natural gas to get the same energy release as you get get from burning coal.

More, we know exactly where all the reserves are located. Getting the coal out and turning it into electricity results in cheaper power than you can get from pretty much any other power source. In Alberta, anyway.

Until you put a price on the pollution it causes.

By 2018, the current Alberta plan will price carbon dioxide equivalents at $30 a tonne. That's on all the carbon we consume — natural gas, auto fuels, electricity, everything. What does that mean to us?

Well, groups like the CTF warn that's going to be $900 a year on average for Alberta families by 2030, when the last coal-fired plant is to be shut down.

The government puts the figure at just under $500, to be reduced by rebates from the $3 billion per year the government expects to receive from carbon taxes.

What's that mean in a city like Red Deer?

Currently, the city is in the process of creating its own greenhouse gas reduction plan. I was pleased to be invited to help with the creation of that plan, representing that part of Red Deer interested in more sustainable and active transportation. A wide variety of representatives from government, business, power regulators, and citizen groups are at the table.

Here's a bit of what we know so far. Every person in Red Deer is responsible for about 17.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent gas emissions per year. In 2010, the start-point for the plan, that came to 1.77 mega-tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year, most of which will remain in the atmosphere for many decades.

The goal, as set by the International Protocol on Climate Change, is to reduce that number to 30 per cent below what it was in 1990, which is the global goal required to avoid temperatures rising by more than the “tipping point” of two degrees.

How can we possibly get there? By everyone ditching their cars and biking or walking to work? Nope, not even close.

The largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta cities is not from our cars, but from our buildings. That's because they're 55-per-cent powered by coal, and almost all heated by natural gas.

There will be no approaching our share of the GHG reductions, without switching away from coal-fired electricity. In British Columbia, where there is so much hydro power, the balance is much different. In Norway, where almost all electricity is hydro, the government wants the entire country to eventually run all its automobiles on electricity.

But Alberta needs a giant technology switch from coal to renewables for electricity, or we will forever be known as a “dirty” producer of energy, which will hurt growth in our most valuable resource industry, the oilsands. 

That's both the rock and the hard place the province is in.

Robin Campbell a former Alberta energy minister and former environment minister, is now president of the Coal Association of Canada.

He says a significant portion of that $3 billion in carbon taxes should be directed toward technologies to reduce the emissions from burning coal. Good luck with that.

In a province that has always done the easy thing when it comes to everything from energy production to urban planning, the easiest thing is a technology switch to renewables.

You can't get there without charging a price for carbon emissions from everyone that creates them. Whining about the short-term cost doesn't help, either.

A neophyte Canadian leader assumes a new role for Canada on the world stage

The checklist continues for our new prime minister as he works through a series of international meetings before he can settle down in Ottawa and worry more about Canada.

Justin Trudeau met the Queen on Wednesday. This weekend, there's the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Malta. After that, he will barely have time to debrief, before attending the Paris round of international talks on climate change.

And don't forget the the crowds of groupies in Manila, at the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum earlier this month, all looking for a selfie with Canada's “hottie” prime minister.

Attending all these global events, while dealing with the complexities of setting up a new government at home, would make anyone's head spin.

Still, Trudeau says even a neophyte national leader like ours has a role to play on the world stage. According to the The Associated Press, he said U.S. president Barack Obama and German chancellor Angela Merkel “were very pleased that I was going to the Commonwealth, because they wanted me to make a real effort to talk about climate change” ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Paris next week.

That's a pretty hefty pair of endorsements for a nation that's had zero presence on the climate change docket up to now (and that's putting it generously).

The agenda for the Commonwealth group does include the current top-of-mind issues: climate change, international terrorism, the refugee crisis. Add to that their internal agenda of promoting what is purported to be the purpose of the Commonwealth's existence: democracy, equality, rule of law.

Because on those fronts, the Commonwealth hasn't really performed all that well.

The Commonwealth is comprised of 53 nations, mostly former British colonies, with a combined population of 2.2 billion people. As a trading group, that represents a lot of potential market, but you also need to remember that Commonwealth nations take up about 20 per cent of the world's international economic support payments.

And for all the talk of the “civilizing influence” of Britain on these nations, that influence is questionable.

Following a protest at the Commonwealth's London headquarters, Peter Tatchell, a gay rights campaigner, said 40 of the 53 Commonwealth nations still criminalize homosexuality. Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria and Brunei actively persecute gays, with murder, imprisonment and torture part of their official anti-gay policies.

Equality and rule of law are not always a given in Commonwealth nations, either. In fact, this year's meeting is being held in Malta, because Mauritius refused its turn to host, and boycotted the previous meeting in Sri Lanka, in protest of Sri Lanka's abhorrent record on human rights.

So what's the point of listing the issues confronting Canada's presence at all these big events?

I believe it's the change of expectations being put on government here at home. For 10 years now — a very long time in the life of politics — Canadians have been led to expect less and less of the federal government. Doing less has been official government ethos for a very long portion of the electorate's memory.

That pendulum has reversed. Trudeau senses people want our government to do more, to be more than the mere holder of the national economy. And attending these international events in such early days of his taking office must surely affect that sense.

Just recall your own feelings upon return from a major convention for your business or volunteer group. I've been to more than a few of these, and if you participate at all, you come home with a buzz of new ideas and energies.

Now, multiply that by becoming prime minister, being mobbed for selfies in Manila, being presented to the Queen, attending a Commonwealth summit with the endorsement of two of the world's most powerful politicians behind you, and then going to another global summit with a tectonic shift in expectations for some big decisions — all within a few weeks.

That has got to affect the next few discussions at cabinet.

It's exhausting enough to get a new government going, for a rookie prime minister and cabinet members, plus a host of first-time MPs. Now try it after being in the room with King Mswatti III who has 15 wives, all of whom he got pregnant before marrying, and being expected to discuss with him British notions of equality.

And then being asked to do big things to help to save the planet.

This is not something Canadians have ever seen before. If we have not recognized a change of eras in our history by now, wait to see what happens next.

New times, new governments, new problems for opposition parties

It's not easy being in opposition these days. Especially not in Alberta, nor in Ottawa, where radical regime change has elected governments with radically different ideas about how governments should do business.

It is plainly obvious that voters have rejected the old way of doing government business, so how does the opposition (which represents that old style) successfully oppose the new?

That's the challenge for both the Wildrose Party in Alberta and the federal Conservatives in Ottawa. If you like, it even poses a tangential challenge to the governing Saskatchewan Party whose leader Brad Wall seems to have manoeuvred himself as an opposition leader who just happens to hold the reins of power.

In Ottawa, it's way too early to tell if the Conservatives can morph from a decade of being increasingly autocratic government leaders to becoming opposition defenders of democracy against government autocracy.

Suffice to say that adopting a slogan like “change of tone” will not be enough.

Interim Conservative Party leader Rona Ambrose strode out to meet the press following her appointment, to begin this process. She promised a more open and inclusive approach to federal politics, took three quick questions, then turned her back and walked away.

It appears “change of tone” will not come easily.

But you have to give them points for trying. Friday's headlines hint at something more positive. The Huffington Post, for instance, reported Friday that the Tories will give the “benefit of the doubt” to the Liberals on climate change.

If that's the path forward, it's a smarter one. It reflects the tone of the Liberal Party during the election campaign when leader Justin Trudeau said he wanted to see the details of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement before deciding whether to support it.

The NDP under Tom Mulcair rejected the TPP out of hand — a classic opposition move, but one that did not resonate with voters who have gotten tired of government-by-competing-autocracies.

Compare this example with Alberta's Wildrose Party statements on the issue of what governments should do about climate change.

On Thursday, party leader Brian Jean suggested that because Alberta environment minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd even spoke to her federal counterpart, Catherine McKenna, on Wednesday, that it was complicity toward a new round of the National Energy Program. Whoa, Nelly. Really?

From 1980-85, when that debacle occurred, the Progressive Conservatives under Peter Lougheed were governing Alberta, and Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, was prime minister. The NEP was a stun gun that froze investment in Alberta, killing thousands of jobs. It also killed Liberal Party prospects in the province. There has been no forgiveness since, earned or offered.

Now, said Jean in a party release, the NDP are in charge and they “are more than happy to go along” with a new federal scheme for a repeat. He said the fact the two ministers were even talking shows that the Alberta government is willing to let the federal government dictate how we run our energy-based economy.

Never mind where people may stand on the issue of what governments should do concerning the environment; this is about what opposition parties need to learn to persuade people, in today's political realities following regime change.

Alberta voters have rejected the tone and substance of us-versus-them governance. Canadians in general rejected the notion that ideologues can dictate a narrow viewpoint from a small office onto the country, with no accommodation for anyone else.

In today's reality, an opposition can't win hearts (or votes) by throwing stones (or mud) anymore. Not in a time when people feel threatened enough already.

Alberta is on the verge of economic crisis driven by low energy prices. Canada needs a policy on how to react to a global refugee crisis driven by sectarian violence and terrorism. The whole world is looking for unified leadership on preventing a potential climate disaster that we have all worked together to create.

The change is this: we have elected political parties with policies of co-operation on these issues. An opposition party cannot succeed by simply refusing to co-operate.

Whatever core support a rather overconfident premier Brad Wall may have in Saskatchewan, it's a minority view to say he doesn't want to co-operate on faster processing of Syrian refugees. That ship has sailed, and the non-profits are already at the table with money and resources to bring them in.

His announcement that Saskatchewan will be 50-per-cent reliant on renewables for energy supply sounds more like a government people will want to elect (or re-elect).

How will opposition parties there or in Alberta win debates now? By creating bogeymen of higher-priced electricity (which people can offset by being more efficient) or of potential loss of profits for large corporations with large pollution footprints? These just won't fly in an era when people are looking for solutions, not excuses that solutions are just too much change.

In a climate where people want change, being in opposition is not easy.

Brad Wall isn't building a wall — he's just writing bad things on it

“Let's not be mistaken, the people who are seeking refuge are not the barbarians. They are fleeing the barbarians.” — Nicolas Chapuis, French ambassador to Canada

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall wants prime minister Justin Trudeau to suspend his plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees into Canada by the end of the year. He fears that such an accelerated program would allow a few Islamic State barbarians to slip through the screening process.

How you can do more than what the United Nations has already done to pre-screen for families (as opposed to single young men), already separated from the unscreened refugees flooding Europe's borders, is hard to say. Suffice that any process would fall short of 100-per-cent security.

But in setting that as some kind of standard, Wall is building a wall of fear and suspicion around all Muslims — which is exactly what experts tell us the barbarians want from us.

Creating an underclass of people among us — and providing tacit government permission to hate and distrust them — makes it that much easier for recruiters to convert young people already here into becoming the terrorists we fear from abroad.

But one thing Wall's letter to the prime minister accomplished immediately was to expose the divisions already separating Canadians over the issue of fast-tracking immigrants from a war-ravaged country where not a whole lot of us can really tell if any faction there can be deemed “the good guys.”

I followed the news coverage of this story posted by major news outlets in Canada: CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Maclean's.

In every case, the story about Brad Wall's letter was presented fairly and evenly. A lot of people like to complain that Canada's news media is inherently biased (invariably against them, whatever their position on any issue may be). But I saw no such bias in their coverage, which supposedly will become the primary information source for most Canadians on this issue.

Where the bias played — and it played huge — was in the comments section.

I don't pretend to know if — or how — online each news media moderates the comments that appear at the bottom of stories. Most often, I don't read them. People should have better things to do than walk through the valley of the trolls.

But this time, I looked at the comments below the stories, and here's what I found — at least in the news window of Monday afternoon. I found a wall. Between Canadians.

On the CBC site, the posted reactions were almost completely to reject Wall's request that we suspend the refugee program. A (very few) supported Wall's request, but overwhelmingly, readers were appalled that a Canadian political leader would say what he did.

Comments on the CTV site, on the other hand, were virtually 100-per-cent Brad Wall-for-prime-minister. Even if under an assumed name, it seemed nobody wanted to challenge the group.

Readers of the Globe story seemed more willing to see two sides of an issue, but generally, the comment consensus was that Canada should push ahead with the refugee program.

Maclean's only had one posted comment. Maybe their filtering system is more rigid, or maybe more Canadians wait to read Maclean's in print than online. But that comment rejected Wall's request.

I repeat, the news stories themselves were entirely balanced and should not elicit the kinds of comments that appeared. Not on their own, anyway; this is a reflection of readership, not of journalism.

National Post, for their part, did something outstanding, in my view. They interviewed surviving people who went through our last similar epoch of fear and racism: Jews who fled Europe to Canada at the outbreak of the Second World War. One had escaped the Dachau concentration camp, ended up in Canada, and spent years under armed guard as a suspected enemy of Canada.

If anyone would have reason to not be a Nazi sympathizer, it would be these Jews (plus a few communist academics and homosexuals fleeing persecution in their homelands).

Frederick Blair, immigration minister at the time, was determined to keep Jews out of Canada by any means, but shiploads of prisoners of war — including at least 2,300 Jewish civilians — found themselves behind barbed wire in Canada. One prison camp was called the Plains of Abraham camp. Doubly ironic, when you think about it.

It speaks to the times that these young men did not become suicide bombers, but rather a group of upstanding Canadians after the fact. But the infuriating unfairness and racism behind their imprisonment cannot be explained away by that.

Wall's request is far too close to Frederick Blair's campaign for comfort. That Canada turned away shiploads of Jewish refugees during the Second World War to their deaths does not speak well of us trying to do the same today with Syrians.

Many Canadians may not know who the “good guys” are in the fighting in Syria, but we do know the refugees are not the bad guys.

Ultimately, morally and politically, we are obliged to let them in.

Carbon capture is not real progress

The Alberta NDP did the right thing in not pulling the plug on the money the government and the Shell corporation had already spent on its Quest carbon capture and storage facility near Fort Saskatchewan. It wasn't the best thing, but it was the right thing, a start.

For about $1.3 billion, Quest will strip carbon dioxide out of “process gas streams” at the Scottford Upgrader and shove it deep underground. That's not the same as stripping carbon from its waste gases, or from the exhaust of all the vehicles that will burn the gasoline and diesel Scottford's customers will refine down the pipeline.

But it's an easy meme to say the process is the yearly equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road. I figure that's less than all the cars, trucks and buses in Edmonton.

The Alberta government, under the previous Conservative regime, dedicated $745 million to the project over its first 10 years. The federal government gave $120 million, and the rest is coming from Shell and its Athabasca Oil Sands partners Chevron Canada and Marathon Oil.

The government needs something for show and tell at the Paris conference on climate change. This, along with Saskatchewan's similar project are at least something large to put on the table.

But even Shell CEO Ben van Beurden allowed this wasn't the best possible arrangement. For carbon capture to grow — a very real necessity if Shell is to continue extracting oil in the future — van Beurden says there needs to be an economic imperative.

He means a price on carbon of between $60 and $80 a tonne. This cost, tacked onto the price of our fuel and electricity is what he's talking about.

And no doubt, the Alberta government has been listening. Prepare for a carbon tax to pay for more projects like this in the future.

A better path forward would be a cap-and-trade system, but that seems about as politically possible in Alberta as a provincial sales tax. We'll have to wait and see on that.

Here's a reason cap-and-trade would work better than the straight taxing of the carbon as it comes out of the tailpipes of consumers' cars.

One of the rock stars of the climate change movement is John Schellnhuber, born Hans Joachim Shellnhuber. He's been named a science and climate change advisor to the pope, and is a Commander in the Order of the British Empire, among many other honours and accomplishments.

Last June the Executive Intelligence Review named him a “Satanist in the service of the British Royal Family” who has “in effect declared himself Pope.” So what's not to like about that?

Shellbnhuber will be a key player in the Paris climate change talks. His message is that you can do all the carbon capture you like, and do all the conservation efforts you can imagine, but none of it holds a smoky candle to switching to renewables.

Solar, wind, tide, whatever — nothing Shell or its partners can do will bring us closer to the greenhouse gas cuts we need, the way renewable energy can.

Renewable power has already proven scalable in many of its forms, and the so-called problem of intermitancy (when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow) is merely an engineering problem that engineers get closer to solving every day.

Remember how people once said you can't get crude oil out of the tar sands without putting more energy (and money) into the process than you can get out? Well, that was an engineering problem too.

A carbon tax on its own does not promote the growth of renewables, except insofar as it raises the price of all energy, making renewables more profitable.

Cap-and-trade, on the other hand, works at both ends of the production process. Producers get paid for their energy, and they get paid just because they produce energy without burning fuel.

That's why cap-and-trade probably won't fly in Alberta. If you cap our total carbon emissions at something even a bit below current levels, every tonne of growth will be taxed and the money paid to industries whose very existence is to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.

That's also why the big energy players are working so hard to look less like bad guys these days.

But just as big oil and gas needed tax subsidies over the years, so will renewables. The source of that cash needs to be cap-and-trade because it taxes all major producers directly, not the buyers of gasoline and diesel.

A carbon tax needs to be more or less revenue-neutral, offset by tax cuts in other areas (like income taxes), or it won't get off the ground. Cap-and-trade is a cash transfer which need not be revenue-neutral. Nor would it be profit-neutral for the big emitters (oil sands developers and coal-fired power generators — the kingpins of the Alberta fossil fuel economy).

But rock stars like Prof. Shellnhuber are adamant that the only way to reach our emission goals is to get off the carbon economy.

In his words, we need “an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20-30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous climate change.”

So, taking some of the process carbon out of making more gasoline is not really making progress.

I wonder what our government will come back with, along with its souvenirs of Paris.

On the agenda for our new Canadian cabinet: give CBSA a wake-up call

In the real world, it's called a snafu. That would be one order of magnitude below fubar.

It's today's headline in the shadow world of the Canada Border Services Agency, which imprisoned a man who's dedicated himself to fighting terrorism and the unholy forces that dupe of Muslim youth into becoming terrorists.

The CBSA arrested Mourad Benchellali Tuesday when his plane from France landed in Toronto — even though he had been cleared to enter Canada by the RCMP and CSIS (who had a closed-door appointment with him to learn about how groups like ISIS recruit young Canadians.)

The CBSA put him in an orange suit in maximum security prison and  — until his story became public — refused to allow him to voluntarily return to France.

This is the second time Benchellali had attempted to enter Canada to further his own private crusade against terrorism. In June, he was barred from getting on a plane in France, because his flight to Canada would cross American airspace.

Benchellali is on the U.S. “no fly” list. Organizers bringing him to Canada this time around had him fly in via Iceland, which, they were assured by Canadian security officials, would be OK.

Someone forgot to inform the CBSA.

Filmmaker Stormy Night Productions is making a documentary for the CBC, centred around Calgary mother Christianne Boudreau. Her son was sucked in to the thought of becoming a jihadi, and he died as an ISIS fighter in Syria. Benchellali was to meet her in Montreal.

Death as a deluded jihadi might well have become Benchellali's fate as well. In 2001, at age 19, he was contacted in France by his older brother Menad, and persuaded to take a “dream vacation” in Afghanistan. Mourad made a very big mistake.

He and four friends found themselves in an al-Qaida training camp and were subjected to non-stop brutal training. This is Mourad's own testimony, but he says when his 60 days was up, he tried to get the heck out of there.

He planed to escape to Pakistan, but while he was in Afghanistan being programmed by al-Qaida, 9/11 happened and the border was closed. He tried entering the country through an unguarded border crossing, was caught, handed over to U.S. forces and sent to the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

His experiences are contained in a book he wrote titled Voyage to Hell, an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled Detainees in Despair, and numerous interview accounts since.

At the time of his arrest and detainment in Guantanamo, Benchellali says newspapers attempted to paint him as an unhappy teenage loner, an outsider in European society. But he says that was not true.

In an interview with McClatchy News Service, Benchellali said: “I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.”

What he got was 60 days of forced mind-control. “I was trapped by my own fear and stupidity.”

Benchellali has since dedicated himself to being a warning against the propaganda sent to entice young people to join groups like ISIS. He speaks throughout Europe to Muslim youth warning them against thoughts of joining radical terrorist groups. He was there, he paid the price, his words have a credibility no government security agency could ever have.

And he would have shared his message with Canadian youth, Canadian police and Canadian intelligence — except for a snafu by the CBSA.

CBSA refuses to comment on their mistake. Understandable, considering the world they live in.

But one hopes they will talk to their new boss, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale. Perhaps new Immigration Minister John McCallum might have some time to sit in on that.

One can only imagine what either of them might have said as opposition members, if this had been done under the former Conservative government.

No one expects CBSA to talk to us mere Canadians. But they do have a lot of explaining to do.