Too late to turn back the clock, Leap is already upon us

Since the proclamation of the Leap Manifesto at the recent NDP national convention in Edmonton, there's been a lot of doomsaying on both sides of the economy-versus-energy industry debate.

If we don't radically reduce our use of fossil fuels, are we on a path to climate change catastrophe? Or is Leap the manifestation of a fevered mind, bent on destroying our way of life? 

A lot of these arguments remind me of two groups carrying on a heated online discussion on the colour of the sky. Is it the azure blue of day, or the rich dark of night? Actually, if you look outside, it's raining.

If you connect the dots to four significant articles in the good old Globe and Mail Tuesday, April 26, it will put the Leap debate into sharper focus.

First, there is the ongoing coverage of Alberta premier Rachel Notley pleading before the federal cabinet for stronger support for a pipeline project. Any project, as long as it carries Alberta bitumen to a saltwater port. The exercise is probably pointless, and we'll get to that later.

That's because of the other three articles.

First of those is an announcement that Saudi Aramco plans to go public — partially, very partially. The royal family-owned national energy giant says it plans to hive off five per cent of its holdings in a public offering.

That's roughly the market value of Alphabet, the company that owns Google. In fact, if you combined the values of all the shares of Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Exxon Mobil together, you would still not reach the approximately $2 trillion that Aramco is said to be worth.

And the Saudis are selling. Why? To diversify their economy, according to the Globe article. They want the Saudi economy to contain 35 per cent of income generation from small and medium-sized businesses. A reasonable goal, I suppose.

Would Aramco, with its 261 billion barrels of cheaply recoverable crude and condensate be a good buy? Hmm . . . perhaps not if the Saudis are starting to wean themselves off it.

And why would that be? Perhaps an essay by Stephen Carlisle, president and managing director of General Motors Canada can shed light on that.

His article, published in the Report on Business opinion page, is as astounding as the news the Saudis are selling part of their national energy monopoly.

The car of the future will be electric, says the General Motors head honcho. It will be self-driving. It will be shared.

It will not burn gasoline.

He likened this impending change to the revolution that saw the end of horse-drawn carriages, beginning in the early 1900s. It took 50 years, but millions of horses, harness makers and carriage factories were buried by that revolution.

Carlisle wrote that Mary Barra, GM's board chair and chief executive officer has made it her mission to “disrupt our business model and to own the customer relationship beyond the car.”

What's good for General Motors is good for us all, right? And General Motors does not see a car in every garage in our economy's future. Electric, autonomous and shared — this is where General Motors plans to stake its future value for its shareholders.

A fourth article appears in the Globe's Drive section. It opens with the assertion there is a sense of inevitability that cars will soon drive themselves. Electric cars, that is. No gasoline to burn, at least not in city centres, where the vast majority of car trips are taken.

Why is premier Notley so obsessed with pipelines, when even the Saudis and General Motors see a future with less and less oil needed to run the economy? When crude oil stockpiles are already flooded? When everyone everywhere agrees the planet cannot withstand continued growth in the burning of fossil fuels? Just asking.

It appears obvious that our debate over the Leap Manifesto should not be about its relevance or usefulness. It should be about the fact that an energy revolution is already upon us, and that we need to adapt to a new reality.

We've still got time. A little, anyway. Carlisle said the horses-to-cars revolution took 50 years. According to the recently signed Paris Accord on climate change, we've got till 2030.

We need to use that time to build toward the future that is coming, not to the one we wish we could keep. That's not a leap, it's practical reality.

Churches risk losing their moral authority

There are many reasons why people choose to be people of faith. People join religious organizations for as many reasons as there are people. People decide to leave or ignore religion for just as many reasons. Each decision is personal.

Even so, reasons for joining up can be broadly categorized, and one main category is that adhering to a religious faith gives one a well-considered moral anchor to underpin the decisions people make in their day-to-day lives.

The Golden Rule is pretty well universal, but it can encompass hundreds of subtexts. Deciding on them has kept theologians employed since before people built the pyramids.

But what happens when the decisions of church authorities are out of step with the moral understanding of parishioners? When this happens, we get the studies that document the empty pews.

A couple of examples from recent events:

Canada's mainline churches are just beginning to formulate (or update) faith statements on doctor-assisted suicide. To oversimplify for the sake of an article, their considerations must balance belief in the sanctity of life as a God-given gift, and the notion that God-fearing people need to respect the law, but are free to make their own choices.

The law of the land, as interpreted by our Supreme Court, holds that Canadians have the right to exercise their autonomy — the right to decide for themselves when they die, if they are extremely ill and suffering intolerable pain. Federal legislation (Bill C-14), was proposed to align our criminal code with that court decision. 

The bill is subject to wide criticism. The arguments around C-14 and doctor-assisted death inevitably break down to individual cases, but governments must write blanket legislation. And churches feel the need to make blanket judgements on issues of life and death as well.

The trouble is, just as happened with long-ago public debates over the morality of divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage, the people in the church pews are very familiar with individual cases that do not align with blanket church policy.

And that major category of reasons for joining a church — having a moral anchor upon which to make decisions — has been weakened.

In another example, Canadians have learned that a large group of Catholic organizations was inexplicably let off the hook for $25 million in reparations to people hurt in Canada's historic Catholic residential schools. By an alleged misunderstanding between lawyers, of all things.

Former federal Conservative minister of aboriginal affairs Jim Prentice and Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations determined in 2006 that a group of more than 50 Catholic organizations should pay reparations in the amount of $79 million. This was to be part of reconciliation over the tragedy of abuses that had victimized children in the residential schools.

Some of the money — $29 million — was to be immediate cash. Another $25 million was to be paid through in-kind services. And a further $25 million was to be raised through internal fundraising.

The first two obligations have been met. But years later, fundraising had only gathered about $3.7 million. Here's where the misunderstanding apparently comes in. A judge in Saskatchewan ruled that a third party might reasonably conclude that a federal lawyer agreed the Catholic groups had tried hard enough to complete their obligations, and were therefore not required to raise the rest of the money.

Somehow, this became a legal thing. A legal thing, but not a moral one in the eyes of people in the pews, on the streets and in the aboriginal communities.

So how do church leaders rule from the pulpit on moral issues like the right to decide one's death in certain cases, when the history of church hierarchy on issues of divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage or obligations to people who have been harmed have been out of step with laws made in our democracy? When the people in the pews are themselves individually or have people close to them who are outside official church dogma, or have a different moral code?

Ultimately, faith is an individual decision. Joining a faith group widens individual choices into decisions made by a congregation and its leaders — the people called explain the Golden Rule in all its complexity.

Every generation, every decade almost, has its moral crisis. Today's crisis is about how people in extreme pain can decide to end their pain.

The bond between believers and church leadership today depends more on guiding and supporting individuals, than accepting doctrine proclaimed from on high. Doctrine has proven to be less eternal than we used to think.

Better to ponder how faith groups can console the survivors of people who make a legal choice to end their own suffering, and leave judgement to even higher authorities.

The NDP returns to the wilderness

Few Canadian governments get this kind of honeymoon gift from the opposition parties. Halfway into their first year of mandate, the Liberal cabinet and caucus — with its large complement of rookie members — can be confident they will not face any serious challenges to power for at least the next two years.

Unless they create one of their own, of course, which is always possible.

The official opposition Conservatives will spend the next year redefining their brand and looking for a leader. The NDP will be fronted by a lame duck who has less than half the support of the party for perhaps the next two years, while the party itself redefines its entire mission, never mind its public brand or finds a new leader.

Depending on how you read history, the Liberal Party spent perhaps seven years in the wilderness (under two different leaders) before sweeping the country in the last election with a newly-minted Justin Trudeau. But during those years, Parliament at least had an effective opposition, led by Jack Layton and by Thomas Mulcair, who was ousted as leader at the NDP convention in Edmonton last weekend.

Since 2011, and until the last election, the NDP could have called itself a government-in-waiting. Not today. Today, no party can say that, since government-in-waiting implies readiness to govern, and that requires a leader.

As for the NDP, government-in-waiting will be unavailable to them for a very long time. The party is once again a house divided.

I'm old enough to remember the Waffle. The NDP that good old Tommy Douglas built, bringing us universal health care, was split in the late 1960s by an energetic splinter group, which wanted to fast-track Canada into socialist nationalism.

The Waffle pushed a national debate on how Canada should grow into the future. For years after, high school debating clubs would enter contests wrangling over whether Canada should nationalize industries that had been taken over by American firms. (Alternately, we debated the morality of the Vietnam War. Good years.)

The Waffle's move away from centre-left effectively kept the party far distant from power in Ottawa, though local conditions and popular leaders would gain them provincial governments.

As in Saskatchewan and B.C. historically. As in Alberta and Manitoba today.

As in no place, while the Leap Manifesto gains momentum.

Prophets always seem to come from the wilderness, and the centres of power seldom like what the prophets have to say. But what the supporters of the Leap Manifesto have to say, at least needs to be heard.

If our high school debating clubs are not already wrangling over how Canada should be facing a future affected by climate change, they should be. (That is, if high schools in Canada still have debating clubs.)

The Leap Manifesto brought to the NDP's national convention in Edmonton proposes a fast-track to an energy future that does not use fossil fuels. Like, at all. It proposes that no government should approve, much less put money into growth in infrastructure to develop and transport more bitumen, oil and natural gas to market. As for coal, well, those days are over.

Which puts the most recent and popular provincial NDP government, and its new star leader in a serious crimp.

High school debaters should be doing this, but no official in the Alberta government is going to seriously consider stranding our natural resources for the mere sake of saving the planet on Canada's behalf. Not going to happen.

Proponents of Leap strive mightily to reinforce that their manifesto is just a discussion document, not a party platform. But calling it a manifesto implies future action. It does not wonder aloud what we should be doing or ask for your agreement. It proposes policy.

Thus, it's totally non grata in a province that supplies (or could supply) energy self-sufficiency for the whole country. Premier Rachel Notley called the document naive and tone deaf.

One can excuse naivete in a discussion paper. Tone deafness is death to a political party.

The NDP faces real challenges in Manitoba, which will have a provincial election April 19. The Leap Manifesto is, at the very least, trouble for the NDP government in Alberta.

The wilderness beckons the party once again. That's where the prophets come from.

Good news, for now, for the Liberals in Ottawa.

Governments love change, just not to the point of reform

These observations are not related:

• Politicians and their parties solicit and receive large cash donations from wealthy people and businesses, and pretend there is no ethical problem with doing so, as these gifts obviously come with no strings attached;

• MP Wayne Easter (speaking as a member of the Liberal caucus and not in his role as chairman of the Commons Finance Committee) says the government should fulfill its election promise of reviewing Canada's tax system, with an independent arms-length committee, not as a study by (and for) federal bureaucrats. Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who runs the CRA, wants to keep his options open — and probably keep such a review under close control;

• Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette has been trying for years to get the CRA to release data on the gap between how much taxes our economy should be producing, and the revenue the CRA actually collects. This is known as the “tax gap.” Most of the world's leading democracies publish figures on this so that people will know how much revenue their governments are losing through the use of offshore tax havens and other dodges. A published tax gap would also inform the 95 per cent of Canadians who duly report all their income every year, of what a bunch of chumps they are.

• The CRA, under the direction of finance minister Morneau, promises to study the concept of studying the tax gap;

• The so-called Panama Papers, a massive leak of of secret documents from the offices of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, lists a trove of information on how the super-rich, the super-famous and some superbly powerful dictators stash huge amounts of money out of reach of their national tax agencies. The papers purport to show that offshore banking costs the Canadian treasury billions of dollars a year — revenue that must be supplied by the rest of us honest taxpayers;

• Trust in our provincial and federal governments to manage our economy and social programs fairly and equitably continues to drop.

Nope, no links in any of the above.

It is difficult to nigh-on impossible for Canadians to figure out if they are getting a fair deal from their government, without a high degree of confidence that government is a good steward of what we send them.

Mostly, we judge governments on how they spend. We talk a lot about budgets and debt levels. We chatter about stimulus spending versus the need for balanced budgets.

Sometimes, we spare a thought or two about the increasing wealth gap, but perhaps because so many of us expect to be rich someday, we don't talk about that too much.

We don't really look at whether our tax system is fair at all, other than to gripe that we as individuals pay too much taxes or that other people pay too little.

Without knowing that everyone pays their fair share, how can we understand what a fair share really is? When politicians and parties appear beholden to their wealthy and influential donors, how can we trust them to make big-picture decisions in our collective best interest?

The government tells us they will review our total tax system and its myriad tweaks and boutique breaks, but they will not inform us of how comprehensive or effective this review will be. It strains confidence that anything will actually change, because one group of political donors or another might become unhappy.

It should floor us that the Canada Revenue Agency — under the direction of both Conservative and Liberal political masters — will not share its data with the Parliamentary Budget Office. Or that the chairman of the Commons Finance Committee cannot speak in his official capacity about a tax system review. Aren't we on the same team here?

As a society, we are already too sceptical about the people who hold power over us. There always seems to be a hidden agenda behind the regime. What deals have been made to get the money to buy the ads that promise us things in election campaigns?

The social flap over the Panama Papers will die down into the background noise of distrust we already have for government. It will become part of the hum and drone of the WikiLeaks event, for instance, that told us how our every move can be monitored by government authorities — who will not tell us what they owe the people who bought them their elections.

This is a world phenomenon, not just a Canadian one. But we should expect Canada to do better than the world at large in producing honest, open and transparent government.

If our tax system needs an overhaul, do it. Tell us what parts of it we can really do without, and then make the changes. And help us be confident that it applies fairly, to everyone.