Canada's Faltering Green Epic

There's little over a month left before the Kyoto Protocol is to be ratified. As things stand right now itmay instead go down as the late 20th century's grandest testament to good intentions. In preparation for thatfateful moment, the Federal government of Canada unveiled its long-awaited Kyoto technical paper on May 15,dealing with some of the economic stakes involved in caring for ecology.

The "Discussion Paper on Canada's Contribution to Addressing Climate Change" has the stated aimof seeking public and business consultation in order to decide on whether to ratify the agreement. In it, fourdifferent "options" or strategies are given equal importance. Yet, even before the BushAdministration turned its back on the world environment, Ottawa was not hiding its preference for the fourthone: a credit system that would allow as much as 30% of its Kyoto commitment to be drawn from so-called"clean energy" sources.

Sounds good. Now where's the catch? As Greenpeace-Canada has been quick to point out, Option-4 does notexist in the Protocol. The government will try to convince Europeans, who have already indicated they're lessthan favorable to this option, that it's entitled to get credit for the cleaning-power of its forests and theremote curbing influence of natural gas exports. However, it proposes no contingency plan for penalizing useor exports of energy known to produce greenhouse gas emissions.

As for the three other options, the government seems to have counted them out from the start. They wouldinvolve the delicate matters of either raising gasoline and energy prices. Their results would financiallyhurt the treasuries. Or, worse, they would pave the way to a doomsday scenario: the entire economy would behit hard.

Option-4 does make clear who the Canadian government's partners are. As quoted in "The Globe andMail" on May 15, the "Discussion Paper" contends that Option-4 "would appear to have thepotential to reduce Canada's [greenhouse-gas emissions] in a reasonably cost-effective way and provide theflexibility to capture the ideas and contributions from the provinces, territories and stakeholders."

It's high time it be known that Canada, the perennial green country, has skirted the issue of being theworld's No. 2 polluter per capita (roughly 4.42tons accounting for 133.9m tons of carbon dioxide produced in1997). The Kyoto Protocol calls for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990's level. Yet thecountry's emissions are 20% higher now. This means that leaning on Option-4 in the "DiscussionPaper" is tantamount to doing nothing in real collective terms on curbing emissions.

What's more, Option-4 would also exempt Canada from developing energy sources known to emit greenhousegases so long as it were to export them, here complying with the wishes of fossil fuel rich Alberta. Thoughthis province stands opposed to the Protocol it would still like to see exemption for its plans to exploitlocal tar sands for petrol in case Kyoto does live.

Faced with the constraints of the Protocol, the U.S. and other countries have pleaded for the misguidedidealism of former leaders, when it hasn't simply rejected the agreement. This can hardly be the case ofCanada's Liberal government. In power since 1993, its Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, has adorned manypolitical robes. What he could never be is an environmentalist.

Chrétien's team has continually stated their commitment to ecology, as it also has for public education,scientific research, artistic creation, health care, farm help and other items on the social agenda.Meanwhile, the cabinet keeps delegating real implementation to provincial governments financially strapped dueto the fed's shortening arms. For the role of environmental liquidation through limitation, Chrétien haschosen the right man. David Anderson is to lull a disenchanted nation as it lives out the denouement of afaltering epic.

Mr Anderson looks like everything a green-friendly country would expect from the caretaker of its holiestmounds. Originating amongst the majestic Douglas Fir and Sitka Spruce standing tall in the coastal rainforestsof the West, he has been Minister of the Environment since 1999. Prior to appointment, he received recognitionfor working on conserving salmon stock in the waters of British Columbia. In pop terms he's a typicalWest-coaster, i.e. he looks ecological. Were it not for his seat in the Federal common house, Mr Andersonwould surely flinch at an invitation to change from his lumberjack shirt and Birkenstocks into suit-and-tie.

Vancourites and residents of the Gulf islands are generally the most laidback of Canadians, drawingliberally from the relaxing effect of potent greenery. Graced with Orca-filled waters, the area's the onlypart of Canada basking in a microclimate reminding residents of the tropical world curving concavely below.Yet elating relaxation is not what marks the features of Mr Anderson's otherwise clean-air filtered face. Likemost urban Canadians, which generally means central-east city dwellers, he no longer knows how or what tothink of the nation's natural spaces.

A PEACEFUL BUT GENERALLY UNLIVABLE LAND

Internationally, Canada's surely recognized as one of the greenest of states. For its citizens, it's becomea defining image of its youthful mingling among the mighty. Yet, prior to the 1960's, Canada was still littleknown outside of its national boundaries, save for its past as England's proudest colony. Its history,grandiose in close detail, in fact follows so much of the plight of the colonial venture in the Americas. Theterritory known as 'Nouvelle France' fell into Britain's dominion in the 1760's. Unlike other American talesof outsted metropolitan powers, the French-speaking population perdured. The term used to refer to thisperiod, 'La Conquete', is still ignored by most 'Anglos', not to mention unacknowledged by most indigenousnatives who lend to it a quite different meaning.

Many regions west of the US Prairies are striking by their majesty. Canada's lake-studded Great Shieldnever could reflect the manifest destiny of John Ford's epics of Far West conquest, or the perdition ofEuclides de Cunha's time-exposed strata clashes amidst the Brazilian highlands eroding into the drought-riddenbacklands. Canada's winter deflects and keeps repelling epic narratives into the indeterminacy of boundlessunvanquished terrain best captured by painters like Lorne Harris. It's not only Nature's chill that hasbrought Canadians to the humbleness of respect. It's their environment's Being.

After the land had been colonized into a nation, its proximity to two Anglo powers prompted affiliation tothe struggle in Europe during the two world wars. Canada's real promotion to the international stage wouldstill have to wait for the naming of future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson as laureate of the Nobel PeacePrize in 1957. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, his minister of justice and successor as Prime Minister, exploded whathad stayed locked in the shell of provincialism in Pearson's commitment to international peace. After all,Pearson had about-faced during his tenure in the top job in support of the U.S.'s nuclear arms race. AlthoughTrudeau got his hands dirty in a hysterical reaction to the nationalist violence of the FLQ by imposing theWar Measures Act and suspending civil liberties in the fall of 1970, his Canada kept its image as a broker forinternational peace. It's an image it has jealously conserved up to present times.

Recent decades have shown that remaining a peace-loving nation becomes complex when you benefit from one ofthe world's most privileged standards of living. Trudeau was an indignant, but careful opponent of the ColdWar. A non-aligned leader in thought, he befriended Fidel and was a catalyst to Nixon's meeting with Mao. Forall his independence, he could not fail to recognize that the romanticism of Canada's ties to England hadshriveled at amazing pace in contrast to its love affair with its southern neighbor. If those of English,Scottish and Irish stock generally stood up for what it meant to be Canadian, few French Canadians did, andeven less the Eastern European and East Asian immigrants and their offspring. For them, the dream was to watchthe border be transfigured into the promise of a secure economic and American future.

Into the early eighties, Canada managed to maintain its independence from US militarism, so long as itagreed to partake of NORAD and NATO. The trade-off meant allowing extension of the Americanmilitary-industrial economy well into national territory. Peace and social democracy still withstood changingtimes, but Trudeau's retirement from politics in 1984 ushered in the challenges that were already gnawing atCanada's nationhood.

FROM INTERNATIONAL PEACE TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

Canadians often describe the essence of their country as a brew consisting of two conflicting cultures, theFrench and English. No matter how one wishes to reconcile the distinctions separating these two solicitudes,they remain locked in self-dependency. The diversity that Canada really is, its indeterminacy and expanse, isfirmly rooted in its environment, its Nature, 'ses grands espaces'.

You can blame the weather, you can cite stiff immigration conditions and quotas, you can even accuse FrenchCanadian separatism, but Canada, including Quebec, are vastly under-populated lands. At barely 30m, itspopulation remains a speck in the second largest country in the world territorially, though it frugally enjoysliving off the world's 8th GDP, being comfortably snuggled in the Top-5 rank of Purchasing Power Parity.Canada's main player in this economy, and its overriding source of wealth, remains its natural resources.

Even as the Cold War raged under Reagan, Canada turned environmentalist pride into a world politicalstance. The country exalts no national 'parks' the way the US does: the nation is but an unfolding part of theNature that only arbitrarily bears its name. Which is why, notwithstanding the birth of GreenPeace in BritishColumbia in 1971, there has seemed to be no need for a dominant 'Green' party in its political landscape.Environmentalism simply blended in with the country's social democratic history. The recent collapse of itsprovincial namesake, in the British Columbian provincial elections of all places, perpetuates this distance.

Soon enough, Canadian citizens began taking stands internationally on environmental questions. A moment ofnaive arrogance came with the ambiguous global drive to preserve the Amazon rain forest as those involvedstupidly tended to override the sovereignty Brazil holds over the region. There was a chance for reparation atthe Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro itself in 1992. Thereafter the spirit slid into remission and thenation further saw itself undergo what had been occurring with greater pressure since opening to internationalcurrents.

In a rebound, environmentalists renamed BC's coastal temperate jungles as 'rainforests'. Awareness grewthat the ecology battle was homeward bound where nothing original, neither Nature nor Natives, was living ashappily as had seemed. But Canada still saw itself as a country that made ecology a priority over theeconomy-- an unconscious extension of its debt to the First Nations. As the effort to care was twisted bybusiness at the expense of others, the environment began facing off with economic concerns.

Such tension may have very much to do with how oblivious the electorate is to Green and green-determinedeconomic policies and programs. This is certainly the major drawback of the inexistence of a significant Greenparty at the federal level. Even so, most of the country´s political parties do not fail to address themultiple facets of ecological issues. When Ontario's Conservative provincial government did, it wound up with7 deaths and 2 300 illnesses at a small town called Walkerton in 2000. E-coli has contaminated the town'sdrinking-water system. Owing to mismanagement and budget-strapped environment controllers, it was left tofester there for months before brutally striking.

By then, Canadians sensed there had been a change in global perception of their stance toward the giftbestowed by the Great Chief Above. As Green activists were castigated for their unpersuasive economicanalyses, Walkerton proved that the environment had been shifted to the intensive care of another politicalpractice: public cutbacks and downsizing of skilled staff.

ECOLOGY HIT BY ECONOMIC ENFORCEMENT

The business and political classes, thriving through late-nineties growth, saw with conviction that thesource of future wealth increasingly lay in the service sector. They caught upon the wave that the publicwould best gobble this idea were its ties to heavy industry downplayed. Little had changed, despite itsdecorative "consumer" driven dynamic.

The players in this 'new economy' or 'e-economy' may well be living in increasingly urbanized city centers,but their generative force lies in the backlands. The need to drive the service sector at speeds approximateto the US's has to rely on energy generation from sources far beyond what the voting majorities ever have tosee. As a background, government, motivated by NGOs, raised the question of developing "efficient"energy generation from "renewable" sources. Despite the tuned-in ears of public interest, the factis that, so far, efficiency has never been implemented on even a minor scale in Canada.

As the economy heated up at a pace unseen since the early 1970's, so did the environmental feed providingthe fodder. The Toronto Composite Stock Exchange blew through the ceiling, passing the NYSE's DJIA in 1998 andmoving above the 10K point volume in every bit the same type of fantasy on which the southern economy wassurfing.

With the quick wealth available to market players and stock option draped executives, the populationconfided in its business elite in a way perhaps only Torontonians or Albertans had in the past. Formerconservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, even saw fit to try to definitively clean his name from kickbackallegations by emerging from his smoke-screened limousine. He reminded us that NAFTA stood as the raisond'être of Canada's prosperity, and happened to be passed through the wisdom of the government he had led.

With money to spend from the electronics and bank sector booms, Nature became a cottage playground when itwasn't being transformed into other material for industry in less regenerative ways. As it did, its useful"consumer" products, automobiles and airplanes first among them, were engulfed in an overwhelmingamount of greenhouse emissions. With the economy going strong, Canada moved into its last internationalconference as a world environmental leader: Kyoto, 1997.

Western economies hung on for another two years before finally starting to slip up. The Stock Market boomturned out to be a bubble after all. Ever since, countless Pension Funds invested in the pride of Canada'seconomy, John Roth's Nortel electronics, have been dragged down the inverted slopes of the earnings pyramidright into the maze of the funeral chambers. As a provider of fiber optics hardware, the market slump that hitNortel in the fall of 1999 was but the tip of an iceberg still veering uncertainly out of the subsidiary-freemarket. By Amsterdam 2000, Canada suffered the final blow to its green prestige as it was crowned byenvironmental activists as one of the world's biggest polluters.

TIGHT INTERESTS AND A TIGHT UPPER CLASS

Everyday, five and a half million Torontonians awake under a sky thick with smog. And they're not alone.Air pollution has been affecting life in many of the country's major cities. In addition, bio-invasion hasbegun afflicting wildlife and shellfish stocks.

Like the rest of the world, Canada has not been spared freak climatic phenomena, all regularly cited aseffects of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. Unending rain in the Prairie provinces in 1999,unusually warm winter weather in the Saint Lawrence river valley between Toronto and Montreal, and the mosttroubling symptom: streaks of warming air in the Arctic. More shameful is what UNEP GEO-2000 has cited as theregional and world environmental stress for which Canada and the US are responsible as a whole. Containing buta fragment of the world's entire population, it is estimated that their car, airline and industry-heavyterritories produce more than 70% of its total pollution.

One of the long-standing truths, or half-truths, of economics may indeed be that only with prosperity doesphilanthropy grow. Never mind: ecology is a matter of philosophical practice, not philanthropic pretension.For all the talk of globalization and world markets, Canada has balked severely at recognizing itsinternational responsibilities and growing liabilities. It has been merely aping the US.

Canadians can seldom be as up-front and confrontational as Americans. On May 15, the federal governmentbasically confirmed suspicions of its underhandedness. It has not come out explicitly to say it does not planto ratify the Kyoto Protocol. But its "Discussion Paper" establishes conditions to ratification,namely with Option-4's "clean energy credits", that the international community is not likely toaccept.