Finance Committee chair Easter top non-cabinet-MP target for lobbyists in 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic kept MPs away from Ottawa for most of the year, but that didn’t stop lobbyists from meeting with MPs to try and influence both the government’s and the opposition’s agenda. Liberal MP and House Finance Committee chair Wayne Easter was lobbied 190 times in 2020, the most for an MP not serving […]
Canada well-positioned to both buy and sell cleantech products
Canada is making ambitious plans to tackle climate change. While the rest of us were just trying to reach the finish line before the holidays, the federal government was busy budgeting for green stimulus and making plans to meet our Paris Agreement commitments by increasing the carbon tax and making large outlays on clean infrastructure. […]
Trudeau government’s new climate plan is insufficient
GIBSONS, B.C.—In 2014-2015, led by the newly formed Ecofiscal Commission, there was a bloom of comment, editorials and op-eds advocating carbon pricing as a climate mitigation method. As a British Columbia climate activist, I was familiar with the failure of our province’s vaunted carbon tax, so I gathered 15 or so of the authors, prominent […]
Post-COVID world will change us all forever
Just as the post-Trump America is a very different place, the post-COVID world will change us all forever. Virtual meetings have gone from being a techie tool used by geeks to the go-to place for people to meet globally. A year ago, no one could have envisioned an international meeting of leaders on global warming […]
Canadians’ appetite for climate action growing, but beware of polarization
Last fall, the federal government released a flurry of new climate measures: net zero by 2050 legislation, a climate plan that will increase the carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, and strategies for hydrogen and small modular nuclear reactors. Ottawa says these measures pack the policy muscle needed to hit the country’s 2030 […]
Trudeau brands himself as Canada’s Climate Change Churchill
OAKVILLE, ONT.—“We shall fight climate change at our gas stations, we shall fight it with our furnaces, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength with windmills and solar panels, we shall defend our planet’s environment, whatever the cost may be.” Okay, that’s not a real quote, but it’s the kind of Churchillian-style fighting […]
How much nature can address climate change depends on us
On Dec. 11, the Government of Canada released its renewed climate plan. As a young person who has been working in national and international climate action and conservation for the past four years, I was excited to see nature—more specifically, “nature-based climate solutions”—recognized as a necessary part of climate action. But the plan has some […]
Canada’s Arctic ‘a serious border we must master and manage,’ says leading security expert, as accelerating climate change dramatically alters the North
As accelerating climate change continues to radically alter this country’s vast, disparately populated, and resource-rich Arctic landscape, Canadians, politicians and policy-makers should no longer view the region as a “distant tundra,” according to security expert Irvin Studin, who argues that Canada should be regarded as a “major Arctic country” with a “serious border that we must […]
National unity is key for climate in 2021
It’s almost time to turn the page on 2020. As vaccines signal some hopeful “light at the end of the tunnel” for that public health emergency, for many, the focus shifts to humanity’s other public health emergency: climate disruption. Some have the impression that nature has had time to breathe during COVID-19, that carbon pollution […]
Canada needs to deliver to stem climate change
Darius Elias remembers childhood summers spent out on the land in Old Crow Flats, northern Yukon wetlands, where members of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation spent months harvesting food each year. But few travel to Old Crow Flats these days, as climate change has transformed the land. Today, dramatic permafrost thaw and drained lakes make […]
