In Canada's election campaign, a warming planet sits on the back burner
Trump and the economy are top of mind at the federal level, and Manitoba politics is following suit
Nearly halfway through Canada's election campaign, national unity among the most popular parties means distrust of Donald Trump and distaste for a consumer carbon tax.
The economic disruption and sovereignty threats spawned by the U.S. president have transformed a left-for-dead Liberal Party into a dead-centre front-runner and forced the Conservatives to wave the maple leaf in an environment where patriotic gestures are no longer just for people who park heavy equipment in public places.
Mark Carney's Liberals and Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives are also united in their promise not to revive a carbon tax that environmental-minded economists such as Carney once touted as an effective policy tool.
If you're looking for something more ambitious in the way of climate policy in this election, prepare to be underwhelmed.
Jagmeet Singh's New Democrats promise to keep the carbon tax dead and buried but would maintain the industrial carbon price and emissions cap. The Liberals are vowing to tweak the existing "output-based pricing system," which is the official euphemism for the carbon price. The Conservatives would repeal the federal pricing system but expand credits for clean technology.
The Greens would be much greener, which is what voters expect Greens to do, even if they don't elect many of them.
Given the intense economic uncertainty facing most Canadians right now, the lack of focus on climate policy in this election is understandable, even to environmental activists.
"The truth is that Canadians care about affordability. That's top of mind for sure, but they also care about climate action and they clearly care about protecting the places and the things that they want for their children," said Laura Cameron, the program and strategy director for Manitoba's Climate Action Team.
"Those concerns are still there, even though many households are struggling to pay the bills."
Cameron says Canada should be able to walk the carbon-emissions walk and chew affordability gum at the same time.
"The government's role is to be looking at solutions that can address both of these issues," she said.
Populist provincial policies
This is not just a federal political phenomenon. Not long after taking office, Manitoba's NDP government rolled out a couple of populist policies that could be described in charitable terms as climate-agnostic.
First, Wab Kinew's government announced a one-year gasoline tax holiday decried by policy nerds as working at cross-purposes with the now-dead federal carbon tax.
Then the Kinew government urged Manitoba Hydro, a nominally independent Crown corporation, to enact a one-year rate freeze that deprived the utility of revenue it needs to repair its crumbling infrastructure. Hydro's latest rate application notes some of that infrastructure has deteriorated so badly, two of its three main transmission lines — bipoles I and II — have permanently lost 20 per cent of their ability to carry electricity.
Manitoba Hydro, which is among the greenest energy producers in the world, is now planning to spend $1.4 billion to build a two-turbine fuel-burning power station that will likely run on natural gas.
Hydro needs this new station by 2030 to prevent winter power shortages during peak periods of demand. It also warns there is no guarantee the corporation can wean itself off fossil fuels by 2045, despite a directive from the premier to achieve that milestone one decade earlier.
Kinew suggested last week it is no longer realistic to expect Hydro to stop burning fuel to create electricity by 2035 — and cited the Trumpist threat as a reason.
"We have to look at the American situation, and things that we might have thought of in the past a certain way — the balance between renewables and carbon-based fuel — I think given what we're seeing with Trump, we have to be able to put the future power needs of our province as our first priority," Kinew said in Brandon on April 2.
Cameron said she finds it troubling to see the province "sort of back stepping" on its climate commitments.
"We would like to see the province looking at ways to reduce peak demand," she said.
"That thermal generating station is ultimately aimed at meeting that peak demand when we're in the coldest days of the winter, and there are other ways that we can reduce the peak on the energy efficiency side."
None of these ways will materialize overnight. The easiest energy efficiency win, in purely technological terms, involves installing neighbourhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling systems in new residential developments.
But this would require provincial direction, municipal co-operation and nothing short of complete buy-in from both home builders and homebuyers.
The provincial NDP government, meanwhile, has promised to install 5,000 heat pumps. There has been no talk of phasing out the installation of gas or electric furnaces in new Manitoba homes.
A move like that might inspire an even bigger pushback than the federal carbon tax did, before its creators succumbed to pressure and killed off their own policy.
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