First ministers scramble for a consensus on nation-building projects in the wake of Trump’s predatory trade war. But the pretense that this is to protect our sovereignty gets mushier.
And nary a mention of the climate crisis, while we are forced to breathe toxic smoke from record wildfires.
The wildfires started early, in May, and by June there were over 200 across the boreal forest. By July it was 500. Our wildfire carbon in 2023 was one-quarter of the global wildfire emissions. What will it reach this year?
This trendline is ignored at our peril.
Meanwhile, parochial politicians say we aren’t a major global polluter as they stubbornly refuse to understand climate science and try to live in their alternative reality.
We have passed the 1.5 degrees C, above pre-industrial levels, tipping point and could reach two degrees warming by 2030. The jet stream has fundamentally changed and seasons are already unstable.
The arctic is heating faster, approaching four degrees. Hydrology is changing with lower water in lakes and rivers. Drought conditions exist in forests. Soil dries, habitats degrade and animals suffer.
How easily we forget: Fort McMurray, Lytton, Jasper. How many northern settlements will burn in 2025?
Indigenous Canadians make up five per cent of the population; they make up 40 per cent of those fleeing these wildfires. The human trauma continues to build.
There will be no viable nation-building projects, especially across the North, without tackling the climate crisis head-on.
But there is an alternative way forward.
Take electrification
An integrated interprovincial grid would accelerate renewable electrification and further lower emissions. But the demand for electric vehicles must grow. The federal government granted billions in subsidies to big auto companies to build electric vehicles in Ontario, while imposing a 100 per cent tariff on China’s burgeoning electric vehicle industry.
China’s Build Your Dreams car manufacturer produces a quality, reliable vehicle costing one-half of Tesla. Meanwhile the Big 3 (all U.S.) auto firms are lobbying Prime Minister Mark Carney to roll back the phasing in of electric vehicles.
Is our sovereignty being used to protect the multinationals rather than the consumer and climate?
And what about more bitumen pipelines?
The threat of Alberta separation is being used to advance the Northern Gateway. The separatists noticeably ignore the First Nations’ treaties, which preceded their supposedly “sovereign” province.
In spite of Alberta’s politics of blame, the only pipeline built over the past decade, the Transmountain Extension pipeline to Vancouver, cost taxpayers $34 billion. And don’t forget the billions of subsidies to oil and gas companies. Imagine this magnitude of support for Canada to become a renewable energy superpower.
Northern Gateway would inevitably end the tanker ban along BC’s northern coast.
Any claim of decarbonization of Alberta bitumen extraction with expensive carbon capture ignores 85 per cent of emissions from end-use combustion. Some “grand bargain.”
The tariff-ridden steel industry would benefit from pipelines. But the Pathways Alliance, about which Premier Danielle Smith is so enamoured, which operates 95 per cent of Alberta’s tar sands and had 2023 profits of $37 billion, would be the big winner. It includes companies that have U.S. operations and are U.S. subsidiaries.
How would supporting this conglomerate alter our integration into the U.S. economy?
And, what about our military?
To accelerate the timeline to reach two per cent of GDP, Carney’s government added another $9 billion for the military, totalling $63 billion this year. Then, without a budget, it accepted a five per cent level within a decade, which would cost $150 billion yearly. At one-third of today’s federal expenditures, and more than twice today’s federal transfers for health and social services, this would be devastating.
Our military, most assuredly, will increasingly be needed for extreme weather emergencies, mostly wildfires and flooding.
But as shown so tragically by Middle East carnage, militarism is not a pathway to international peace and security. Exorbitant battle-ready military spending will leave our healthcare crisis on the back burner.
Ironically, though the pressure to reach five per cent spending came from Trump, he poses the only real threat to our territorial integrity.
And now Carney’s Liberals have agreed to join Trump’s latest grandiose mega-project – the $542 billion, missile-defence system, Golden Dome. Just how could this inflationary monster create more independence from the U.S.?
More sovereignty squandered in the name of sovereignty?
In spite of all the nationalistic rhetoric, we remain a historically structured branch-plant economy. While it may prove to be the start of a trend, that the percentage of our exports going to the U.S have gone from 75 per cent to 66 per cent, recently, our post-Carney government’s first multi-million-dollar military expenditure went directly to the U.S. “defence” industry.
We shouldn’t be fooled by Danielle Smith’s new-found smile. The boreal forest is burning, and it will increasingly burn until we reverse the global emissions trend.
How Canada stick-handles the threat from Trump’s trade war needs a careful rethink.
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