Dirty Oil Diplomacy

Over the past three days I have had about 10 meetings with European decision- and policy-makers to talk about the impacts of tar sands on Canada’s domestic and international policy. Together with members of First Nations, Chief Bill Erasmus and Ben Powless, trade expert Stuart Trew, and evironmentalist Steven Guilbeault we are tackling the impacts of the Canadian government’s fixation on the reckless expansion of the tar sands in order to offer up a different, and critical, perspective to a European audience who has been on the receiving end of aggressive Canadian government lobbying. 

One of the most striking things about these meetings for me has been the fact that I don’t need to try to convince anyone of the importance or urgency of addressing the climate crises. There is no political tag attached to climate change; it exists, it is serious, it is getting worse, and we need urgent solutions. Obviously Europe is not perfect, many of us would say that there is no industrialized country in the world that is doing enough on climate change, but in relative terms Europe is light years ahead of Canada.

The Fuel Quality Directive is one example in a suite of policies Europe is implementing to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution. The proposal for implementing this policy is a result of years of evidence, science, research and statistics. The policy is clear, technical and necessary in order for Europe to live up to its commitments. The Canadian government’s problem is that the proposal assigns a proven value (based on data including industry and Canadian government numbers) to highly polluting fuels such as tar sands and requires them to clean up their act. This probably doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, ensuring oil producers have environmental standards they must meet, but when you are trying to keep polluters happy at all costs, apparently it is worth waging a full on diplomatic and public relations war. 

Decision-makers and policy-writers have been fascinated (for lack of a better word) by the lobby arguments used by the Canadian government against their clean fuel policies — Europe is trying to take an informed, science-based approach to its policy-making, and the Canadian government can’t seem to handle it. 

For me, it is clearly part of the larger trend of our current government to make every effort to polarize and politicize this debate, while simultaneously getting rid of any science that would tell them otherwise, or actually inform empirical policy-making. The federal government has plans to gut the Environmental Assessment Act, they muzzle their scientists, and they are cutting funding to important scientific research facilities.

It is too early to tell, but from what I have seen so far, European decision-makers have not been impressed by the Canadian government’s attempts to peddle not only their dirty oil, but also their inaccurate and polarized public relations campaign. Europe is looking for real policies to meet real greenhouse gas reduction goals, and until Canada can prove they are ready to be the ally Europe used to know, European member states must continue to stand up to the Canadian Governments campaign against climate action.