Canada

[Webpage editor's note: One business writer who doesn't let the hype obscure the facts.]

ROME -- Beware environmental announcements that the oil industry likes, and the Alberta oil industry certainly liked Alberta Premier Rachel Notley's response to her province's delinquent status on the climate file.

With the Paris climate conference only days away, a Canadian climate action strategy is now urgent and overdue. The CCPA’s Climate Justice Project has been researching climate solutions for the past seven years. We conclude that an aggressive approach to tacking carbon emissions can also be a good employment and industrial strategy for the nation – a green industrial revolution that can improve well-being for everyone in Canada.

How times have changed in 2015. Just days away from the Paris climate conference, Prime Minister Trudeau met with the Premiers to talk about working together to make Canada a leader on climate. Compare this to PM Harper, who never met with the Premiers, championed the oil and gas industry, and if anything was a disruptive force in global climate negotiations. And leading the march to Paris?

Canada's rate of warming is about twice the global rate, according to a climate change briefing presented to the country's premiers on Monday.

Witness a real-time drama happening in Canada that is representative of the political absurdities unfolding in the Paris COP 21 process -- and that provides a stark example of establishment NGO politics versus the authentic climate justice movement.

Mike Hudema aligns Greenpeace Canada with the market-based NGOism of Forest Ethics to congratulate the fossil fuel enablers in the new NDP government of Premier Rachel Notely in Alberta. (See statements below, and Notely’s speech.)

It’s hard to imagine a block of chemical plants mere kilometres from the University of Toronto campus or near our homes. And yet, about a three-hour drive away, Aamjiwnaang First Nation is surrounded on three sides by
Canada’s largest concentration of petrochemical refineries.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May denounced National Energy Board (NEB) reviews of both the Energy East and Trans Mountain Pipeline proposals as frauds – and warned that Justin Trudeau faces a legal mess.

The Mohawk community at the centre of the Oka Crisis is leading plans to hold a ceremony aimed at solidifying an Indigenous alliance against the proposed Energy East pipeline.

Kanesatake Grand Chief Serge Simon said the ceremony is expected to take place in British Columbia this coming spring.

It’s a humble shack with a $9-billion view.

The Treaty 8 Tribal Association has set up an observation shack overlooking the Peace River at the Site C dam site where opponents and other interested parties can watch what critics say is the destruction of the Peace River valley.