Canada

OTTAWA - Stephen Harper slammed the door on unilaterally regulating Canada's oil and gas sector Tuesday even as four provincial governments, representing almost 80 per cent of Canada's population, were pledging to go further and faster in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Environment ministers from British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec signed what they're calling a compact in Lima, Peru, where an international climate conference is underway.

On Saturday, November 29, Québecers braved the cold and took to the streets of Québec and Montréal. Buses were sent hundreds of kilometres across the province to the two cities, where workers from all sectors marched against the province’s planed austerity measures.

The march was organized by a coalition of community, student and labour groups and pulled out more people than any multi-city rally since the Maple Spring of 2012.

In Québec City, it was more people at a march than anyone could even remember.

The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a First Nation whose leadership has spoken out for years against oil sands pollution in northern Alberta, is among six First Nations being taken to court by the federal government for not complying with a new law requiring bands to post audited financial statements online.

The First Nation's spokesperson, Eriel Deranger, called the lawsuit "a kind of bullying" in retaliation for  fighting the oil industry, although the government said this is not the case.

Ann Craft is a self-described strong willed and caring Irish woman who has been selling real estate in Central Alberta for 19 years.

But now she is getting rather upset.

"I'm more than pissed off. I'm appalled."

Appalled, she says, by the two-year fracking horror story she has lived through. And the consistent failure, she charges, of Alberta's regulatory bodies including Alberta Environment, Alberta Health Services and the Alberta Energy Regulator to do their respective jobs.

"It's mind-boggling."

Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a compelling opinion piece for the New York Times in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar sands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, Illinois and Oklahoma.

It would be hard to invent a more destructive ritual of national self-punishment. Year after year, we hand oil companies gigantic tracts of pristine land. They skin them of entire ecosystems. They vacuum billions of dollars out of the country. Their oversized power, sunk into lobbying and litigation, upends government law-making.

RED EARTH CREEK, ALTA.—The Alberta Energy Regulator says close to 60,000 litres of crude oil have spilled into muskeg in the province’s north.

An incident report by the regulator states that a mechanical failure was reported Thursday at a Canadian Natural Resources Limited pipeline approximately 27 kilometres north of Red Earth Creek.

Are Stephen Harper's pipeline policies beginning to boomerang back at him?

On the West Coast, 78 people have been arrested (so far) over the past week on Burnaby Mountain, protesting Kinder Morgan's proposal to triple its pipeline capacity to transport Alberta oil to British Columbia.

From an 84 year-old retired librarian to 11 year-old girls, people are being hauled away and charged with "civil contempt" for obstructing surveyors for the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Perhaps it’s the charming student activist, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who donated his $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award to the pipeline fight, or perhaps it was the scandalous documents leaked last week that showed pipeline company TransCanada has teamed up with one of the world’s most powerful PR firms, Edelman, to manipulate public opinion surrounding the Energy East pipeline.

MONTRÉAL — Two years ago student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois rose to fame by becoming the face of Quebec’s so-called Maple Spring. He turned the episode that spelled the beginning of the end of premier Jean Charest’s tenure into a book titledTenir tête.

Last week, the book won the Governor General’s 2014 French-language non-fiction prize. On Sunday, Nadeau-Dubois revealed that he was giving his $25,000 prize to a citizens’ coalition devoted to blocking TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline.