Canada must consider how Alberta’s oilsands contribute to global climate change and make moves to cut its carbon emissions before it's too late, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu told reporters in Fort McMurray. “Only those who don’t want to listen, only those who want to be blind can’t see that we are sitting on a powderkeg,” he said Friday. “If we don’t do something urgently, quickly, we won’t have a world.” Tutu is in the northern Alberta city for a two-day conference on oilsands development and aboriginal treaties, was hosted by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.
Weather forecasters at Environment Canada aren’t supposed to discuss climate change in public, says a Canadian government spokesman.
Environment Canada made the comments in response to emailed questions about its communications policy.
. . . the department’s communications protocol prevents the meteorologists from drawing links to changing climate patterns following extreme weather events such as severe flooding in southern Alberta or a massive wildfire in Northern Quebec in the summer of 2013.
CALGARY - Ottawa wants the Commission for Environmental Co-operation to drop its investigation into whether laws are being properly enforced when it comes to oilsands pollution.
The CEC asked the federal government in December to respond to allegations that it has failed to enforce provisions in the Fisheries Act by allowing harmful substances to leak from tailings ponds into water sources downstream of mines in northeastern Alberta.
EDMONTON - Critics say Albertans are in danger of being shut out of discussions on how the province's natural resources are developed.
Expert observers and opposition politicians worry Alberta's new energy regulator is drawing the circle of who can speak so tightly that one hearing on a proposed energy project had to be cancelled because no one was allowed to appear.
While Canada slashes budgets for research, education and public broadcasting, there is one part of our economy that enjoys remarkable support from the Canadian taxpayer: the energy sector.
The Canadian Labour Congress, the umbrella organization for most of the country's labour organizations, has chosen a new president who has vowed to make the national body more militant in confronting management and the Harper Conservatives.
The Harper government received a stark warning this week that its reliance on fossil-fuel exports to keep the economy humming is an increasingly risky gambit in a world grappling with the need to dramatically reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.
Faced with scientific evidence that climate change is a real and growing threat, global governments, including the United States and China, are adopting clean-energy strategies to improve the efficiency of resource use and switch from fossil fuel to renewables.
This is the story of how Canada’s Plan B rejoinder to Obama’s repeated Keystone delays became mired down, jeopardizing future oil-sands development and production at a cost, according to a Calgary research group, of more than $400 billion in lost economic growth over the next 25 years. It was put together after on- and off-the-record interviews with more than 60 government and industry officials, environmentalists and aboriginal leaders. Some government officials close to Harper asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak.
The left has long admired Canada as an enclave of social democracy in North America: for its openly socialist electoral parties, its robust welfare state, and its more moderate policy profile. Recent developments, however, have thrown that reputation into question. The country is helmed by a prime minister, Stephen Harper, known for his brazenly right-wing views and executive unilateralism. Both federal and provincial governments have embraced austerity and eroded public services.
The current trajectories of Canada’s predominant political economies are increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part to the fact that we have become, in many respects, a petro state, rather than the much vaunted “Energy Superpower” that we were promised.
