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.
. . . commentators often put forward variations of Solomon’s theory — that it’s we ordinary people, with our self-absorption or resistance to change, who are the prime culprits in the world’s failure to act against climate disaster.
Violent conflicts and threats to the territorial integrity of some of the world’s most vulnerable countries are among the more ominous risks posed by an ever-warming planet, according to the UN organization given the task of assessing the impacts of climate change.
Top scientists say the latest international report on climate change shows that Canadians must wake up to the impact of warming temperatures on land, on water and in communities across the country. They say the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, released Sunday in Japan, shows changes are on their way and further delays in responding to them only narrow the options. "We no longer have the option of choosing between mitigation and adaptation," Debra Davidson, a University of Alberta sociologist and lead author on the report, said Monday.
START with the term “tar sands.” In Canada only fervent opponents of oil development in northern Alberta dare to use those words; the preferred phrase is the more reassuring “oil sands.” Never mind that the “oil” in the world’s third largest petroleum reserve is in fact bitumen, a substance with the consistency of peanut butter, so viscous that another fossil fuel must be used to dilute it enough to make it flow.
