by Paul Martin
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Green and White
Like most Canadians, I have worked and lived most of my life in cities. And like most Canadians, part of my attachment to our country comes from the sheer scale and beauty of the land. When I was a young man, I found summer jobs that took me out on Lake Erie and then to northern Alberta, the Beaufort Sea, the Saguenay, and Hudson Bay. I hiked, canoed, and fished in some of the wildest places in Canada. All this was long before the words ecology and environment entered daily discourse. As I have said before, when I was young my love of the outdoors began to translate itself into strong feelings about conservation. In those days, very few people had begun to understand the interdependency of the natural world and the future of the human race. Like many people, it was only as the science progressed and the problems facing us increased that I became concerned with the larger issues of biodiversity, the ozone layer, and greenhouse gas emissions, to pick a few examples. In fact, I think it is fair to say that although this understanding had deepened considerably by the time I went into politics in 1988, it is only in the last decade that the science — and the public’s understanding of it — has led us to face the fact that our very future as a species is now in play.
After the 1990 leadership convention, I asked to be environment critic. That job introduced me to a circle of Canadian environmentalists, including Elizabeth May, Stephanie Cairns, Louise Comeau, and David Runnalls among others, with whom I started consulting regularly. As opposition critic, I attended the Rio conference, chaired by my friend Maurice Strong, and grappled with some of these issues as they played out on a global scale. I had a chance to deepen my understanding of the ideas circulating internationally, and meet some of the important people behind them. Rio also marked me because of the appalling contrast between the commitments made by government leaders in that international forum and their actions after they headed home.
This experience coloured my view of how countries acted during the Kyoto process, where the undertakings we and the other countries made contained no substantive measures that would ensure their implementation. After we signed Kyoto, I argued for a fully articulated plan. To their credit, as environment ministers, Christine Stewart and later David Anderson made an effort to develop one. But they were fighting an uphill battle. Of course the conflicts were not only out in the community, with industry, but also internal; the departments of Environment and Natural Resources had deep philosophical differences, as well as disputes over bureaucratic turf. When the vote on ratification took place, after I was out of cabinet, I supported it. But I continued to express my deep reservations about this kind of policy making by photo op.
By the time I came back to government as prime minister, some people had concluded that meeting our Kyoto targets was impossible. This was not my view, but it was clear that they were extremely ambitious and were getting more ambitious every day that passed. By this time, Canada was about 20 per cent above its 1990 emissions level and its target was to get to 6 per cent below the 1990 level. Still, we had signed an international treaty and Canadians expected us to do our best to meet those commitments. I was determined to have a go, but this time we were going to have a plan to get there.
Under the direction of Brian Guest and Johanna Leffler (who collaborated with Desirée McGraw and Louise Comeau, two leading environmentalists, and a small group of environmental policy experts), the preparation for my environmental agenda as prime minister was well underway even before I became party leader. After the 2004 election, Stéphane Dion took over as environment minister. His arrival at the department proved crucial beyond even my expectations. He threw himself into the job with his characteristic energy, enthusiasm, and intellectual rigour. You have to remember that any program was inevitably going to be dauntingly complex. There was a complex scientific dimension. There were individual industrial sectors with which we had to negotiate and which did not hesitate to try outfoxing the system by offering up changes that were already underway for other reasons in the hope that the new regime would not have any impact on them. We were also hamstrung by controversial commitments made by the previous administration to cap the costs that industry would face to comply with emissions reduction targets. The provinces, of course, were significant players, for both constitutional and political reasons, and the provisions of the Kyoto treaty itself were complex. Finally, to be credible to the public, the whole package needed to be acceptable to important elements of the environmental community, who would be sought out by the media to give their imprimatur (or withhold it). In a way, it was the towering complexity of these issues that made Stéphane ideal to take them on.
Of course, the Environment department was not the only one concerned with this issue within government. When I became prime minister, the Department of Natural Resources had primary custody of the Kyoto file, and it took some effort to shift the balance. Brian Guest, collaborating closely with Stéphane among others, coordinated the development of what was called “Project Green,” an umbrella under which we could place several elements of our environmental platform, including climate change. Before Christmas 2004, Brian gave me a detailed proposal, which included an ambitious attempt to reach our Kyoto targets. The plan included restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions that could be ratcheted up over time, as well as incentives for Canadians to make energy-saving changes in the daily lives. He also argued that we could earn international credits under the treaty by making environmental investments outside our borders that would also benefit our Canadian industries. I personally hoped that in the long term, we might be able to use Canadian technology to help developing countries in Africa, for example, to grow through the kind of green initiatives that would benefit them as well as us.
By developing a thorough costing and economic modelling we allayed some of the concerns of the Department of Finance. If there was a bureaucratic obstacle remaining, it was the Department of Natural Resources. Although the plan was transformed considerably as it fought its way through the bureaucratic process, we managed to get significant elements into the 2005 budget. We were beginning to break the logjam that had helped paralyze the government since Kyoto first emerged on the horizon. Canada at last had a very detailed plan for coming to grips with carbon emissions, even if we did not communicate this as clearly as we might have done.
The 2005 budget contained both spending and tax measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including incentives to use wind power and other sustainable sources of energy. There were also conservation programs, including one encouraging homeowners to retrofit their houses to conserve energy. There were tax incentives to industry to develop less wasteful energy usage and money for environmentally sustainable infrastructure in our cities. There were also more traditional measures to enhance our natural environment, including our parks and waterways. It was quickly dubbed the “greenest budget ever,” and rightly helped establish Stéphane’s reputation as one of the world’s most effective environment ministers and Ralph as Canada’s greenest finance minister.
The plan that underlay Project Green was a judicious mix of regulation, tax incentives and disincentives, and emissions offsets. We recognized that when the United States finally turned on this issue, it would turn on a dime. In fact, its municipal and state governments were already showing Washington the way.
We wanted to prepare Canadians to participate in the international emissions trading system that would inevitably follow. We also wanted Canadians to be able to take full advantage of the huge market for environmental technologies that will be in increasing demand as the world comes to grips with what may prove to be its greatest challenge.
As finance minister, I had set up an agency to develop environmental technologies, and it has been very successful, but it could be doing so much more. Almost every major problem the world has faced in the last two centuries has been resolved in part through technological advances. In 2000, Canada set up a pilot project for carbon dioxide sequestration, for example, i
n Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and I am happy to see the Harper government is now pursuing our lead on this. We have the right geology for carbon storage in this country, and we need to make sure this, and the development of a wide range of advanced environmental technologies, is an industrial and governmental priority.
In the same vein, we have not worked hard enough at finding technological fixes for coal-generating power plants. It is clear that the rapidly developing countries of Asia will continue to burn coal, increasing their production of carbon dioxide. The incentives and disincentives should ensure that no new plants will be built without the capacity to fully utilize newly developing technologies for carbon sequestration.
One of the other environmental issues that preoccupied me as prime minister was the preservation of fishing stocks. John Efford, who was my original natural resources minister before he had to step down due to ill health, and Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan had long argued that Canada needed to get a hold of the problem of overfishing off the nose and tail of the Grand Banks — outside our territorial waters. One on occasion, Mark Watton, who staffed the Atlantic desk in the PMO (and who was very deeply concerned about the issue), arranged for me to join a Fisheries Department surveillance flight out of St. John’s. Below us they showed me a big fishing boat that two months earlier had cut its illegally sized nets to avoid capture by our people trying to police the fishery.
The problems off our shores were really just local symptoms of an international disease, and while our prime concern is the Nose and the Tail of the Grand Banks, ultimately a global solution is required. Some of the poorest countries on earth, including many in Africa, for example — countries that have always depended on local fishing for the very sustenance of their people — were the victims of huge industrial fishing fleets from much richer places such as Spain or Taiwan. These fleets sailed just outside territorial waters, vacuumed up the fruits of the sea, scraped the bottom of the ocean bare, destroyed the fish-stocks and the environment that produced them, then moved on to the next place, indifferent to the devastation they left behind. The global commons were being ruined — with every major fishing stock under threat — and I felt strongly that we needed to address this as a global issue. Canada — with the death of the Atlantic cod fishery as a terrible example of failure — was in a position to exert influence, speaking from bitter experience.
Geoff Regan, as fisheries minister, took the lead, and the push to increase global concern became a consistent element of our foreign diplomacy. I met with Britain’s Tony Blair, Ricardo Lagos of Chile, France’s Jacques Chirac, and George Bush, and argued for a “global commons” approach. I also met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, Portugal’s Santana Lopes, and Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez, whose countries were among the worst offenders. Everyone agreed on the principle (albeit a bit defensively in some cases) that fish stocks were the property of humankind and should be managed as such. What I was looking for was an international agreement that would start with the North Atlantic but then go beyond it to manage fishing in international waters according to scientific and environmental standards, with the agreements monitored by an international organization as well as the coastal states. We had made reasonable progress at the leaders’ level but by the time I left office had not yet achieved an agreement that would permit us to get officials doing the detailed work required. Who can doubt that fish stocks will collapse, just as our cod fisheries have done, if we do not adopt a global approach?
It was in the North that my feelings about the country, the land, our people, and the environment came together most closely. I had fallen for the North as a young man, working in the Arctic in the summertime, and the place has never lost its allure for me. It is remarkable that this vast expanse — which few Canadians know truly well, and which many will never see with their own eyes — can nonetheless have such a powerful hold on us. Of course, being a Northern country is very much part of how we see ourselves. Quebec singer Gilles Vigneault wrote the lyrics “Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver” — My country isn’t a country, it is winter. It became a very popular song that applies to all Canadians, whether they are digging themselves out of a snowbank in the Saguenay or walking into the January wind on Portage Avenue. While other peoples may define themselves by moments in their history that are memories rather than experiences — whether it is the adventures of cowboys or the lost glories of empires — we define ourselves in part by our geography, and especially the vast Arctic North.
When I was at Canada Steamship Lines in the late 1970s, and before we had become partners, Ladi Pathy approached me to see whether we were interested in forming a joint venture with Fednav, the government and Upper Lakes Shipping to build and operate an Arctic-class bulk carrier. I jumped at the chance. It was always part of my conception of the North that commerce would play a role in maintaining our sovereignty, along with our Aboriginal peoples, Arctic science, and the military. We built the MV Arctic, which at the time of its first operation was 51 per cent owned by the government of Canada and 49 per cent by the three shipping companies. The ship is a combination of bulk carrier and ice-breaker. One of my regrets about leaving CSL was that after I entered politics, the company lost its interest in the North somewhat, and when the government decided to sell its share in the ship, CSL did not take the opportunity to snap it up. Today, it has become part of Ladi’s fleet at his company, Fednav.
When I became prime minister, I had two goals in mind for Canada’s North: enhance the living conditions of the people that live there and assert our sovereignty over its land and waters. The two are intimately connected. Making life better for Northerners — in particular the Inuit, who live in some of the most remote areas of the territories — will allow many of them to stay on their ancestral lands, which will in turn reinforce Canada’s sovereignty. Internationally, our work to improve the lives of those who inhabit our North underscores our sovereignty. (Both Russia and Norway have made similar arguments in defence of their own claims.) And the history of the Canadian Inuit on the land and ice constitute part of our claim too; it has been a source of frustration to some Inuit leaders that we have not made this case more strongly. Of course, the military must play a role in maintaining our sovereignty, but the territories are so immense that no purely military land-or sea-based solution will ever be enough.
As I’ve said, making the North a place where people want to continue to live is not just a matter of justice and citizenship; it is also part of making sure we control one of our most precious and certainly our most delicate geographical resources. We know that as the ice-cap melts, the emerging shipping lanes will be more and more attractive, and the potential environmental disasters more and more of a concern. At the same time, the natural resources that have been imprisoned and inaccessible underneath the ice will be more and more tempting to exploit. It is estimated that a quarter of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves lie in the Arctic Basin. At the same time, the changing conditions in the North will likely open up opportunities for a commercial fishery that will have to be carefully managed.
We need to make sure that we are sovereign over the economic development of the North, so that the environment can be fully protected, and the economic benefits accrue primarily to the people whose land it has been for millennia. Our existing case, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (which controls development in the North), is irrefutable, even if there are some small boundary issues. But we need to assert our rights wherever we can, as strongly as we are able. We can no longer take them for granted or assume that nobody else covets this bitterly cold land and the freezing waters that course through it. For this reason, our government provided more funding for the International Polar Year — $150 million — than any other country and used this to coordinate our efforts.
Science is a big part of Canada’s approach to the North and we are the leader in many areas of study across the Arctic: ocean currents and ice dynamics, understa
nding of the treeline, caribou and reindeer habitat and migration, and the Arctic coastal fisheries, to choose a few examples. These activities cement our territorial claims as well, giving us an important base of knowledge about the North. In particular, our effort to map the land and sea, including the seabed, is fundamentally important. Canada has had a program for mapping the continental shelf, which has been used to help determine boundaries in the North since 1958, but we injected new funds to scale up our efforts. As I write, it is reported that Canada is preparing to claim an area of the continental shelf the size of our three prairie provinces, stretching to the North Pole, as well we should.
Replacing Canada’s aging ice-breakers is an element in ensuring our presence in the North, but the area is so vast that no number of ships could ever patrol it adequately. That’s why we invested $110 million to triple our satellite surveillance capacity for the North. We also increased support for the Canadian Rangers program, which enlists Northerners, mostly Inuit, to patrol thousands of square kilometres of territory in the most remote parts of the North on snowmobiles in some of the most inhospitable weather conditions on earth. Why no one has ever made a TV show about these guys, I will never know!
We also created a new joint task force for the Canadian Forces, which undertook the largest ever military exercise in the North involving land, sea, and air units, along with the Coast Guard, RCMP, and environment and emergency preparedness teams. I was very interested in this particular exercise of our sovereignty. Indeed Sheila and I went to Pangnirtung along with Nancy Karetak Lindell to watch part of the exercise. Most Canadians have never had the pleasure of visiting Pangnirtung, an Inuit community perched beside a spectacular fjord on the edge of the Arctic Circle on Baffin Island. If it weren’t so inaccessible, its stunning beauty would be as familiar to Canadians as Lake Louise.
