The American Recovery and Successive Canadian governments have been criticized for inaction on the climate change file. The truth is that they have been very active. This activity simply hasn’t been focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To grasp the essence of contemporary Canadian climate policy, one need only turn to Stephen Harper’s first speech as Prime Minister to business leaders outside of Canada. Speaking to a United Kingdom audience in July 2006, he boldly announced his intention to build Canada into an “energy superpower.” Canada, he said, was already the fifth-largest producer of energy in the world, on the strength of its production of oil, gas, uranium and hydroelectricity. But this was “only the beginning”: “An ocean of oil-soaked sand lies under the muskeg of northern Alberta—my home province.
The oil sands are the second largest oil deposit in the world, bigger than Iraq, Iran or Russia; exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. Digging the bitumen out of the ground, squeezing out the oil and converting it in into synthetic crude is a monumental challenge. It requires vast amounts of capital, Brobdingnagian technology, and an army of skilled workers. In short, it is an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” 16 The Energy Superpower vision he laid out in that speech—of an economic future for the nation rooted in the rapid exploitation of the tar sands, the expansion of the oil and gas frontier in the Arctic, and the sale of nuclear technology and fuel—has been the key driver of climate policy in Canada ever since. It shaped the government’s response to the 2008 economic crisis. In Canada, only eight per cent of the economic stimulus package was dedicated to “green” measures, a level well below the comparable green share of stimulus packages in the US (12%), China (38%), the European Union (59%), and South Korea (81%). And of that, the largest amount (41%) was for carbon capture and storage projects—a direct public subsidy for coal-fired and tar sands electricity, as well as for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), making Canada the only country to subsidize nuclear power as part of its economic stimulus package.17 The steps for turning Canada into this “energy superpower” have begun to be realized in federal budgets, the government’s most significant annual policy statement.
It was telling that the Harper government’s first budget saw the elimination of fifteen climate-related programmes.18 And in its 2010 budget, it eliminated the principal federal programs for supporting energy efficiency19 and renewable energy,20 while putting in place new measures to fast-track approvals for fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure.21 And the International Energy Agency’s 2009 country review found that even though Canada is of one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita in the world, and has a higher energy intensity than any other IEA country, the largest part of government research and development spending is for fossil fuels (27%) and nuclear power (38%), while energy efficiency (14%) and renewable energy (11%) are short-changed.22
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