On the Immorality and Futility of Canadian Climate Policy under Trudeau

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Canadian climate policy under the Trudeau government is both self-defeating and immoral. Focusing on the central facet of the government's strategy – which trades a small carbon price for significant expansions of oil pipelines – the paper develops this argument in three principal ways. First, it situates the strategy in relation to the global warming potential of new extracted/exported emissions facilitated by new pipelines, which would overwhelm the savings created by the carbon price. Second, the paper focuses on the policy's potential to exacerbate a perilous national accumulation strategy that leaves workers and communities highly vulnerable to unstable global commodity markets. Finally, it situates the policy in relation to a centuries-old process of colonial theft of Indigenous lands to facilitate extractive development. The paper closes by considering what an environmentally sound and morally just Canadian climate policy would look like along eco-socialist lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• climate change
• indigenous
• pipelines
• just transition
• Trudeau government

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ottawa's Paris pledge is exceptionally modest. To do its fair share in preventing 1.5°C of warming, Canada would need a target closer to 45–60 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 (United Nations Environment Program 2019). That is to say nothing of the Paris Agreement itself, which is woefully inadequate. Indeed, assuming all states actually fulfilled their pledges, the accord would achieve less than a quarter of the emissions reductions needed to stay below 1.5°C of warming.

2 The National Energy Board estimates the exported emissions at 70 percent of the total emissions (i.e., only 30 percent would come from domestic processing) (Lee 2018).

3 As Katz-Rosene (2020) further notes, these latter two industries, though low-carbon, are still primary industries that may be subject to the same commodity booms and busts noted above, and could further undermine efforts to redress injustices inflicted upon Indigenous communities. Extensive planning and consultation would thus be required to ensure such industries are designed in a way that is stable, sustainable, and just.

4 It is important to note that, prior to European arrival, Indigenous communities did not consider the land, waters, or animals to be ‘property,’ and thus all treaty negotiations relied on a very poorly understood notion of capitalist property rights that made little sense to them – a misunderstanding which proved fundamental to securing their approval. As Huseman and Short (2012, 228) argue,

The great difficulty with seeing such treaties as a legitimate surrender of rights derives from the fact that native peoples did not know what the treaties signified to the whites, especially seeing as so many had no concept of private, let alone state, property, so could only guess at what the agreements actually meant.