Canada and the environment:  A fresh start for a fresh decade

by Preston Manning*

The Globe and Mail – January 25, 2010

With the dawning of a new decade, a “fresh start” for Canada on environmental issues is an urgent necessity, especially at the national level.

Canadians (particularly the younger generation) strongly believe in environmental protection and conservation. But they have become disillusioned by inaction and the ineffectiveness of so much of the political debate on the subject – the failure of the ill-conceived Kyoto Protocol, the bungled presentation of carbon pricing by the Liberals under Stephane Dion, the reluctance of Canadian conservatives to become environmental champions, the acrimonious debate between global warming alarmists and sceptics, and the indeterminate outcome of the recent Copenhagen talks.

Grounds for more productive dialogue and action on the environment do exist among those Canadians who share the following convictions:  (1) That it is a good idea to reduce the negative environmental consequences associated with the production and burning of hydrocarbons, regardless of whether you consider global warming to be one of or the most serious of those consequences; and (2) That the choices required to address our environmental challenges are not polarizing and divisive “either/or” choices – either regulatory action by government or market based initiatives by business – but unifying and consensus-building “both/and” choices.

As a starting point for fresh-start dialogue and action, let’s focus on the principal horses (to use a western analogy) that need to be harnessed to the environmental protection/conservation wagon:

(1)            Full Cost Accounting. “If it matters, measure it.” Let’s adopt expanded accounting practices which explicitly recognize the environmental and social impacts of economic activities, identify the costs of avoiding or mitigating them, and gradually incorporate those costs into the prices of goods and services. Let’s give as much attention to keeping the National Ecological Accounts and reducing the Gross National Waste as we do to the National Economic Accounts and increasing the Gross National Product. And to be equitable, and avoid creating another national unity crisis, full cost accounting needs to be applied to all energy sources, economic enterprises, and regions – not just to petroleum and companies based in western Canada.

(2)            Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI). STI has enormous contributions to make toward the achievement of both environmental and economic sustainability. But maximizing those contributions requires Canada to squarely address two chronic problems:  (1) Our historic difficulty in managing and financing the movement of STI from the laboratory to the market place. (2) The need to anticipate and mitigate the negative impacts which may accompany scientific innovations, such as those now associated with the internal combustion engine or the production of ethanol from biomass. Let’s create a private-sector-based think tank/do tank dedicated to devising business strategies and public policies to address the first of these problems. And let’s consistently perform so-called Economic Environmental Ethical Legal and Social (EEELS) impact assessments on innovative applications of old and new technologies (such as those associated with carbon capture and storage) to address the second.

(3)            Market mechanisms.  “Markets” are devices for harnessing resources (physical, human, and financial) to meet “demands” using pricing signals and monetary incentives. Historically, markets have been the most effective instruments known to man to meet our demands for goods and services. But with effort, innovation, and care, markets can also be harnessed to meet our current demands for clean water, clean air, reclaimed soil, and overall reductions in the Gross National Waste. So let’s get serious about attaching prices to the “goods and services” delivered by ecosystems such as watersheds, incorporating the cost of mitigating negative environmental impacts into the prices of conventional goods and services, and offering investors fair and reasonable returns on capital successfully invested in environmental protection and conservation.

(4)            Government Policy and Regulation. Of course there is a major role for government policy and regulation with respect to environmental protection and conservation, but let’s sharpen our definition and exercise of that role. For starters, let’s see governments – which constitute some of the largest resource owners and consumers of goods and services in the country – lead more by example. With respect to regulation, let’s have governments focus on “macro regulation” – creating frameworks and incentives for individuals and companies to practice responsible environmental stewardship – rather than attempting to micro-manage individual or corporate behaviour. And since ecosystems like watersheds and air sheds don’t respect federal/provincial/municipal boundaries, let’s see more delegation of environmental protection by all levels of government to one-window ecosystem-based regulatory authorities.

(5)            Demand-Side Transformation. Much of the past emphasis on environmental protection has been on the supply side – attempting to find more environmentally responsible ways to supply our demands for energy, food, shelter, and other goods and services. But let’s also find ways and means of making absolute reductions in those demands themselves. Full-cost accounting and pricing will have this effect. But let’s also focus more of our educational and teaching resources – through the home, schools, and faith-based institutions – on teaching the importance and the means of reducing our demands on finite resources and ecosystems.

(6)            New Eco-Partnerships. Some of the solutions to our environmental challenges will require the forging of new eco-partnerships. Public-private utility partnerships, for example, can be used to finance and manage the conservation of watersheds. (One has been proposed for the management of the Athabasca watershed in Alberta.) The transportation and intermittency problems faced by producers of wind and solar energy can be solved in part by partnering with non-renewable energy producers and shippers. And with respect to achieving sustainable continental energy security, let’s begin to seriously consider partnering with the United States in the creation of a North America Sustainability Agency (NASA II) to harness public and private resources in both countries to the objective of cleaning up oil sand production in much the same way that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA I) harnessed public and private resources to put a man on the moon.

(7)            Political Leadership at the National Level. Past initiatives by the federal Conservative have included substantial investments in environmental standards enforcement, the $2 Billion ecoENERGY (clean energy) initiative, and establishment of the mandatory Green House Gas (GHG) emissions reduction target of 20% by 2020. Also to its credit, the Harper government has not made hypocritical international commitments on GHG reductions as did the Liberals at Kyoto nor has it bungled the presentation of a major environmental initiative (carbon taxes) as did the Liberal opposition under Stephane Dion. At the national level, it is therefore the Conservative government that is in the best position to provide fresh start leadership on the environmental front. Such leadership might especially include more vigorously establishing the connection between “conservatism” and “conservation” (the words come from the same root); applying the core concepts of fiscal conservatism – “living within our means” and “balancing budgets” – to living with our means ecologically and balancing the ecological budget; re-assessing the conservative application of science to environmental issues, including global warming, to ensure that it is principled and balanced; and most importantly, making the harnessing of market mechanisms to the task of environmental protection and conservation the “signature contribution” of conservatives to environmental and economic sustainability.

*Preston Manning is President and CEO of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy (www.manningcentre.ca).