Hostility to oil has turned Canada’s swerve away from political conservatism into a bumpy ride.
The biggest bump so far is the Leap Manifesto, a creation of documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis and activist and author Naomi Klein, his wife.
Published last September, the manifesto calls on Canada to generate all its electricity with renewable fuel within 20 years and to use no fossil energy at all by 2050.
True to a thesis explicit in the subtitle of Klein’s latest book, Capitalism vs. the Climate, the manifesto doesn’t limit itself to energy.
“Power generated this way will not merely light our homes but redistribute wealth, deepen our democracy, strengthen our economy, and start to heal the wounds that date back to this country’s founding,” it says, adding, “Wherever possible communities should collectively control these new energy systems.”
The manifesto also asserts, “There is no longer an excuse for building new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future.”
Canada’s newly dominant parties of the left seem not to know how to handle this repudiation of economic fundamentals disguised as energy transformation.
Most interesting is the New Democratic Party.
Meeting this month in Edmonton, NDP leaders couldn’t bring themselves to call the manifesto the retrogressive hogwash that it is. So they embraced without adopting it.
This tendency boldly to claim both halves of split differences apparently cost the party leader his job and evoked proper outrage from Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley, who called it naive.
Notley, who a year ago ended decades of Tory control in Alberta, seeks approval of pipelines connecting her province’s oil sands with tidewater—projects the Leap Manifesto abhors.
On Apr. 14, her government released a budget with a gaping deficit and revenue from a new carbon tax below expectations.
Work generates carbon emissions, and with work down painfully in Alberta’s slumping, oil-based economy, there’s less to tax.
Eventually, all Canadian politicians will have to decide whether they consider that good or bad.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Apr. 15, 2016; author’s e-mail: [email protected])
Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.