Young protesters at the U.N. climate talks in Lima, Peru highlight out-of-touch North American energy policies. Credit: Adopt a Negotiator.

By Leehi Yona
LIMA, Dec 13 2014 (IPS)

While U.S. and Canadian officials delivered speeches about how the world needs to step up to their responsibilities at the U.N. climate negotiations in Lima, Peru, activists from North America demanded clear answers back home on their governments’ relationships with fossil fuel corporations, as well as the future of several major oil projects across the continent.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke Thursday about the role each country should play on tackling climate change and referred to the U.S.-China agreement announced in November. The agreement, which pledged unforeseen emissions reductions for both countries, has been lauded by many countries as a progressive step forward at the U.N. negotiations.“Under Stephen Harper, Canada has no climate policy beyond public relations.” -- Canadian MP Elizabeth May

However, civil society delegates have expressed concern over the disconnect between the messaging the United States has been taking in Lima, and its domestic fossil fuel reliance.

This international discourse collides with Washington’s hesitance to repeal the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed project that would transport over 800,000 barrels of bitumen a day from the Alberta tar sands to Texas oil refineries.

“The best way the U.S. can support progress in the U.N. Climate Talks is to start at home by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline now,” said Dyanna Jaye, a U.S. youth delegate attending the conference with SustainUS.

TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline has been stalled in political procedures since 2011. Once considered to be a done deal, the project has grown to be a bone of contention among environmental groups, who have mobilised to put pressure on President Barack Obama to reject it.

Having been presented as a bill to Congress numerous times, it most recently passed a House of Representatives vote but failed in the Senate by only one vote on Nov. 5.

Youth have taken a leading role on been pushing for Kerry to reject Keystone XL, shining a spotlight on the influence of the fossil fuel industry in hindering progress.

Following Kerry’s speech to the U.N. on Thursday, Jaye and other U.S. and Canadian youth activists organised an action in protest of proposed pipelines through the two countries.

Calling for the industry to be kicked out of the negotiations, youth have highlighted that a successful deal in Lima would necessitate a phasing out of fossil fuel use to zero production by 2050, as stated in a World Wildlife Fund report.

“Dirty fossil fuel projects like Keystone XL clearly fail the climate test,” Evan Weber, executive director of US Climate Plan, told IPS. “We’ll be drawing the line on any new fossil fuel infrastructure and calling for investment in renewable energy solutions.”

Protesters emphasised the need for domestic action at home in order for there to be any progress at the United Nations

The United States, however, isn’t the only country whose domestic issues directly contradict their statements here at COP20. The Canadian government has been criticised for their lack of domestic ambition and their close relationship with fossil fuel companies at this conference.

At the talks, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq stated on Dec. 9 that Canada is “confident [they] can achieve a climate agreement” at these talks, “however it will require courage and common sense.”

While the government has attempted to portray itself as a climate leader in these negotiations, members of civil society have pointed out discrepancies between the emissions goals they are promising and the emissions trajectory the country is actually on track to produce.

“Under Stephen Harper, Canada has no climate policy beyond public relations,” said Elizabeth May, a Canadian Member of Parliament and leader of the Canadian Green Party attending COP 20.

“The zeal to exploit fossil fuels has led to the evisceration of ‎environmental laws. We have distorted our economy in the interests of exporting bitumen,” she told IPS.

Canada has once again entered into the non-governmental spotlight at U.N. climate negotiations. On Tuesday, uproar ensued when Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that any regulation of the oil and gas industry would be “crazy” considering the industry’s current financial state.

On the conference’s last day, Canada was also awarded a Fossil of the Day, a daily non-prize awarded by civil society during the Climate Talks to the most regressive country, for its consistent meddling with and lack of participation in the U.N. process.

“As members of civil society, we’ve seen Canadian negotiators prioritise fossil fuel companies over public interest time and time again in Lima,” Catherine Gauthier of ENvironnement JEUnesse, a Québec youth environmental organisation, told IPS.

Both countries have come under scrutiny for their promotion of climate action on the international level while promoting tar sands expansion and shale gas fracking projects at home. Shale gas has particularly been promoted by both governments as a bridge fuel to help wean societies off fossil fuels with the goal of increasing renewable energy sources.

“The use of fracking as a bridge fuel is the biggest lie the American public has ever been fed,” Emily Williams of the California Student Sustainability Coalition told IPS. “It poisons our health and our communities, and destroys our environment. It cannot be part of the climate solution as it starves the renewable energy revolution of the investment it needs.”

Both Canada and the United States have been active in calling for swift action on the international level when it comes to climate change. The U.N. negotiations are currently running over time in Lima as countries work towards a compromise agreement.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Mining tar sands oil at Ft. McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

Canada’s tar sands oil boom may be in jeopardy and it appears the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not have any plan B in its ambition to remake this resource-rich country into “an energy superpower.”

“This is one of the sectors that creates some of the most jobs, not just in the oil patch, but around the country in terms of manufacturing and support services, and this government will continue to do everything to promote the Canadian energy sector,” Harper told reporters in December 2011.“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits." -- economist Marc Lee

But now, in the fall of 2014, Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert blames a hardnosed approach in Ottawa which she suggests jeopardised what might have garnered greater political support for its energy strategy from Canadians.

“It is playing out in the courts, in the provinces and in public opinion, with the Harper government almost always on the losing side of the argument,” she wrote in a Sep. 27 column.

Hebert was referring to efforts by the Harper government to loosen environment assessment rules, speeding up pipeline projects by gutting scientific research funding to investigate the climate change impact of fossil fuel emissions (including tar sands oil) on domestic regions like the Canadian Arctic, and to question the loyalty of environmental NGOs.

“While the majority of Canadian voters support the development of Canada’s energy potential, most continue to expect their governments to act as honest brokers in the search for a balance between the economy and the environment,” she added.

All the major pipeline projects designed to carry tar sands crude oil, which is extracted from the bitumen tar underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta, to markets in the U.S. and Asia (the later via British Columbia’s Pacific coast) are experiencing delays due to local and vocal opposition.

These projects are all slated to be built by either Enbridge or TransCanada Pipeline, both major Canadian pipeline construction companies.

“Right now there are 2.2 million barrels per day of capacity, production from the tar sands. And the federal and provincial governments have jointly handed out permits to take that to five million barrels per day. That is a huge increase, even if they never approve another project, which they will, and the limiting factor in all of this is pipelines,” says Keith Stewart, climate change and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada.

Despite occasional prodding from the Harper government, U.S. President Barack Obama appears loath to make a quick decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico because of stiff opposition from environmentalists, including some who are his supporters.

Keith Stewart notes that the Conservatives face the prospect of losing parliamentary seats in the vote-rich Pacific coast province of British Columbia in the national federal election in 2015 because of concerns about potential oil spills from either of the two planned pipelines in the pristine wilderness environment.

Northern Gateway, which has received formal regulatory approval coupled with 209 conditions, would travel across various First Nations indigenous territories in the BC interior to the coastal port of Kitimat. Supertankers would then load up the tar sands oil and navigate the narrow waters of the Douglas Channel for the open sea.

Many commentators, including Stewart, are doubtful that the project will ever get built because of the legal challenges from the First Nations, whose lands claims were given further reinforcement in recent Canadian court decisions.

The second project, by Kinder Morgan, is an extension of an existing pipeline in British Columbia that would slice through both wealthy suburban communities in the province’s lower mainland and First Nations territory.

Then there is Energy East, which is currently at an earlier stage of regulatory approval than the other two pipeline projects. It would transmit Alberta tar sands crude oil from the west to eastern Canada, which currently imports foreign oil, and is supported to various degrees by all the three major federal political parties.

But its route through Quebec has also ignited opposition because of climate change concerns. This is a province that prides itself on being green due to its reliance almost exclusively on hydroelectric power, “resulting in very low greenhouse emissions per capita,” adds Stewart.

“There is not a lot in [Energy East] for Quebec. It is all risk and low reward. You are taking the risk of spills into the St. Lawrence River and into the drinking water,” he notes.

Meanwhile, Jim Stanford, an economist with the UNIFOR union, warns of a boom-bust syndrome that is intrinsic to resource commodity investment. He says that tar sands oil is no exception to the trend.

Stanford points to the slide downward in the world price of oil from the 100-dollar a barrel level – the minimum required by energy producers to justify ploughing money into the expensive extraction process of applying chemicals, water and machinery to dig the bitumen out of the ground.

“Commodity prices go up and they always come down. And getting excited in a period of relatively high prices usually ends in tears [among the investors] when the prices come back down the other way,” Stanford says.

Another economist, the Vancouver-based Marc Lee, observes that the Harper government is keen to extract as much tar sands oil as possible over a short period of time before renewable energies like solar and wind, with fewer consequences for the warming of the planet, come on stream at more affordable pricing.

“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits,” says Lee.

Looming over all of this is Canada’s historical dependence on the development and export of raw resource staples, starting with trade in fur and fish from the New World to Europe under French and British colonisation in the 1500 and 1600s, says Mel Watkins, a retired University of Toronto political economist and the author of various books and articles on what he and others call the “staples theory,” to explain this country’s evolution.

Other important resources for Canada have been lumber, minerals and petroleum. Watkins speaks favourably of the wheat boom which began in the 1890s and provided, he recounts, positive spinoffs for the Canadian prairies, including the spread of family farms, expansion of agricultural, railway construction and settling of new communities and towns.

But often, says Watkins, resource-dependent countries – including Canada, Australia and nations in Latin America – get “addicted” to resource exports to the point where other parts of their economies fail to receive the full benefits of the commodity. He calls it “the staple trap.”

Watkins explains how the energy companies in Canada rely on foreign-made machinery to extract the tar sands oil and that once dug up the crude is invariably refined outside Canada.

Furthermore, continues Watkins, the tar sands boom has helped to raise the value of the Canadian dollar and thus upped the price of domestically manufactured products in a competitive world market.

Finally, resource-dependent countries like Canada “are too deferential” when it comes to the multinational energy companies paying sufficient royalties and taxes back to the government, adds Watkins, “which [could] can then be used to seed diversified, greener, development.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Mining tar sands oil at Fort McMurray. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

Job cuts totalling 1,000 announced at Environment Canada’s climate change division this month means there will be even fewer government scientists onboard to monitor the impact of the extraction, development and transportation of crude oil from the carbon-intensive oil sands in Alberta.

The oil sands are a major source of fossil fuel emissions which are heating areas of the planet, including the Arctic.“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work." -- Dennis Howlett

Ironically, this same department, just weeks earlier, produced new research confirming that toxic chemicals from oil sands tailing ponds covering 176 square kilometres in northern Alberta are leaching into the local groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.

But two experts on Canadian environmental policy say they expect fewer such studies to be financed by a Conservative government in Ottawa focused on the development of the Alberta oil sands.

“This government is taking out specific forms of [research] capacity and those are the kind of things we need to have if we are ever going to tackle climate change,” said John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada.

“[With] any government that comes into power in the future, it’s going to take them two or three years to get the staff, to review what they have to do,” he told IPS.

Picking up the investigative slack but without the same amount of resources are the environmental NGOs such as the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, said Mark Winfield, a professor in the faculty of environmental studies at Toronto’s York University.

“These functions of NGOs in the public policy process have become even more important as the capacity to provide evidence-based analysis — contrary to what the current government wants to hear — continues to be diminished in Ottawa,” Winfield said in a recent blog post.

He points for instance to a report by the Pembina Institute that offers evidence of  a “significant increase” in fossil fuel emissions if a proposed west-east pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick carrying crude oil from the oil sands is built.

Both Suzuki and Pembina are among several leading environmental organisations that have charitable status under Canadian tax regulation and thus are able to provide tax receipts for Canadians donating money for research into climate change, oil and gas development and other pollution issues.

However, since the 2011 federal election when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party won a parliamentary majority, these same NGOs have faced the prospect of losing their charitable status for allegedly straying past the legal 10 percent budget limit for  political activity.

The federal government’s rhetoric heated up when natural resources Minister Joe Oliver in early 2012 warned publicly of “radical” environmentalists “threaten[ing] to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” with their opposition to proposed oil pipeline projects.

Oliver stated then that these same groups rely on funding from “foreign special interest groups.”

Mark Winfield worries that CRA is raising “profound issues about the rights of Canadians,” by its actions.

The scorecards that NGOs introduce at election time to compare the positions of the various political parties on specific environmental issues including climate change may represent a crossing of the fine line between research and political advocacy, said Philippe Brideau, a spokesperson for the Canada Revenue Agency.

“In general, the CRA would likely consider a charity that rates political parties to be carrying on a partisan political activity.”

University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman is not adverse to some restrictions, although he is uncomfortable with some of the government’s rhetoric directed towards the NGOs.

“I think it is perfectly okay to publish data. But I am not sure it is proper to get tax money and get up and say ‘the Conservatives are killing the environment,’” he told IPS.

At the same time, Wiseman said he is not sure that Canadian organisations taking foreign money is necessarily illegal or even a bad thing.

“If there is some group that arises and wants to build democracy in the Ukraine, we want to give them some money. It could be illegal according to Ukrainian law. I suspect it is not illegal here.”

Recently revealed internal documents indicate that the Canada Revenue Agency is investing 12 million dollars (U.S.), more than then the 7.2 million previously announced, in an ongoing multi-year audit until 2017 of environmental NGOs with legal charity status.

CBC TV recently reported that CRA is investigating the following environmental charities — David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, The Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre and the Ecology Action Centre — for possibly exceeding the allowable 10 percent for political activity.

John Bennett at the Sierra Club, which is not being currently audited, said the political restrictions were never an issue for the NGOs until the Harper government came along and unleashed the CRA.

“There are things that groups have been doing for years and years and are now being told those are not qualified activities,” he explained.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made vague allegations about ties between NGOs and organised crime. Credit: Joey Coleman/cc by 2.0

Environmental NGOs, for instance, have historically worked with corporations within an industry like forestry to establish a sector-based code of conduct that respects the land, water, flora and fauna during any resource extraction activity.

Now, under a “retroactive” interpretation of political activity for charities by the CRA, that kind of consultation is being disallowed, said Bennett.

“This is the kind of activity which we thought was very positive, so trying to say that we can’t do that anymore is a way to get us out of the business of being an influence for change in society,” he said.

Philippe Brideau at the CRA counters that the issue of a code of conduct is not as clear-cut with regards to consultation.  “It depends on whether the actual activity fits the definition of political activity,” he said.

But Dennis Howlett, executive director for Canadians for Tax Fairness, argues that the Harper government is using the CRA to conduct a political “witch-hunt,” against NGOs daring to criticise public policy.

He notes that a similar form of “intimidation” of ongoing auditing is also occurring with organisations focused on international development.

“These audits are clearly designed to intimidate and disrupt their work, so instead of going in and auditing and saying, ‘no everything’s fine,’ they keep the audit open, and they don’t conclude the audit. They don’t come to any resolution; they just keep the charities hanging… I know of audits that have been going on for a year.”

Furthermore, Howlett points to the reported staff cuts at the Canada Revenue Agency over a three-year period totaling close to 3,000, plus another approximately 100 jobs lost in the units assigned to investigate overseas tax evasion and aggressive tax planning, and finally the disbanding of a special unit devoted to organised crime.

“These would be the more experienced trained auditors, forensic accountants, people with a fair high level of education and training and experience,” Howlett told IPS.

“CRA has lost a lot of key staff and their ability to investigate both individuals using tax havens to hide their money, as well as corporations who are shifting profit through tax havens to reduce their product and their tax bill.”

Brideau counters that the CRA “takes its commitment to detecting and addressing non-compliance with Canada’s tax laws seriously.” He denies that any auditors have been cut in his department.

“Reductions in staff are limited to individuals performing programme or corporate support functions,” he told IPS.

Regional temperature increases predicted by 2100. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report 2004

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Two reports released Wednesday reveal the dangerous gap between science and politics. New climate research shows that extreme events such as the severe heat wave in the U.S. last year will double in 2020, increase 400 percent by 2040, and then get far worse without significant carbon reductions.

Meanwhile, an analysis shows Canada cannot meet its weak 2020 carbon emissions reduction target even as it plans to triple the size of its massive tar sands operations in coming decades.

Canada’s has no credible carbon reduction plan and has done virtually nothing on climate since Stephen Harper’s government came to power in 2006, said activists.

“It will be very difficult for the Canadian government to achieve its own emissions reduction target for 2020 even without tar sands expansion,” Danny Harvey, a climate scientist at the University of Toronto, said at a press conference Wednesday.

Canada, the United States and other countries pledged to reduce their total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 17 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2020 under what is known as the Copenhagen Accord. Scientists say that target is too weak and will result in global temperatures rising by at least 3.5C, a very dangerous level of climate change.

Those high temperatures will likely produce heat extremes that kill people, animals and crops, and blanket 85 percent of the planet’s land area in summer by 2100, German and Spanish scientists reported late Wednesday.

“That’s what our calculations show for a scenario of unabated climate change,” said co-author Dim Coumou of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Shockingly, it is already too late to prevent a doubling of heat waves by 2020 and four-fold increase by 2040, concludes the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The reason for this is that burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the past 50 years has added 40 percent more heat-trapping CO2 gas to the atmosphere. Even if all human sources of CO2 emissions ended today, temperatures will continue to rise from the present 0.8C of additional warming to as much as 1.1. to 1.5C due to a time lag in the climate system, scientists say.

And those temperatures would not decline for a very long time.

That is why all countries agreed to cut CO2 emissions at the 2009 U.N. climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Canada matched the U.S. pledge to reduce emissions 17 percent but then did little to reduce its emissions and instead dramatically expanded the world’s biggest energy project, the Alberta tar sands.

Each year, the tar sands burn nearly 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas, roughly two-thirds of what India uses annually. This gas is mainly used to heat water so the tarry bitumen can be boiled out of the ground and converted into heavy crude oil.

In 2011, 370 million cubic metres of freshwater was used. This is more than the city of Toronto’s 2.8 million people use. Oil companies pay nothing for the water even though the water becomes too toxic to be returned to rivers or to aquifers.

Most analyses show that oil from the tar sands is the most polluting and has the highest CO2 footprint compared to other sources of oil. Those CO2 emissions are increasing as bitumen becomes harder to extract and are expected to double by 2020.

“Canadian politicians are simply not telling the truth. You can’t keep expanding the tar sands and meet the reduction target,” said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at Simon Frasier University and a Harper government appointee to the now-shuttered National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

There are no federal regulations on oil and gas emissions in Canada. Instead of acting, the Harper government launched a 16-million-dollar public relations campaign in the U.S. and Canada promoting the economic benefits of “responsible resource development” of the tar sands – a move mocked by activists as “greenwashing”.

Deep cuts in emissions after 2020 will be needed to avoid most of the world suffering under devastating heat waves before the end of the century, the Potsdam Institute’s research shows. Those reductions “will be impossible to achieve if we lock in 40 years of increased tar sands emissions by building more pipelines” like the Keystone XL, said the University of Toronto’s Danny Harvey in a press conference here in Toronto Wednesday.

The U.S. is on target to make its meet its Copenhagen reduction pledge. However, Canada’s abysmal environmental record has come to the attention of the Barack Obama administration. President Obama recently said that he would only approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution”. The long-delayed Keystone XL would bring 800,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen (heavy oil) to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL will increase Canada’s emissions by allowing the tar sands to expand in size, said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defence Canada. And there is no technology nor any policies that will allow Canada to reduce those emissions before 2020, McEachern said.

Other proposed pipelines that are needed to support tar sands expansion have met strong opposition in Canada and it is far from certain if they will be completed, said Jaccard.

“We are now at a point where the only acceptable alternative is for the U.S. government to reject Keystone XL,” he said.

Canada is pulling out of the United Nations convention that fights droughts in Africa next year, making it the only country in the world not participating in the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Recurring droughts have destroyed most harvests in the Sahel. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Canada’s Stephen Harper government made the decision behind closed doors without consultation.

This follows another unexpected decision late last week to fold Canada’s aid agency CIDA into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The CIDA decision was widely criticised by Canada’s development community for directly linking aid to trade.

Desertification and degradation of land is an enormous problem and getting worse with climate change, says Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada.

“I’m gobsmacked Canada would do this,” Fox told IPS.

Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to desertification. Land degradation is the world’s quiet crisis, undercutting food production, increasing water scarcity, impoverishing hundreds of millions of people and affecting two billion overall.

“Our goal is to build a land-degradation-neutral world,” Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD executive secretary, told IPS previously. The target date to reach that goal is 2030.

Every country in the world makes a contribution to support the UNCCD. Canada’s contribution for 2012-13 was supposed to be 315,000 dollars and it remains unpaid, the secretariat told IPS.

In an emailed response, Amy Mills of CIDA told IPS, “CIDA has already paid Canada’s assessed annual contribution of 350,000 dollars for 2012, and will pay its contribution of 315,000 dollars for 2013.”

Canada’s commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity are unaffected, she said.

“We are seeking to use Canada’s resources in the most effective manner possible. Canada will continue to play a leadership role in advancing the global food security and nutrition agenda. For example, Canada has helped almost four million farming households across Africa obtain more drought-resistant seeds for their bean crops.

“In the past, Canada has tried several times to help position the Desertification Convention as a significant means to promote global, and Canadian, priorities to improve food security and to combat land degradation and desertification. We believe other efforts are achieving better results,” she said.

Last year, the Stephen Harper government spent 28 million dollars celebrating the 100th anniversary of the War of 1812, a minor conflict between the U.S. and Canada.

“That Canada would do this (leave the UNCCD) is really a scandal,” Christoph Bals, policy director of Germanwatch, a German NGO focused on development and global equity.

Canada has long been a leader and champion of the U.N. and multilateralism, which is the only way major global issues like poverty, hunger and climate change can be addressed, he told IPS from his office in Berlin.

The decision to abandon the UNCCD follows another Harper government decision in 2011 to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the only legal treaty to combat climate change.

“I heard from many, many Canadians about how ashamed they were by the decision to leave Kyoto,” said Bals. “That decision and the UNCCD decision do not reflect the majority of Canadians, in my opinion.”

Instead the Harper government decisions reflect the narrow interests of Canada’s fossil fuel industry, he says.

Canada’s abandonment of yet another U.N. organisation trying to solve major global issues could have far-reaching consequences, Bals says. Canada is wealthy and doing very well economically but countries facing economic or other challenges may decide they don’t need to participate either.

“It sends a very negative signal,” he said. “There will be consequences for people around the world.”

Global governance is weak and needs support not abandonment, says Fox. “The U.N. is a tough place to get things done but the solution is not to simply walk away.”

Canada recently committed 250 million dollars annually in food assistance under the new U.N. Food Assistance Convention to help millions facing hunger. It has also been generous in terms of humanitarian aid for crisis like the Horn of Africa drought, he says.

Ironically, the Harper government is rejecting the very U.N. body whose primary objective is to prevent and reduce hunger and the impacts of drought. With this decision, Canada is saying it’s not interested in prevention or solving the problem, Fox says.

“I hope there will be enough domestic and international pressure that the government will re-consider. It is simply the wrong move.”

A banner targets Canada's tar sands development, the country's fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Anthony Fenton/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

Canada’s police and security agencies think citizens concerned about the environment are threats to national security, and some are under surveillance, documents reveal.

The RCMP, the national police force, and Canada’s spy agency CSIS are increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies, said Jeffrey Monaghan, a researcher with the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Protests and opposition to Canada’s resource-based economy, especially oil and gas production, are now viewed as threats to national security, Monaghan said. This conclusion is based on official security documents obtained under freedom of information laws over the last five years.It is governments and the fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations.

For the past two years, officials in Canada’s Stephen Harper government have been calling environmentalists “radicals” and accusing environmental organisations of money laundering.

“The Harper government has a strong interest in suppressing environmental activism,” Monaghan told IPS.

By branding activists as extremists or radicals, many people will not want to be involved. Surveillance and other security activities will have a similar “chilling effect”, he fears.

“There could be an incredibly profound impact on public participation,” Monaghan noted.

In 2011, a Montreal, Quebec man who wrote threatening letters opposing shale gas fracking was charged under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act. Documents released in January show the RCMP has been monitoring Quebec residents who oppose fracking.

In a Canadian Senate hearing last week, Richard Fadden, the director of CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) said they are more worried about domestic terrorism, acknowledging that the vast majority of its spying is done within Canada. Fadden said they are “following a number of cases where we think people might be inclined to acts of terrorism”.

Canada is at very low risk from foreign terrorists, but like the U.S. it built a large security apparatus following 9/11. The resources and costs are wildly out of proportion to the risk, Monaghan said.

Without a significant foreign threat, security services are looking inside the country for reasons to justify their “bloated budgets”, he said. And the new “enemy within” is environmental organisations, according to the inflammatory rhetoric of Harper’s Conservative government.

A year ago, in a widely-published open letter, Joe Oliver, the minister of natural resources, slammed “environmental and other radical groups” for getting in the way of forestry, mining and energy projects.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” Oliver wrote, without naming any groups.

“They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest,” he charged, without offering any evidence.

A few months later, in a television interview, environment minister Peter Kent accused some charitable environmental groups in Canada of being used “to launder offshore foreign funds for inappropriate use against Canadian interest”. Kent went on imply evidence of illegal activity but offered no proof.

Canada’s economy has become increasingly reliant on resource extraction, oil and gas in particular. The Alberta tar sands are the world’s biggest industrial project, sending 1.6 million barrels of tar-like oil south to the U.S. daily.

The tar is too thick to extract with conventional drilling so it is strip-mined or boiled out of the ground, destroying large areas of pristine forest, consuming vast quantities of fresh water and emitting tens of millions of tonnes of climate-disrupting carbon.

Environmentalists’ have labelled the tar sands region “Canada’s Mordor”. The Harper and Alberta governments are banking on doubling or tripling the size of the tar sands and aggressively support new pipelines to ship the tarry oil south to the U.S., west to Asia and east to Europe.

Tar sands oil, natural gas and the pipelines to move them are considered by these governments to be essential to “Canada’s national economic interest”. This has now been directly linked to national security, said Monaghan.

The federal and Alberta governments and the fossil fuel industry are “virtually seamless” in their thinking, said Greenpeace Canada’s executive director Bruce Cox.

“You can’t tell the difference between a government of Canada ad and one from the oil industry,” Cox told IPS.

Canada’s Natural Resource ministry spent nine million dollars in 2012 in advertising to promote pipelines, safety measures such as double-hulled oil tankers and changes to environmental laws. Cox said those changes “gutted” environmental regulations but the government promotes them as a benefit to the Canadian people.

Canadian security forces seem to have a “fixation” with Greenpeace, continually describing them as “potentially violent” in threat assessment documents, said Monaghan.

Cox said he was aware of this attention and met with the head of the RCMP last year. “We’re an outspoken voice for non-violence and this was made clear to the RCMP,” Cox said.

He said there was real anger among Canadians about the degradation of the natural environment by oil, gas and other extractive industries and governments working for those industries and not in the public interest. Security forces should see Greenpeace as a “plus”, a non-violent outlet for this anger, he argued.

“It is governments and the fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations,” Cox said.