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Climate action is the canary in the coal mine for measuring what a government says they will do versus what they do. Climate action (or the lack of it) signals IF governments will stand up to U.S. corporate influence, tax big oil and gas and tax profiteers for the public good, and PRIORITIZE Canadians in a crisis. If governments won't stand up to big oil & gas - given extreme climate impacts and cheaper renewable alternatives - they are unlikely to take meaningful action on other files like affordability too. In fact they're liable to take other actions that makes things worse.
Methane rules were recently undermined and if big oil get their way industrial carbon pricing implementation timelines will be delayed to such an extent as to make the policy effectively meaningless. But it doesn't stop at climate inaction. The way the Federal Government talks about pharmacare now is the way they talked about the emissions cap just before it was scrapped: vaguely.
As Althia Raj writes: 'Without a line item in budget 2025 or [the] economic update... The [pharmacare] program is ending... The federal government is also slashing billions from health care.' Indeed, the Federal Government is looking at privatizing public assets - like airports - to feed the money into a FAKE 'sovereign wealth fund.' The fund would likely just funnel taxpayer money into dead-end oil and gas projects so as to transfer the risk off of corporations and onto the public. All this to the benefit of often U.S. oil and gas interests.
The Canadian Government says they're following the privatization example of the UK in 'recycling assets'. Well, as The Guardian reports:
"[The] UK public has paid £200bn to shareholders of key industries since privatisation... The transfer of tens of billions of pounds to the owners of the privatised water, rail, bus, energy and mail services comes as families face soaring bills, polluted rivers and seas, and expensive and unreliable trains and buses."
The Federal Government has defended plans to expand shipments of Canadian gas to climate-wrecking U.S. billionaire data centres by saying it put cards in Canada's hands. Even if that were true - and it is NOT true - you'd need to be willing to play those cards from them to be in our hands. But the Prime Minister has confirmed that 'Canada won’t ‘leverage’ energy, critical minerals [even in current] trade talks with the U.S.' If our existing 'cards' are not to be leveraged, more will certainly not be of use.
Canada's Federal policies are ever more American by the day: like the U.S.-government-style cruelty of making refugees to Canada pay big sums out of pocket for healthcare services, including wheelchairs (and no, this does not 'save us money'). The first step towards losing democracy always starts with getting a democracy itself to normalize 'othering' in the name of 'pragmatism:' it's what happened in the U.S. and it's been "the Death Star of liberal democracy" since the early 20th century (see Part Two, 45 minutes into the podcast).
None of this is pragmatic, practical, nor balanced. The Federal Government is symbolically talking about protecting Canadians and Canada's sovereignty but then DOING the opposite - while implementing false solutions like a gas tax pause (see a graphic below on gas prices).
This is not 'taking the world as it is' - it's living in a fantasy land constructed by corporate lobbyists.
Take nuclear for example. Nuclear energy is a fantastic way to waste funds and slow the transition to truly renewable energy with battery storage (to the benefit of U.S. oil and gas corporations). A nuclear focus is also a great way to benefit the consortium of U.S. companies (tied to the U.S. military) that run "Canadian Nuclear Laboratories" (or CNL).
But nuclear development does NOT help Canadians. In fact, even when it works, it’s more expensive than simply going with renewable energy and storage. Renewables like wind and solar with batteries - contrary to what you may have heard - do NOT need base load power from gas or nuclear to work and could be deployed anywhere in Canada.
As the National Observer reported recently, the Federal Government has no comprehensive plan for wind, solar, and battery storage even though the rest of the world realizes wind and solar are much more efficient, cheaper, and quicker to deploy than all other forms of power. Indeed:
“Canada, the Global Electricity Review found, is an outlier to the market trend. Renewable energy plant construction has dropped over the past two years, leaving wind and solar power accounting for just nine per cent of the country’s electricity mix, less than half the average among the G7”
The world is going renewable faster than ever in response to the current energy crisis, destroying demand for oil and gas in the process, and making oil and gas development in Canada economically pointless. Which is all the more reason we need a build out of truly renewable energy like wind and solar.
But by contrast, Canada has poured billions of dollars of money into Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) with little to no progress. Meanwhile, as Mark Winfield and Susan O'Donnell also write the last large scale reactor built in Canada helped bankrupt Ontario Hydro with enormous cost overruns and:
“If the cost of a new reactor (proposed in New Brunswick) were passed on directly to NB Power customers through electricity rates, those rates could double or even triple.”
It's the same story globally where the nuclear industry - as with oil and gas - are struggling for relevance in the wake of much cheaper renewable and battery options.
Canada also lacks a real plan for dealing with nuclear waste. That is short of the plan to put a nuclear waste megadump near the Ottawa river - which risks contaminating a key drinking water source for Canadians.
CBC reports that we may, this week, see even more environmental protections abandoned - which all the more reason to take action. See how in the newsletter below. | 
