Max Fawcett says yes
Calgarian and lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer
When your dad is Pierre Trudeau, you have an awful lot to live up to. But when it comes to being unpopular in Alberta, Justin Trudeau has managed to eclipse his famous father. That probably still comes as a bit of a surprise to him, too. After all, while Pierre Trudeau openly and unapologetically spurned Alberta, Justin Trudeau has spent the last few years trying to save the province from itself.
This is not the narrative you hear from his legions of haters. In the last UCP leadership debate in August, Todd Loewen said that “Trudeau isn’t trying to destroy our oil and gas industry, he is destroying our oil and gas industry.” Even by the fact-challenged standard of the UCP government, that’s a pretty obvious stretch. Said industry, after all, is currently posting record-high profits on record-high revenues from—you guessed it—record-high production. To quote Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The federal carbon tax, the clean fuel standard and now the much-maligned cap on oil sands emissions are not attempts to destroy anything. Instead, they’re all part of a valiant attempt at dragging Alberta’s largest industry, and by extension its economic fortunes, kicking and screaming into the present. Trudeau is forcing our province to face up to the reality of climate change, a reality local leaders would have steadfastly ignored otherwise, and given us the policy tools we need in order to adapt.
This is in stark contrast to his predecessor, Stephen Harper, who spent his time in office trying to rig the game in favour of Alberta’s oil and gas industry. The conservative leader’s efforts to streamline the regulatory system ended up backfiring in the courts, while his braggadocious talk about Canada becoming an energy superpower (and his refusal to take climate change seriously) ended up putting a bull’s eye on projects such as Keystone XL—one the Obama administration didn’t miss.
Trudeau is the first prime minister to get a new pipeline headed towards Canadian tidewater in more than 50 years. He’s also the first to get a major liquefied natural gas project—the biggest energy project in Canadian history, as it happens—greenlit. Those investments are buying Alberta the time it needs to adapt and evolve to the imperatives of climate change and decarbonization—time that many of his opponents seem determined to squander.
That’s not Trudeau’s fault. Neither are the thousands of people who seem convinced, facts notwithstanding, that he’s personally responsible for everything from global inflation to their car breaking down last week. Haters, as the saying goes, are gonna hate. But with the passage of time and the ongoing acceleration of the energy transition, history will record a very different story: that Justin Trudeau was good for Alberta. Better, perhaps, than any prime minister in recent memory.
Emma Jackson says no
Organizer with Climate Justice Edmonton and 350.org
While it’s easy for anyone’s leadership to look good compared to the subterranean bar set by Jason Kenney, the reality is Justin Trudeau has not been good for Alberta.
Trudeau’s government has been forced to deliver on some positive decades-old promises, including a national childcare program, and to reaffirm its commitment to others, including pharmacare and dental care. But faced with the overlapping crises of COVID-19, the rise of the far-right, the climate emergency and the rising cost of living, Trudeau has largely responded through a neoliberal, individualist approach that worsens crises and downloads the costs onto working people to the disproportionate benefit of Canada’s billionaire class.
Arguably, the top reason Trudeau hasn’t been good for Alberta is that he has overseen a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the top 1 per cent. Canada’s 87 richest families now own 4,448 times more wealth than the average worker, and this massive income gap has only grown of late. During the first six months of COVID-19, while millions of Canadians were losing their jobs, the country’s top-20 billionaires each amassed an average of nearly $2-billion in wealth, for a combined total of $37-billion. This was happening at the same time that Alberta experienced the worst food insecurity among all Canadian provinces, at 20.3 per cent.
While one in five households struggle to put food on the table, Trudeau allows Bay Street executives to make out like bandits. Despite 89 per cent of Canadians, including 82 per cent of Conservatives, wanting to see a 1 per cent wealth tax paid by the richest Canadians, Trudeau hasn’t cracked down on the ultra-rich. Billions in forgone revenue is being hoarded in offshore tax havens at a time when Alberta’s healthcare system is collapsing and thousands are dying in a drug poisoning crisis.
Trudeau has also failed to deliver on his now three-year-old promise of a Just Transition Act—legislation Alberta desperately needs in order to protect workers and communities during the transition to a renewable energy economy. In fact, despite the fossil fuel industry’s outsized contribution to the climate crisis and its propensity to shed jobs while raking in record profits, Trudeau has continued to throw money at the industry. In 2020 the federal government gave $18-billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry, and Big Oil executives have since been clamouring for more to fund false climate solutions.
Alberta can’t afford any more empty promises from Trudeau. The transition to a low-carbon economy is happening whether we like it or not, and it’s up to the Liberal government to deliver a comprehensive industrial strategy that serves working people over the corporate elite. Trudeau’s failure to deliver a just transition, electoral reform and redistributive policies during a time of mass inequality has only fanned the flames of economic discontent and Western alienation, and this will continue as long as he continues to over-promise and under-deliver.
Max Fawcett responds to Emma Jackson.
For someone who’s routinely accused of being “divisive,” Justin Trudeau sure has a way of bringing Albertans together. After all, whether it’s right-wing oil and gas enthusiasts or progressive climate activists such as my dialogue partner, they’re united in their disdain for the prime minister—and their willingness to blame him for things that are beyond his control.
Ms. Jackson, after all, seems to believe that Trudeau is responsible for everything from rising rates of food insecurity to a growing divide between the rich and poor in Alberta. But the former is very clearly the responsibility of our provincial government, not the federal one, given their constitutional jurisdiction over welfare and other social supports. Just ask Tim Li, one of the researchers behind the report Ms. Jackson is referencing. “Provincial policies that we know really matter are things like social assistance rates, minimum wage, provincial child benefits,” he told Global News in August. “These are all programs and policies that affect incomes, especially of low-income households.”
That’s not all. While the federal government created the CERB (Canada Emergency Recovery Benefit) to help households that were economically impacted by COVID-19, the UCP government actually cut benefits to those most vulnerable. They de-indexed AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) as soon as they came to power in 2019, a decision that left Alberta’s most vulnerable people exposed to the full brunt of inflation.
Ms. Jackson also blames the prime minister for the widening gulf between rich and poor in Canada, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and its impact on financial markets. “Arguably, the top reason Trudeau hasn’t been good for Alberta is that he has overseen a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the top 1 per cent,” she writes. “Canada’s 87 richest families now own 4,448 times more wealth than the average worker, and this massive income gap has only grown of late.”
That this is a national problem, not an Alberta-specific one, should be obvious. So too should the disparity between the policies of Trudeau’s and Kenney’s governments. Trudeau has raised taxes on the rich, closed income-splitting loopholes that were being exploited, and massively increased the Canada Child Benefit, which lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. Kenney’s government slashed corporate taxes by one-third and de-indexed the tax brackets for millions of working and middle-class Albertans (which effectively raised their taxes).
Trudeau’s policies will long outlive his own career and save Alberta from the myopia of our provincial politicians.
There’s no question more work is needed, as evidenced by a recent report from Canadians for Tax Fairness that suggested corporations avoided paying $30-billion in taxes last year. But given that the vast majority of said corporations are based in Ontario, not Alberta, it’s hard to see how this specifically or uniquely impacts Albertans.
How Trudeau’s government helps people adapt to the ongoing global energy transition, on the other hand, is specific to our needs here. Ms. Jackson is correct when she writes “the transition to a low-carbon economy is happening whether we like it or not, and it’s up to the Liberal government to deliver a comprehensive industrial strategy that serves working people over the corporate elite.” That’s what they’re already doing, though. The Liberal government has invested billions in clean technology and low-carbon solutions in Alberta, from $3-billion in a net-zero accelerator to $1.5-billion in a low-carbon and zero-emissions fuels fund and $750-million in a Sustainable Technology Development Fund. The much-maligned Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, meanwhile, will deliver nearly $20-billion in additional tax revenues over its first 20 years for the provincial government to spend as it sees fit. LNG Canada and the Coastal GasLink pipeline will deliver a similar bounty for Albertans—all subsidized and supported by the Trudeau government.
More importantly, that government has stayed the course with its controversial carbon tax, one that encourages the development of low-carbon technologies and gives businesses a clear incentive to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. That has come at a considerable political cost, especially in Alberta. But it’s one this government, and this prime minister, has been willing to pay on our behalf. In time, all but the most rigidly ideological observers should be able to appreciate that.
The good news is that Trudeau’s government’s policies will long outlive his own political career, and they may yet save Alberta from the myopia of our provincial politicians. His decision to price carbon properly, and force Alberta’s highest-emitting industry to do the same, will prove transformative in time. The only question is whether Albertans, on the left and on the right, will ever be willing to give him credit for it.
Emma Jackson responds to Max Fawcett.
With our proverbial house on fire, it’s a relief to know that Max Fawcett is at least interested in putting out the flames in theory. But instead of calling on Justin Trudeau to send in well-equipped firefighters, Fawcett seems satisfied with being handed a Dollar Store watergun and receiving a “good luck” pat on the back while Trudeau doles out public money to the arsonists.
This metaphor may sound hyperbolic, but the reality is the climate measures imposed so far by the federal Liberal government come nowhere close to meeting the climate crisis at the speed and scale required. Trudeau is tinkering around the edges of an economic system that’s incompatible with a habitable future on this planet.
As Fawcett notes, these policies are also being rolled out alongside approvals of new fossil fuel megaprojects that will make it impossible for Canada to meet its climate commitments. While both Fawcett and Trudeau insist that these investments “are buying Alberta the time it needs to adapt and evolve,” it’s hard to believe that the way to kick-start a fair energy transition away from fossil fuels is by forcing taxpayers to swallow $17-billion in debt for a pipeline. Instead of rallying the public behind a vision where the environment and the economy actually go “hand in hand,” Trudeau is perpetuating a fantasy in which fossil fuel expansion and incrementalist climate policies are enough to tackle the climate crisis.
But not only are these policies failing to bend our emissions curve, they’re also turning working people against climate action writ large by leaving gaping loopholes for multi-billion-dollar corporations while failing to materially improve workers’ lives. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than in Alberta. Take, for instance, the hotly contested carbon tax. Carbon pricing is one piece of a much larger puzzle. But under Trudeau’s leadership it has eclipsed all other climate policies and reinforced the public perception that addressing climate change must entail personal financial sacrifice. Despite the rebates, the complicated policy makes it easy for many to buy into the Fraser Institute’s assertion that carbon pricing is a “tax grab cloaked in green.”
Trudeau is tinkering around the edges of an economic system that’s incompatible with a habitable future.
In making carbon pricing the linchpin of his climate plan, Trudeau has turned support for the carbon tax into a barometer of one’s “belief” in science and commitment to protecting the planet. In doing so, he’s only fuelled the right-wing populist conspiracy that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a liberal elite to raid our wallets.
Too often, carbon pricing also lets the biggest emitters—those now raking in record profits—off the hook. There’s a reason why fossil fuel CEOs joined Rachel Notley onstage when she announced the introduction of Alberta’s carbon tax in 2015, and it wasn’t to deliver retirement speeches on behalf of their industry. Rather, the biggest players in the fossil fuel industry have accepted carbon pricing as “a cost of doing business”—a small price to pay to get pipelines built and continue lining the pockets of their wealthy shareholders for as long as possible.
Technocratic solutions to the climate crisis will never rally the mass support for climate action that’s needed in Alberta. So, what will?
We need a transformative industrial strategy paid for by the multi-billion-dollar corporations that have been automating jobs out of existence and profiting on the backs of Albertans. The good news is the majority of Albertans support this kind of approach. They want climate action that protects the jobs of working people and forces the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share.
In a 2019 Abacus poll, 72 per cent of Albertans reported being “much more supportive” or “somewhat more supportive” of transitioning the economy and society away from fossil fuels if the federal government were to commit to a “good jobs guarantee” for all people currently employed in the oil, gas and coal industries. Some 69 per cent of Albertans would be “much more supportive” or “somewhat more supportive” if wealthy and large corporations were required to contribute more in taxes to help pay for the plan.
We’re in a climate emergency, and the arsonists most responsible are raking in record profits. It’s time for Trudeau to end fossil fuel subsidies, tax the windfall profits of these companies and phase out the oil sands and natural gas extraction. Then he must get to work building the economy and society working Canadians deserve—one that honours Indigenous land rights, creates good, green, unionized jobs, invests massively in public works projects such as energy-efficient social housing, and expands the low-carbon sectors of our economy.
It’s not too late for Justin Trudeau to step over to the right side of history—and to truly do right by Albertans—but the window is rapidly closing, and the current playbook won’t cut it.
