Ottawa’s incoming clean fuel standard is being designed to help curb transportation sector emissions, but critics say the existing draft text waters down climate targets and will lock in years of fossil fuel use.
The standard has been in development since 2016 and is scheduled to take effect by the end of the year, aiming to cut about 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually. Ottawa wants the regulation finalized by spring to give time for companies to prepare.
The federal Crown corporation building the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion has been handed a seven-day deadline to answer tough questions about soil stability, drilling method, and environmental impacts after proposing to redrill and reroute part of a 1.5-kilometre tunnel beneath the Fraser River, an iconic salmon-bearing waterway near the Lower Mainland population centre of Coquitlam.
A series of grassroot conversations in communities across Canada is building a picture of how a universal basic income can lay the groundwork for faster, deeper carbon cuts, by boosting local resilience and helping to ease uncertainties around the shift to a low-carbon economy.
Growing awareness of contemporary injustices towards First Nations children and a landmark court ruling this fall forced the federal government to reach agreements seeking to settle cases of discrimination in the child welfare system, says the First Nations advocate who led the fight for change.
Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, called the agreements words on paper, but said in an interview that she will measure progress at the level of First Nations children.
In the last 40 years or so, what is often called “neo-liberalism” has come to dominate the thinking and policies of governments in Canada, the U.S. and other countries. This has meant massive bailouts of financial institutions and corporations, outsourcing of jobs, as well as deregulation, privatization and cuts to public services. The result has been the stagnation of wages and deterioration of living conditions for many Canadians.
The Canada Energy Regulator is so closely tied to the fossil industry that it can’t be counted on to produce independent advice on the country’s path to net-zero—yet it’s considered the leading source of in-house energy modelling the Trudeau government has at its disposal, according to an independent expert commenting on the CER’s deeply flawed energy futures report released earlier this month.
As powerful countries keep sinking climate goals, activists likely to escalate tactics rather than accept an increasingly unlivable world
1.5, barely alive
Shortly before the close of this year’s United Nations climate negotiations in Glasgow, UN Secretary General António Guterres offered a sobering summary of the global efforts to address the climate emergency.
A frothy year-end column on the future chances of democracy and fascism, in America and elsewhere
Let me close out 2021 with one of those perky looks into the future in two areas: democracy and fascism. In each, our vision of what’s coming down the track gets distorted by our tendency to visualize via the U.S.
