Canada and the environment: A fresh start for a fresh decade

by Preston Manning*
The Globe and Mail – January 25, 2010

With the dawning of a new decade, a “fresh start” for Canada on

environmental issues is an urgent necessity, especially at the national level.
Canadians (particularly the younger generation) strongly believe in
environmental protection and conservation. But they have become
disillusioned by inaction and the ineffectiveness of so much of the political
debate on the subject – the failure of the ill-conceived Kyoto Protocol, the
bungled presentation of carbon pricing by the Liberals under Stephane Dion,
the reluctance of Canadian conservatives to become environmental
champions, the acrimonious debate between global warming alarmists and
sceptics, and the indeterminate outcome of the recent Copenhagen talks.
Grounds for more productive dialogue and action on the environment do exist
among those Canadians who share the following convictions: (1) That it is a
good idea to reduce the negative environmental consequences associated with
the production and burning of hydrocarbons, regardless of whether you
consider global warming to be one of or the most serious of those
consequences; and (2) That the choices required to address our environmental
challenges are not polarizing and divisive “either/or” choices – either
regulatory action by government or market based initiatives by business – but
unifying and consensus-building “both/and” choices.
As a starting point for fresh-start dialogue and action, let’s focus on the
principal horses (to use a western analogy) that need to be harnessed to the
environmental protection/conservation wagon:

(1) Full Cost Accounting. “If it matters, measure it.” Let’s adopt
expanded accounting practices which explicitly recognize the
environmental and social impacts of economic activities, identify the
costs of avoiding or mitigating them, and gradually incorporate
those costs into the prices of goods and services. Let’s give as much
attention to keeping the National Ecological Accounts and reducing

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 the Gross National Waste as we do to the National Economic
Accounts and increasing the Gross National Product. And to be
equitable, and avoid creating another national unity crisis, full cost
accounting needs to be applied to all energy sources, economic
enterprises, and regions – not just to petroleum and companies based
in western Canada.
(2) Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI). STI has enormous
contributions to make toward the achievement of both
environmental and economic sustainability. But maximizing those
contributions requires Canada to squarely address two chronic
problems: (1) Our historic difficulty in managing and financing the
movement of STI from the laboratory to the market place. (2) The
need to anticipate and mitigate the negative impacts which may
accompany scientific innovations, such as those now associated with
the internal combustion engine or the production of ethanol from
biomass. Let’s create a private-sector-based think tank/do tank
dedicated to devising business strategies and public policies to
address the first of these problems. And let’s consistently perform
so-called Economic Environmental Ethical Legal and Social
(EEELS) impact assessments on innovative applications of old and
new technologies (such as those associated with carbon capture and
storage) to address the second.
(3) Market mechanisms. “Markets” are devices for harnessing
resources (physical, human, and financial) to meet “demands” using
pricing signals and monetary incentives. Historically, markets have
been the most effective instruments known to man to meet our
demands for goods and services. But with effort, innovation, and
care, markets can also be harnessed to meet our current demands for
clean water, clean air, reclaimed soil, and overall reductions in the
Gross National Waste. So let’s get serious about attaching prices to
the “goods and services” delivered by ecosystems such as
watersheds, incorporating the cost of mitigating negative
environmental impacts into the prices of conventional goods and
services, and offering investors fair and reasonable returns on capital
successfully invested in environmental protection and conservation.

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(4) Government Policy and Regulation. Of course there is a major
role for government policy and regulation with respect to
environmental protection and conservation, but let’s sharpen our
definition and exercise of that role. For starters, let’s see
governments – which constitute some of the largest resource owners
and consumers of goods and services in the country – lead more by
example. With respect to regulation, let’s have governments focus
on “macro regulation” – creating frameworks and incentives for
individuals and companies to practice responsible environmental
stewardship – rather than attempting to micro-manage individual or
corporate behaviour. And since ecosystems like watersheds and air
sheds don’t respect federal/provincial/municipal boundaries, let’s
see more delegation of environmental protection by all levels of
government to one-window ecosystem-based regulatory authorities.
(5) Demand-Side Transformation. Much of the past emphasis on
environmental protection has been on the supply side – attempting
to find more environmentally responsible ways to supply our
demands for energy, food, shelter, and other goods and services. But
let’s also find ways and means of making absolute reductions in
those demands themselves. Full-cost accounting and pricing will
have this effect. But let’s also focus more of our educational and
teaching resources – through the home, schools, and faith-based
institutions – on teaching the importance and the means of reducing
our demands on finite resources and ecosystems.
(6) New Eco-Partnerships. Some of the solutions to our environmental
challenges will require the forging of new eco-partnerships. Public-
private utility partnerships, for example, can be used to finance and
manage the conservation of watersheds. (One has been proposed for
the management of the Athabasca watershed in Alberta.) The
transportation and intermittency problems faced by producers of
wind and solar energy can be solved in part by partnering with non-
renewable energy producers and shippers. And with respect to
achieving sustainable continental energy security, let’s begin to
seriously consider partnering with the United States in the creation
of a North America Sustainability Agency (NASA II) to harness
public and private resources in both countries to the objective of
cleaning up oil sand production in much the same way that the

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 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA I) harnessed
public and private resources to put a man on the moon.

(7) Political Leadership at the National Level. Past initiatives by the

federal Conservative have included substantial investments in
environmental standards enforcement, the $2 Billion ecoENERGY
(clean energy) initiative, and establishment of the mandatory Green
House Gas (GHG) emissions reduction target of 20% by 2020. Also
to its credit, the Harper government has not made hypocritical
international commitments on GHG reductions as did the Liberals at
Kyoto nor has it bungled the presentation of a major environmental
initiative (carbon taxes) as did the Liberal opposition under
Stephane Dion. At the national level, it is therefore the Conservative
government that is in the best position to provide fresh start
leadership on the environmental front. Such leadership might
especially include more vigorously establishing the connection
between “conservatism” and “conservation” (the words come from
the same root); applying the core concepts of fiscal conservatism –
“living within our means” and “balancing budgets” – to living with
our means ecologically and balancing the ecological budget; re-
assessing the conservative application of science to environmental
issues, including global warming, to ensure that it is principled and
balanced; and most importantly, making the harnessing of market
mechanisms to the task of environmental protection and
conservation the “signature contribution” of conservatives to
environmental and economic sustainability.

*Preston Manning is President and CEO of the Manning Centre for Building
Democracy (www.manningcentre.ca).