Some Like it Cold: The Politics of Climate Change in Canada (review)

On January 29, 2010, the Stephen Harper government announced that it had reduced its climate-change policy goal, in order to harmonize it with that of the US, from 20 per cent below 2006 levels, to be achieved by 2020, to 17 per cent below 2005 levels. Both goals are substantially less than the formal Canadian Kyoto goal (ignored by the Harper government) of a 6 per cent reduction below 1990 levels by 2012. The goals are meaningless in any case, since the Harper government is taking no active steps, beyond funding carbon sequestration research while waiting to see what the US does, to slow the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Some Canadian provinces, most notably British Columbia, are putting in place potentially effective policy measures, but others are not. Alberta, for instance, has a policy goal which leaves ample room for expansion of its oil industry, which means growth in Alberta emissions will undercut any policy action taken by other provinces or the federal government. At the meeting of parties to the Kyoto regime in Copenhagen in December, 2009, Canada played no visibly active role, beyond suffering the gibes and scorn of environmentalists. Canadians need to know why their federal and provincial governments are failing them so abysmally on this issue.

Fortunately, Robert Paehlke's recent book provides them with answers. Paehlke was born in the US, moved to Canada in 1967, and in the book uses the word "we" to refer to Canadians. For many years he has been one of our leading scholars in the domain of environmental politics. Some Like it Cold, however, is a bit of a departure, in that it is not a book intended exclusively for an academic audience. Instead, Paehlke has written a personal, highly accessible work, drawing on his life experience as well as academic expertise to speak directly to his fellow Canadians. In a concise, eminently readable format, with use of ample documented evidence, this books lays out the basic challenge facing Canadian citizens, their governments and all others, humans and other species, living on our planet today. Paehlke does not pull his punches. The global transition from a fossil-fuel economy will entail major short-term costs, in order to avoid long-term consequences. In perhaps the most frightening sentence of the book he says : "I do not think there is any precedent for this anywhere in human history."(149)

The book provides an historical account of the continuing policy failure which has unfolded over the past twenty years. In 1988, the Government of Canada led by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney played a lead international role, working with two international agencies to host the Toronto Conference — the event which put climate change on the international policy agenda. Twenty-one years later, Canada was ignored or laughed off the stage in Copenhagen. The book does an excellent job of explaining how we lost our way between those two events.

Paehlke provides an accurate, detailed account of the twists and turns of Ottawa climate-change politics in those intervening years. It is a story of posture, rhetoric, and government spending, with the only consistency being a steadfast refusal to use effective policy instruments such as law or tax. Above all, it is a story of the unwillingness of the Chrétien, Martin, and Harper governments to face up to the provinces which are dependent upon oil revenues. His basic argument is that Canada has the material means, technological capacity, and popular support needed to begin taking effective action. The problem, he says, lies in three aspects of our political system. The first is the fact that under the Canadian constitution it is provinces, not the federal government, which own the natural resources — with the result, noted above, that efforts of individual Canadians and other governments are "overwhelmed by one export-oriented industry operating in one Canadian province." (123) Secondly, he points to fragmentation of the party system, with five parties competing for votes...