This morning a group of protesters rolled out the welcome mat — literally — for Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who arrived in Copenhagen today. They mingled with Christmas shoppers outside the Canadian embassy by the main shopping drag in Copenhagen. There was a quirky element to the protest, with a gift basket of treaties for the prime minister to sign presented at the embassy door, but the atmosphere was serious. Speakers included Naomi Klein, who has been very prominent on the activist circuits this week.
The demonstration was organised by the Indigenous Peoples of Canada and called for a stop to the extraction of oil from the tar sands region in Alberta. Tar sands mining is the most energy-intensive and environmentally damaging method of extracting oil. It also destroys Canada’s boreal forests, which store a vast amount of carbon.
Canada also figured prominently on the climate change blogosphere today. A hoax press release, which was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, raised false hopes among Canadian campaigners. It outlined a drastic shift in the country’s environmental policy, doubling greenhouse-gas reduction targets to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. But Ottawa responded quickly with a statement saying: “Canada’s binding responsibility is to supply the world — including its burgeoning developing portion — with those means of transport, health and sustenance that prosperous markets require. Stopping short of these dictates would violate the very principles upon which our nations were founded, and endanger our very development.”
“Without the dynamism of our oil sands industry, we in Canada would not have the energy — moral, financial and literal — to develop the alternative energy future the whole world craves,” says Bruce Carson, a special adviser to Environment Canada.
Also released today was the Climate Change Performance Index report. The report was produced by the NGO German Watch, and ranks nations according to their environmental achievements. Canada was ranked 56th, out of 57 countries. Draft regulations on cap-and-trade in the country have been repeatedly delayed and are not expected until late 2010 at the earliest, while emissions continue to increase at 26 per cent over 1990 levels. In the past few months, the present administration has made it clear that it will ape US environmental policy, but continues to lag behind its neighbour in reducing emissions and investing in renewables.
Canada, the only nation to drop out of the Kyoto Protocol, has shown today that it will continue to put prosperity before climate change prevention. It could be a huge obstacle to achieving a transformative agreement this week.
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