I think this is an important question and answer article regarding the environment for Guelph. This was in yesterday’s Mercury.
Now that the byelection has been called, media and politicians have been spinning the vote in Guelph as a test of the leadership of the candidates’ parties, and of the Liberal party’s controversial environment plan.
Conversations with the candidates about their own views about how Canada can best reduce its carbon footprint often touched on Guelph’s Community Energy Plan, public transportation, and the hotly contested Green Shift plan.
Frank Valeriote
“I see first a personal response from each of us, you and I, which is introducing into our lives the usual — using efficient appliances and buying local produce and retrofitting our houses, driving less, changing our light bulbs,” Liberal party candidate Frank Valeriote said. “No single effort is going to be enough, we have to do a lot of things.”
Valeriote cited Guelph’s Community Energy Program as good local policy, and added that both the municipal and federal government have a responsibility to educate people about how to reduce their carbon footprint and provide incentives for them to do so.
The One Tonne Challenge — a program introduced by the Liberal government in 2003 to encourage people to reduce their carbon emissions by one tonne, since cancelled by the current government — is a successful example of an education initiative, Valeriote said.
The Liberal party’s plan for green incentives is the Green Shift.
“This is exciting because this Green Shift has evolved over the past number of years through our investigation of the best way to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint,” Valeriote said.
“It will tax things that we don’t want, like pollution and waste and use of fossil fuels. Of course the neat thing about it is that this money comes back to us through lower income taxes, through enhanced child tax and personal tax credits, through a return of money from the government for innovation and investment in green technologies,” he said.
Members of the Conservative party have frequently called the plan a “tax grab” and a “tax trick,” in the media and Valeriote was careful to point out the Green Shift plan calls for the auditor general to ensure that it is revenue neutral, and also that it does not include any additional taxes on gasoline.
“We should not fall prey here to the fear-mongering and the petty comments made by the detractors,” he said. “It is not a tax grab.”
Gloria Kovach
“It’s important to set clear targets for reduction on greenhouse gas emissions and not look at a tax grab and think that’s going to reduce our carbon footprint,” Conservative party candidate Gloria Kovach said, referring to the Liberal party’s Green Shift plan.
“We have set clear targets — 20 per cent by 2020 and 60 to 70 per cent by 2050,” she said, referring to the Conservative government’s Turning the Corner plan, which includes establishing a carbon emissions trading market.
Investment in public transit is important to reducing our carbon footprint, Kovach said, adding the last budget from the Conservative government included $500 million for that purpose.
“That will be helping us here in the city of Guelph in our local transit, and also looking at interconnectivity between communities in the region, and also will help in bringing light rail to the city,” she said.
Kovach said the government’s promotion of biofuels, a requirement that all gasoline in Canada contain five per cent ethanol by 2010, and all diesel and heating oil contain two per cent by 2012 is also important to reducing our carbon footprint.
She highlighted plans announced by the government last year to regulate standby power, the power consumed by appliances that remain plugged in when they’re not in use.
Not all of the responsibility for the country’s carbon footprint rests on the federal government, Kovach said.
“It’s important that locally we all engage as well,” she said, pointing to Guelph’s Community Energy Plan as a leading example of municipal action on climate change.
Mike Nagy
“Canada’s carbon footprint is increasing not decreasing,” Green party candidate Mike Nagy said. “If there’s any country with a lot of room for improvement and fast and noticeable improvements, it’s Canada.”
Nagy said there are many different things Canadians need to do to reduce the country’s carbon footprint, but pointed to stopping tarsands development in Alberta and retrofitting commercial buildings for energy efficiency as two noticeable improvements the country could make.
“If we’re all going around driving more fuel efficient vehicles and we’re fixing our windows, that’s good, but if we’re still allowing the tarsands — the dirtiest oil in the world, it takes one half a barrel of oil equivalent to produce a new barrel of oil and it’s the dirtiest, dirtiest oil — if we allow that to continue to rise our carbon footprint is not going to go down, even if we do all the other things,” he said, adding the tarsands currently makes up about 16 per cent of Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Nagy called for retrofitting buildings to save energy, rather than looking for more sources of energy.
“It’s called mining new supply within your existing supply,” he said.
Nagy also has a vision for rail transportation.
“Instead of investing a billion dollars in highways in the area we need a high-speed train link between Quebec and Windsor and that needs to be integrated with light rail that connects you to all the major city centres,” he said.
Nagy supports a revenue-neutral carbon tax, such as, or similar to, the Liberal’s Green Shift plan.
“We were the first ones to come up with it and we came out with it a long time ago,” he said.
“It’s like a GST. The system’s there to collect tax, it can be implemented instantly.”
Nagy also supports an emissions trading system, or “cap and trade,” in limited sectors, on top of a carbon tax.
“Cap and trade is too long-term based, it won’t get you there as fast as you need to. It takes too long and it’s too complicated to administer,” he said.
Tom King
“We’re doomed as a species,” thought NDP candidate Tom King when he learned there is such a thing as battery-powered air conditioners for dogs to wear on their backs to keep cool.
Changing Canadians’ attitudes toward energy and the environment is key to reducing the country’s carbon footprint, King said.
“Everything else we do is useless unless we have attitudinal change,” King said.
“We’ve gotten so used to our conveniences that we hate to give them up, even if they’re useless or even if they’re destructive,” he added.
Along with a shift in the attitude of the public, King would like to see the political will to take action on setting and reaching strict emissions targets.
King supports federal NDP Leader Jack Layton’s private member’s bill to cut greenhouse gasses and a cap-and-trade approach to reducing emissions.
King described world leaders who are waiting for other countries to make serious commitments on climate change before they make their own as “sort of like a bunch of kids standing at the side of a river waiting for somebody to jump in first, but nobody’s going to go in until the first person goes in.”
“And then maybe they’ll go in, but only if they discover that the water’s not too cold,” he said. “It’s way too late for that kind of attitude. We really need to get in there.”
King doesn’t put the blame for the world’s environmental problems solely on political inaction.
“The reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now is not because somebody did one thing that destroyed the environment, it’s because all of us did all sorts of little and large things all along the way and it just kept getting more and more out of hand,” King said.
Just as the problem is cumulative, the solutions must be too, King said.
“If we begin to retrofit our cities so that they’re more energy efficient, that’s going to help; if we can reduce our use of private cars and begin to get into efficient mass transit systems it’s going to help; if we can get industry to start doing cleaner extractions and processing, that’s going to help,” he said.
Received a rain barrel to water the gardens.
