Daily Archives: April 5, 2016

Cultural Genocide, democracy, Politics, racism

Court ruling gives residential school survivors control over abuse testimony

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St. Michael's Indian Residential School entrance, with two students on the driveway, Alert Bay, British Columbia, is shown in this 1970 handout photo. (HO/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
St. Michael’s Indian Residential School entrance, with two students on the driveway, Alert Bay, British Columbia, is shown in this 1970 handout photo. (HO/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

by Sean Fine, reposted from the Globe and Mail, Apr 4, 2016

Canada’s residential-school survivors have been given control over a massive trove of historically important documents on abuse, after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that they had an expectation of privacy when they created the documents through their testimony in closed hearings.

The ruling Monday gives 38,000 former residential-school students the right to decide over the next 15 years whether to destroy records related to their personal abuse or to give those records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, for preservation in a national archive. All government records on those same claims will be destroyed.

Justice Murray Sinclair, who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created as part of the 2007 residential-schools settlement, argued that Canada could lose its historical memory of the events unless the first-hand accounts were preserved. The federal government said that it owned these records. And Catholic agencies that had run many of the government-funded schools, which indigenous children were forced to attend beginning in the 1880s, said they should be given a veto over records preservation.

But in a 2-1 decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal said that an assurance of near-absolute confidentiality for the survivors was built into the compensation process; many applicants would not have testified otherwise.

Under a process that settled dozens of lawsuits around the country, the federal government agreed in 2007 to set aside a small amount of money for each indigenous person who had been enrolled at a residential school. A larger amount of money – capped at $275,00, plus $250,000 for income loss from the lasting effects of abuse – was set aside for those who could show they were sexually abused, seriously physically abused or subject to other wrongful acts resulting in serious psychological harm.

To qualify, the individuals had to fill out application forms and testify in front of an adjudicator. The audiotapes, transcripts, adjudicators’ decisions and application forms of the 38,000 people who sought this larger amount of compensation form a large historical record.

The judges said government did not control the documents – the court itself did, and it has a responsibility in class-action lawsuits to promote access to justice. And the law passed by Stephen Harper’s government that set out the terms of that settlement “put the survivors, not Canada and not anyone else, in control of their own stories,” Chief Justice George Strathy wrote, joined by Justice Jean MacFarland.

The survivors who do not wish their records to be preserved “should not have to run the risk that any part of their stories will be stored, against their will, in a government archive and possibly disclosed at some time, even far into the future,” they said. That would run opposite to the settlement’s purpose: healing and reconciliation.

Disputing Justice Sinclair’s point that historical memory will be lost, the judges said “a public record will be preserved … which will include thousands of individual stories, freely given.”

Chief Adjudicator Dan Shapiro said in a statement that the ruling will be comforting to thousands of claimants, “many of whom were distressed at the prospect that the most personal details of the abuse they suffered at residential schools could one day be made public.”

A spokesperson for the Indigenous Affairs department said the federal government is “committed to honouring Canada’s lawful obligations to Indigenous peoples and working collaboratively to renew the relationship based on recognition, rights, respect, and co-operation,” and is reviewing the ruling and considering its next steps.

Justice Sinclair, appointed last month to the Senate, could not be reached for comment. SOURCE

democracy, Politics, Preventing Ecocide

Surgeon General’s Warning: We Must Act on Climate

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Climate change is a serious threat to public health, particularly for pregnant women, children, communities of color and low-income people, a government report issued Monday has warned.

sgwarn_climate_750

By Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, reposted from EcoWatch, Apr 5, 2016

The report, The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment, finds that rising temperatures in the coming years will bring along with them the increased risk of:

  • death from heat stroke, particularly in the summer months;
  • chronic and acute respiratory issues;
  • vector-borne illnesses like the West Nile virus and Lyme disease, as well as the new emergence of new pathogens;
  • chemical toxins in the food chain;
  • and mental health consequences of being exposed to climate disasters—among a litany of other risks.

“Every American is vulnerable to the health impacts associated with climate change,” White House Science Adviser John Holdren said Monday. “Some are more vulnerable than others.”

Air_Quality

In particular, the report finds, those facing the highest risk are pregnant women, children, communities of color, the elderly, people who work outdoors, those with disabilities or preexisting medical conditions, immigrants and low-income people.

“I don’t think we have seen something like this before where we have a force that has such a multitude of impacts,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, comparing the effects to the polio epidemic. However, he said, polio was cured through a vaccine—which does not exist for climate change.

“There is not one single source we can target,” he said. “As far as history is concerned this is a new kind of threat that we are facing.”

The report was produced by eight government agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It comes just ahead of the April 22 meeting between world leaders in New York, where they are expected to formally sign the landmark climate agreement finalized in Paris in December.

ExWeather

EPA director Gina McCarthy said the report aimed to show that climate change is “not just about glaciers and polar bears—it’s about the health of families and our kids.”

“Climate change endangers our health by affecting our food and water sources, the air we breathe and the weather we experience,” McCarthy said. “It will exacerbate certain health effects that already exist and create new ones.”

The report also predicts that extreme heat could cause 11,000 more premature deaths a year by 2030 than previously predicted.

Bottom line, said Murthy, “If we want to safeguard the health of current and future generations, we have to address climate change.”

Temp

Avoiding all the risks outlined in the report will be impossible, said Holdren, as “climate change is already underway and no matter what we do it cannot be stopped overnight. But there is a huge difference between the magnitude if we fail to act … and if we take the actions set out in the Climate Action Plan and the Paris climate agreement.”

Climate change “is a pervasive problem with many dimensions of impacts,” Holdren said, “which together I think make it the most serious threat we face.”

VBDs

 

SOURCE

Activism, democracy, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, Preventing Ecocide, solutions

Op-ed: An open letter to the University of Toronto on fossil fuel divestment

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In defense of the Toronto principle

Op-ed: An open letter to the University of Toronto on fossil fuel divestment

By , reposted fom TheVarsity.ca, Apr 5, 2016

Climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of our time. It requires bold action from all corners of society, including institutions of higher learning like the University of Toronto.

President Meric Gertler’s response to the report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Divestment From Fossil Fuels and the petition from the student group Toronto 350.org embraces this idea. In particular, we acknowledge the significance of the President’s calls on the university to: bring to bear its research and educational prowess on the challenge of moving towards a sustainable and low carbon society; launch a clean-tech entrepreneurship challenge and help bring our research to the community; use our campuses as ‘test beds’ for environmental and sustainability research; join the growing carbon disclosure and transparency movement; and require the university to incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into assessing fiduciary risk and evaluating investment decisions. These are positive measures and we share President Gertler’s ambition for the University of Toronto to be a leader on climate change and sustainability.

At the same time, respecting the tradition of open academic discourse, we argue that the university should go further. The strategy of targeted divestment articulated in our report – what has become known as the Toronto Principle – goes beyond the measures in the President’s response, and if adopted, would establish the university’s role as a clear and principled leader on climate change and sustainability.

What is the Toronto Principle?

The starting point is the principle, enshrined in its own policy, that the university should not invest in activities that cause social injury. While this may have been an unambiguous guide for previous divestments from tobacco and apartheid, it is evident that fossil fuels are currently necessary, and do good as well as harm. The proposal is therefore to target specific behaviors of fossil fuel companies rather than the entire sector. Specifically, the university should divest from:

“firms whose actions blatantly disregard the international effort to limit the rise in average global temperatures to not more than 1.5 C. These are fossil fuels companies whose actions are irreconcilable with achieving internationally agreed goals, inordinately contributing to social injury and greatly increasing the likelihood of catastrophic global consequences;”

Examples of such firms include fossil fuel companies that engage in aggressive (and ultimately unnecessary) extraction and exploration, for instance in the arctic and tar sands, and companies that deliberately spread disinformation on climate science.

Of course, the university operates in a restricted regulatory and policy framework and its fiduciary duties rightly constrain the investment and divestment actions it may pursue. As the President points out, the ESG-based approach he has advanced may well “produce outcomes consistent with the specific guidelines recommended” by our Committee. As he writes, “my expectation is that such investments – properly assessed – would indeed be deemed undesirable from the perspective of ESG-related factors.” If this is correct, and the Committee believes it may be, then the President’s proposal would amount to de facto divestment, in line with what we have recommended.

However, promoting the university’s long-term best financial interest is not a justification for divestment; it is a condition any divestment action must respect. The reason to divest from the blatant disregarders is that it is wrong for the university to participate in and contribute to their socially injurious activities. The Toronto Principle maintains that such investments should be dropped not only because they are bad investments, but also because such investments are morally wrong.

This is not a subtle point. The essence of the Toronto Principle is the contention that it is wrong for the University through its investments to participate in and contribute to socially injurious activities that offer society no indispensable benefits that currently cannot reasonably be gained in any other way. Social injury, as the university’s policy makes clear, should guide our divestment decisions. Considering long-term investment risk and ESG factors is good investment practice, but it is not the extent of the university’s responsibility under the Toronto Principle.

The university policy that our committee’s work was founded upon asks us to consider the social injury that arises from the corporate behavior under scrutiny. While not all such behavior in the fossil fuel sector reaches this bar, it is possible to make judgments about behavior that does. When fossil fuel companies engage in environmentally aggressive extraction, for example, or spread disinformation, they are contributing to socially injurious activities that offer society no indispensable benefits that currently cannot reasonably be gained in any other way.

The university should not participate in or contribute to such behavior through its investments. There may be other examples and the criteria may change over time as the world learns what is necessary to transform itself towards sustainability and a low carbon future.

Incorporating environmental, social, and governance criteria into the university investment decisions and signing on to the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Montréal Carbon Pledge are important and positive steps. However, respectfully, they are only partial steps towards leadership on climate change and sustainability because they frame the issue as one entirely of fiduciary risk.

Yes, it would be good if the corporations listed as examples in our report were screened out by these criteria. But that is, in some ways, beside the point. After all, what if the ESG analysis found that such companies were neither more nor less risky than alternative investments?

The question is not whether climate change makes investments riskier in a fiduciary sense and thus excludable from the university’s investment portfolios. The question is whether the university should be investing in companies that are causing egregious social injury when alternative investments could also meet the University’s fiduciary duties. ESG principles and disclosure initiatives cannot provide guidance on this more important question. The Toronto Principle provides such guidance and, further, it is a means for the University of Toronto to lead and have an impact that goes far beyond the financial influence of our investment decisions. It is a principle that we believe the University should adopt.

Sincerely,

Select former member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Divestment from Fossil Fuels:Professor Peter Burns

Mr. Graham Coulter

Professor Andrew Green

Professor Matthew Hoffmann

Professor Arthur Hosios

Professor Bryan Karney

Professor Mohan Matthen

Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar

SOURCE

Fascism/Corporatism, Politics

The Year the Oil Bubble Burst

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As companies are forced to slash value of reserves, industry faces a grim new future.

By Mitchell Anderson, reposted from TheTyee.ca, Apr 4, 2016

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end for the oil industry? It’s reporting season in the financial world and like it or not, fossil fuel companies are being forced to erase billions from their balance sheets to reflect devalued or worthless oil reserves.

Let’s start with the big picture. Global oil reserves are estimated at 1.7 trillion barrels.

Energy companies treat their share of these reserves as the equivalent of money in the bank and report them as assets.

Back in 2014, oil was worth about $110 per barrel. Now it hovers around $40. That means that about $120 trillion in global assets have just disappeared, at least until oil prices rise again.

And that’s not likely to happen anytime soon — or perhaps ever. Much ink has been spilled trying to explain the reasons for the global price collapse. The short answer is that Saudi Arabia is weary of cutting production to prop up prices and ceding market share to new entrants like U.S. shale gas and Alberta oilsands.

Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi said as much to a horrified meeting of U.S. petroleum executives in Texas in February. Keeping prices artificially high by limiting oil production has just allowed competitors to bring higher-cost gas and oil to market, he said. “Cutting low cost production to subsidize higher cost supplies only delays an inevitable reckoning,” he said. Low prices mean “inefficient, uneconomic producers” will shut down, he predicted.

Is anyone going to cut production to prop up prices? Saudi Arabia’s arch-enemy Iran, free from years of sanctions, called the prospect “ridiculous.” Junior producers in North America raked up debt when oil prices were high and have to keep pumping, often at a loss, just to service their loan payments.

Meanwhile, lenders who drank the Kool-Aid on sustained high oil prices are saddled with increasingly risky oil debt exposure — more than $100 billion for Canadian banks alone.

Writing off billions in value

The biggest commodity cartel in history has come flying apart, and the days of artificially inflated oil prices might be over forever.

But isn’t cheap oil bad for the environment? No — the reality is exactly the opposite. High prices have brought investment, exploration and development of fossil fuels, and the industry’s interests have perversely driven public policy. That all ends as prices plunge.

And as OPEC profitably demonstrated for decades, oil consumption isremarkably inelastic. When prices are high, people will pay whatever it takes to fill their tanks. When prices fall, they don’t drive that much more. However, lower prices do offer governments a fine opportunity to introduce carbon pricing to finance our transition to cleaner fuels.

How much trouble are the oil producers in? Companies can only claim an oil deposit as a “reserve” if they have a reasonable likelihood of extracting the oil and selling it profitably. And in 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission updated its reporting standardsto require companies to write off deposits not developed within a reasonable time frame.

The collapse in prices means a lot of the reserves being carried on companies’ books are now worth much less or fail the accounting tests and can now longer be counted as assets.

Chesapeake Energy is one of the big contributors to this bloodbath. The company was recently forced to write off 45 per cent of its oil and natural gas reserves, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of oil. Lower prices mean the deposits can’t be brought to market profitably and have no value on the companies’ balance sheets.

Bad news for Chesapeake shareholders, good news for the climate. Some 530 million tonnes of CO2 emissions are now staying in the ground — the equivalent of taking 100 million cars off the road for a year.

The SEC rules also require a “standardized measure” of company value in annual filings, including the reflections of price changes on reserves’ value and shareholder equity.

According to the standardized measure in Chevron’s SEC filings, its oil and gas reserves were worth $180 billion less than a year earlier. Likewise Imperial Oil reserves took a hit of almost $38 billion. Exxon Mobil’s reserves lost $260 billion.

All this affects share prices. The Financial Times reported that since June 2014 “The 300 largest global oil and gas companies have… seen $2.3 trillion sliced from their stock market value.” Bondholders have also taken a bath, with $150 billion in value lost over the same period.

Writing’s on the wall

The 2014 price crash was largely a result of the shale gas boom in the U.S. This extra supply — only two per cent of global oil and gas demand — was enough to drive down prices.

Electric vehicles could cause a similar price crash by creating a similar small drop in demand for oil. Tesla is now taking orders for its new $46,000 sedan, and General Motors is racing to offer a cheap, long-range electrical vehicle.

The winners of this race will be consumers and the climate. The losers will be oil industry investors, blindly hoping that someday prices will once again be over $100.

Electrical vehicles have a tiny global market share today — one for every thousand cars on the road. But a recent analysis shows that by 2023 rapid adoption of cheaper, better electric vehicles could trigger another oil price crash.

The shift would mean a permanent reduction in oil prices and the loss of trillions invested around the world. Perhaps that’s why the Saudis no longer want to play the long game of propping up global prices. Of course the price of oil might rebound in the interim. But if that market change is permanent, so too are the losses.

The writing should be on the wall. Canada faces big risks if we don’t quickly transition from fossil fuels — or, for that matter, even if we do.

The companies developing Alberta oilsands and coal mines have made commitments to do $21-billion worth of environmental remediation once the reserves are gone. But the provincial government has security deposits for less than 10 per cent of that. How can the companies pay for the work if they’re broke?

The industry recently asked Ottawa for $500 million to clean up “orphan” wells. They didn’t get it in last month’s federal budget, but this enormous subsidy for what was a profitable sector might re-appear in coming infrastructure spending.

Other mega-projects are plodding along as if nothing has changed. The Site C dam construction proceeds apace, largely justified by the imaginary need to power B.C.’s non-existent liquefied natural gas industry. The Trans Mountain pipeline project to bring oilsands bitumen to the coast plows ahead, even as Jeff Rubin, former CIBC chief economist, warns that oilsands companies are “hemorrhaging red ink” and “going bankrupt.” “There’s no economic context for any of the pipelines being proposed,” he said recently in Vancouver.

We’ve lived through more than a century of unprecedented prosperity largely based on cheap and plentiful energy from fossil fuels. It’s therefore hard to imagine a future that doesn’t include coal, oil or natural gas. But the cracks in this once-unassailable worldview are obvious. Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal miner, now teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

We may soon see the oil industry toppled, and those unwise investors who are the last to make for the exits burned.

SOURCE

climate science, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics

Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

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Losses could soar to $24tn and wreck the global economy in worst case scenario, first economic modelling estimate suggests

The economic impact of climate change could play havoc with the world economy, according to an LSE study. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

By , reposted from TheGuardian, Apr 4, 2016

Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.

In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

“Our work suggests to long-term investors that we would be better off in a low-carbon world,” said Prof Simon Dietz of the London School ofEconomics, the lead author of the study. “Pension funds should be getting on top of this issue, and many of them are.” He said, however, that awareness in the financial sector was low.

Mark Campanale of the thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative said the actual financial losses from unchecked global warming could be higher than estimated by the financial model behind the new study. “It could be a lot worse. The loss of financial capital can be a lot higher and faster than the GDP losses [used to model the costs of climate change in the study]. Just look at value of coal giant Peabody Energy. It was worth billions just a few years ago and now it is worth nothing.”

The Bank of England and World Bank have warned of the risks to the global economy of climate change and the G20 has asked the international Financial Stability Board to investigate the issue. In January, the World Economic Forum said a catastrophe caused by climate change was the biggest potential threat to the global economy in 2016.

“Physical climate change impacts are a systemic risk on a massive scale,” said Ben Caldecott, the director of the sustainable finance programme at the University of Oxford. “Investors can do much more to differentiate between companies more or less exposed and they can help reduce the risk to the global economy by supporting ambitious action on climate change.”

The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, used economic modelling to estimate the impact of unchecked climate change. It found that in that scenario, the assets were effectively overvalued today by $2.5tn, but that there was a 1% chance that the overvaluation could be as high as $24tn.

A street in York, UK. Weather events triggered by climate change have a wide ranging impact on the wider economy. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The losses would be caused by the direct destruction of assets by increasingly extreme weather events and also by a reduction in earnings for those affected by high temperatures, drought and other climate change impacts.

If action is taken to tackle climate change, the study found the financial losses would be reduced overall, but that other assets such as fossil fuel companies would lose value. Scientists have shown that most of the coal, oil and gas reserves such companies own will have stay in the ground if the global rise in temperature is to be kept under 2C. The total stock market capitalisation of fossil fuel companies today is about $5tn.

“There is no scenario in which the risk to financial assets are unaffected by climate change. That is just a fiction,” said Dietz. “There will be winners and losers.” Major investors such as Norway’s sovereign wealth fund – the world’s biggest – have already begun selling off high-carbon stocks such as coal companies.

Investors have also been warned about investing in new coal and gas fired power stations after 2017 by a second new study. The research shows that, to meet the 2C target, no new carbon-emitting power stations can be built anywhere in the world unless they are later closed down or retrofitted with carbon capture and storage technology.

“Investors putting money into new carbon-emitting infrastructure need to ask hard questions about how long those assets will operate for, and assess the risk of future shut-downs and write-offs,” said Prof Cameron Hepburn of the University of Oxford.

SOURCE

RELATED:

Climate change puts trillions of dollars of financial assets at risk: study

 

Activism, democracy, Politics, solutions, Sustainability

Push for NDP to embrace, debate Leap Manifesto

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Leap Manifesto
NDP leader Tom Mulcair speaks with the media while attending the Progress summit in Ottawa, Friday April 1, 2016. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)

Kristy Kirkup, The Canadian Press, reposted from CTV News, Apr 4, 2016

OTTAWA — Backers of the radical “Leap Manifesto” have come up with a two-step plan aimed at getting federal New Democrats to end their flirtation with mainstream moderation and sign on to a more left-wing agenda.

The manifesto calls for dramatic change, urging a swift transition away from fossil fuels, a rejection of new pipelines, and an upending of the capitalist system on which the economy is based.

Leading left-wing thinkers released the creed in September in the middle of the election campaign, jolting NDP Leader Tom Mulcair as he attempted to convince Canadians that his party was a safe, moderate alternative to the Conservatives.

Now, as Mulcair’s leadership is up for debate and the party questions its own identity and direction, key New Democrats are pushing the Leap Manifesto principles into the mix.

Former MPs Libby Davies and Craig Scott, as well as the head of the influential Toronto-Danforth riding association and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis, are circulating a plan to entrench the manifesto’s ideas.

But they don’t foresee a wholesale adoption of the manifesto all at once.

Rather, they’re proposing a two-step process: first, have New Democrats at this week’s convention approve a resolution declaring that the manifesto is “a high-level statement of principles that is in line with the aspirations, history and values of the party.”

If that passes, they’re proposing another resolution calling for meaningful debate of the manifesto by riding associations, leading up to a full, detailed discussion on how to implement it at the next convention in 2018.

“We agree that the time is clearly right to embrace the analysis and values in the manifesto, but we believe that the party also needs a chance to debate and articulate the many policies that flow from it,” says a letter set to be circulated to rank-and-file NDP members at the Edmonton convention, a copy of which was provided to The Canadian Press.

“In other words, we believe the NDP needs to take some ownership over this agenda through a democratic process.”

In an interview, Lewis, one of the key drivers of the manifesto, said there also needs to be an online mechanism to allow members to have a strong voice in the policy-making process.

Nearly two dozen NDP riding associations have drafted their own resolutions urging the party to embrace the manifesto as rank-and-file members mull the future of the party following October’s disappointing election results.

As a result of that increased interest, Lewis said he worked with Davies, Scott and others inside the NDP to help craft an appropriate procedural path which they hope will lead to eventual acceptance of the manifesto.

Scott emphasized that the two-step push to adopt the manifesto is in no way a challenge to Mulcair’s leadership.

“It is nothing of the sort — neither in inception nor now,” he said in an email.

“Rather, it is a challenge to the entire NDP from bottom to top, including a challenge to ourselves to ensure that true, transformative dialogue around Leap’s vision is pursued vigorously and inclusively over the next two years … in order to see what concrete policies can be generated for the 2018 NDP policy convention.”

The letter predicts the manifesto can “play a key role in the renewal of the NDP, rooting the process in a bold, inspiring, left vision of Canada.”

Among other things, the manifesto declares that no further money should be invested in building fossil fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines. Lewis acknowledged that could prove a difficult sell, particularly with the convention being held in oil-rich Alberta.

“The (provincial) NDP government in Alberta feels that being against pipelines is a no-go zone,” Lewis said.

“In fact, the premier of Alberta speaks about climate change and pipelines in the same breath every time she talks about their climate change policy … She always points out that this will give the province the credibility to get its bitumen to tidewater.”

Yet science clearly indicates governments cannot continue to build fossil fuel infrastructure if Canada wants to tackle climate change, Lewis added.

But it’s not just Alberta New Democrats who might have a problem with the manifesto. Former Nova Scotia MP Peter Stoffer, who calls himself a “firm supporter” of the Energy East pipeline proposal, said the manifesto is unrealistic and too far to the left.

“I would definitely love to see the day when we as a society can wean ourselves off fossil fuels but that is not going to happen tomorrow,” Stoffer said in an interview.

In the meantime, Stoffer said he’d prefer using Canadian oil and gas to heat his home or power the planes he flies on.

“At the end of the day, you still have to support our basic economies in this country and use our resources as environmentally friendly as you can for the benefit of Canadians as well.”

When the manifesto was released during the election campaign, it was a stark contrast with the cautious platform Mulcair was offering voters, including balanced budgets and sustainable development of Alberta’s oil sands. He didn’t embrace the manifesto but said he appreciated the debate of ideas.

SOURCE

RELATED:

Push For NDP To Embrace Leap Manifesto Intensifies Ahead Of Party’s Convention

Leap Manifesto should be reference point for policy discussions: former NDP MP

 

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