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C2C Journal

Canada’s Coercive Diplomacy: How the Liberals Impose the Woke Agenda on Developing Countries

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From the C2C Journal

By Anna Farrow
When – or perhaps if – Canadians think about “foreign aid”, they probably imagine idealistic aid workers treating patients in a remote health clinic, a technical expert designing a new bridge or perhaps an academic offering advice on operating fair courts of law. But these are all being pushed into the background as ideology takes over the planning and provision of Canada’s foreign assistance programs. Not only have bridges and tractors given way to morning-after pills and wind turbines, but aid programs are being shaped to serve only certain kinds of people. The kinds Liberals like. Anna Farrow charts the radical remaking of foreign assistance in which Canada uses foreign aid to interfere in the domestic politics and local cultures of recipient countries, turning the mild-mannered middle power into a practitioner of coercive diplomacy and cultural imperialism – arguably even neo-colonialism.

“Far from deploying Canadian aid workers to African countries to listen, learn and craft policies that promote development in line with local goals and aspirations,” Mulroney said in an e-mail interview, “Canada simply transfers funds to its likeminded partners in multilateral organizations, progressive foundations, and the big abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.”

Climate, contraception and the queer-nexus. This unlikely triad of foreign assistance priorities has become the face of Canada in the developing world. Foreign policy – and how Canada applies it on the world stage – usually receives scant public attention. Amid the current array of domestic troubles – cost of living, housing crisis, urban blight, opioid overdoses, revolving-door criminal justice – it is hard to excite voters about how Canadian taxes are being used overseas.
Spectacular fiascos: Canada’s “front end” international reputation has been in decline throughout the Liberals’ nine years in office – thanks to, among other incidents, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s odd sartorial decisions during his 2018 visit to India (top), Canada’s disintegrating military (middle), and the foreign policy establishment’s failure to secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2020 (bottom). But what happens in the “back end” – like foreign aid – is equally important. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick; (middle) Canadian Army; (bottom) IAEA Imagebank, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

When foreign affairs do get noticed, typically the front-facing actions of the prime minister, foreign affairs minister or defence minister are scrutinized. And why not, since it’s a target-rich environment, with Canada experiencing some spectacular failures over the Liberals’ nine years in office. In 2020, after an intense and costly push, Canada failed to secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council that its foreign policy establishment had long craved. A year later, Canada was left out of AUKUS, a new defence and security pact among the United States, United Kingdom and Australia intended to counter China’s expansionism. Just last month, 23 U.S. senators from both parties issued a letter deeply critical of Canada’s parsimonious defence spending. And then there’s the symbolic damage wrought by Canada’s performative prime minister, such as his cringeworthy decision on a 2018 state visit to India to dress himself and his family in traditional Indian wedding garb.

A largely unexamined though arguably even more important feature of foreign policy, however, is the back end, the foreign assistance administered and funded through Global Affairs Canada. Under the Justin Trudeau government, assistance diplomacy has been transformed – and in ways at least as worrisome and damaging as the more high-profile examples cited above.

The words “development assistance” probably conjure up images of Canadian specialists overseeing the provision of clean water in dirt-poor rural areas, conducting immunizations of vulnerable children, building roads, planning much-needed energy infrastructure in regions that still use dung fires and candle-light, constructing new schools, fighting forest fires, or organizing and staffing colleges that turn out agronomists, foresters, hydrologists, engineers and so on. In other words, doing the things needed to, first, address crises that are killing people and shortening lives, and second, providing poor countries the tools needed to lift themselves out of poverty over the long term.

But if these were ever the priorities, they have been deliberately cast aside. In 2017, then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau produced a 77-page policy document, Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy. The paper is explicitly calibrated to the United Nations-sponsored Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Agenda, a multilateral agreement signed by Canada in 2015, describes itself as “a global blueprint…to achieve gender equality, reach net zero emissions, halt and reverse nature loss, build resilient and inclusive societies and economies, and make sure everyone has access to quality education and health care.”

Sharing whose “values”? Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, unveiled in 2017 by then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (left) and Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau (right), places “the right to access safe and legal abortions” “at the core” of Canada’s foreign policy, accompanied by a $14-billion budget over a 10-year period. (Sources of photos: (left) OEA-OAS, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (right) The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Like the 2030 Agenda, Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy advocates an “intersectionality” that ties together climate action and feminism. Bibeau described it as a “new vision for international assistance” and proclaimed that Canada should play “a leading international role.” In her preface to the document, Freeland wrote that, “Canadians are safer and more prosperous when more of the world shares our values.” For the average Canadian, the word “values” probably brings to mind things like a commitment to democracy, individual equality, tolerance of minorities and religions, or being left at liberty to pursue a livelihood and build a family. But those are apparently not the most important values of the people who plan and implement Canada’s foreign assistance effort.

Freeland performed a nifty conceptual shuffle by moving from the innocuous statement that “women’s rights are human rights” to an explication that those rights include “sexual and reproductive rights – and the right to access safe and legal abortions,” and then to the pronouncement that, “These rights are at the core of our foreign policy.” In Freeland’s world Canadian “values” – and the values Canada seeks to transmit to other countries – are focused in very particular areas and skew towards a particular end of the ideological spectrum. Whatever your view is on contraception and abortion rights, the idea that sexual and reproductive “health and rights” are top-tier Canadian values, should drive foreign assistance funding and lie at the “core” of the nation’s foreign policy should surely all be matters for serious public scrutiny and debate.

The money was fairly quick to follow the policy directives flowing from the 2017 paper. In 2019, Trudeau announced that Canada would spend $14 billion to “support women and girls’ health around the world”, with half of the funds earmarked for sexual and reproductive health and rights. The funding envelope was to extend for 10 years. The $1.4 billion per year represents 9 percent of the approximately $16 billion Canada spent on foreign assistance in fiscal 2023 and 79 percent of the amount allocated to health. The Liberals’ most recent budget includes a further $4.2 billion over six years for the provision of contraception and abortion globally. This funding was included in the section of the budget document entitled “Upholding Canadian Values Around the World.”

It appears the ideological commitment to what is always termed “modern contraception” and abortion as the tickets to women’s freedom and economic independence precedes engagement with the countries in which Global Affairs is involved. David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has consistently hammered away at this point. “Far from deploying Canadian aid workers to African countries to listen, learn and craft policies that promote development in line with local goals and aspirations,” Mulroney said in an e-mail interview, “Canada simply transfers funds to its likeminded partners in multilateral organizations, progressive foundations, and the big abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.”

Billion-dollar business: A foreign aid effort that once focused on roads, bridges, immunization and schooling – and did not discriminate among favoured identity groups – now lavishes billions of dollars on sex-ed, contraception and abortion – couched euphemistically as support for “women and girls’ health around the world”. (*Sexual and reproductive health and rights.) (Source of graph: Global Affairs Canada)

In many cases, Global Affairs is not doing the development work but outsources it to agenda-driven, left-leaning non-governmental organizations (NGO) whose missions align with that of the current government. A quick search of the government grant site gets 48 hits on the keywords “Planned Parenthood”. Many of these are smaller grants to local Planned Parenthood Canada offices through the government’s Summer Jobs program, but the search shows that close to $78 million has been provided to International Planned Parenthood or Action Canada through Global Affairs programming.

Given the level of funding that many of these organizations receive, and the close ideological affinity between the two parties, they cross the line from NGO to QUANGO, or quasi-non-governmental organization (better terms might be “pseudo-governmental organization” or “government proxy”). One example is Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, also known as Planned Parenthood Canada. The organization disclosed in its 2022-2023 financial statements that close to 60 per cent of its annual funding is derived from government sources.

Global Affairs Canada delegates much of the program implementation to like-minded organizations such as Planned Parenthood, whose Canadian program funding is used to produce sex-ed (top) and school learning material with explicit (and wildly promotional) sexual content, and whose international branches distribute similar material in developing countries.

Much of the program funding is designated for sex-ed, which is couched in grant-writing language as a matter of access to reproductive rights. But the curriculum developed for these subsidized programs is not comprised of straightforward biology lessons with age-appropriate information about available forms of contraception. The keyword is “comprehensive” sexual education (CSE), which follows a “pleasure-based” methodology. The “right” to sexual pleasure – to “satisfy yourself”, as a Zambian government document aimed at children puts it – is now one of the reproductive rights children are being taught they are entitled to.

In 2020, Global Affairs funded a four-year, $11 million project with Action Canada and the International Planned Parenthood Federation entitled “Rights from the Start” that targeted four South American countries: Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana and Peru. To take a few selected development indicators, less than 20 percent of Ecuador’s road system is paved. The average life expectancy in Bolivia was 63.6 years in 2021 – and falling. Guyana’s was slightly higher – but also falling. Peru ranks 129th worldwide in the number of motor vehicles per capita.

Coercive diplomacy in action: Canada’s “Rights from the Start” project pushes unrestricted abortion access along with “gender equality outcomes” in Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana and Peru – countries where abortion is illegal or severely restricted and opposed by large proportions of the population. Shown, anti-abortion demonstrations in Quito, Ecuador (top) and La Paz, Bolivia (bottom). (Sources of photos: (top) AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa; (bottom) AP Photo/Juan Karita)

But these nuts and bolts issues aren’t of any concern to the Action Canada project, which instead lists a number of expected “gender equality outcomes”, including the “strengthened capacity of partner organizations to develop and implement advocacy plans for the fulfilment of human rights comprehensive sexuality education.”

Abortion, interestingly, is illegal in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, except for cases of rape, incest or endangerment to the mother’s life, and illegal after eight weeks’ gestation in Guyana. It is not a big leap to conclude that the choice of those four countries upon which to push unrestricted abortion is not accidental and that Global Affairs is essentially funding an activist group to lobby a foreign government to effect legal and political changes there. Whatever one thinks of abortion and how freely available it should be, such programs appear to cross the line from “development assistance” to ideologically driven political agitation.

The queer-nexus (aka LGBTQ2SI) funding also sees Global Affairs outsourcing program delivery to advocacy groups. In 2019 – the year Trudeau announced the $14 billion for women’s health – Bibeau announced $30 million over five years and $10 million in every subsequent year “to advance human rights and improve socio-economic outcomes for LGBTQ2 people in developing countries.” We are now a very long way from building the proverbial water well in the poor village – let alone one that’s available to every villager. Canada is instead targeting its expertise and its taxpayers’ funds at particular types of people deemed worthy of help – and they happen to be the very sorts of people the Trudeau Liberals also favour in their domestic policies.

Under an agreement entitled LGBTI Pathways, Global Affairs last year granted over $1 million to ILGA World (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association) “to improve the lives of LGBTI persons across the world.” How was this goal to be achieved? Largely, it seems, by teaching global LGBTI organizations how to lobby for more funding. The project’s two expected outcomes were “enhanced awareness of donors on the priorities, strategies, and funding gaps of the international and regional LGBTI movements…and an increased capacity of LGBTI-led organizations…to advocate with donors to influence policy making and funding strategies.”

The same year, Global Affairs gave nearly $500,000 to Égides, a Francophone non-profit, to advance the “Rights and Well-being of LBTQI+ Women and Girls in West Africa and International Spaces.” Also in 2023, a Global Affairs-funded agreement with Rainbow Railroad, a U.S. and Canada based non-profit that “helps at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to safety worldwide,” provided $700,000 to conduct a meta-analysis, convene roundtables and hold a “3-day conference on policy issues related to forced displacements in a Global South transit country.”

One might think it would be hard to tie feminism, sexual liberation, queer- and transgenderism, foreign policy and climate policy all together but, according to the Government of Canada, “environment and climate action is a pillar of” the Feminist International Assistance Policy. Why would that be? “Research has shown,” the document continues, “that climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately affect women and girls, and that women and girls can be powerful agents of change if given access and control over environmental resources. Since the introduction of the [Feminist Policy], Canada has strengthened its work at the nexus of gender and climate action.” This has become a standard intersectional verbal slide of ministers and apparatchiks.

Improbable nexus: The Trudeau government’s foreign aid effort has somehow merged feminism, sexual liberation, transgenderism and climate-change policies – by, for example, claiming that “climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately affect women and girls.” (Sources of photos: (left) agroffman, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (right) Julie Gorecki, retrieved from The Feminist Wire)

The Liberal policy also is being pushed by Canada’s left-wing opposition parties. In late May, NDP MP Laurel Collins addressed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, saying (at 16:00 in the linked video for May 23), “Climate emergencies are not gender neutral. The degradation of ecosystems disproportionately impacts women and girls, and I am wildly emotional. This is the existential crisis of our time.”

Whether it is actually occurring or not, this “existential crisis” is certainly costly, already resulting in the transfer of large amounts of money from taxpayers in the Frozen North. Canada is currently on the tail end of a five-year, $5.3 billion International Climate Finance Program that encourages recipient countries to adopt practices that may not even be to their benefit.

A portion of those billions was, for example, allotted to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, which received $35 million to undertake a project entitled “Nature Positive Food Systems for Climate Change Adaptation.” The project “aims to improve low carbon, climate-resilient economies in rural areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe for enhanced well-being of communities, especially women, girls, and other vulnerable groups.”

Canada’s $35-million “Nature Positive Food Systems for Climate Change Adaptation” project seeks to enhance “well-being of communities, especially women, girls, and other vulnerable groups” in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe – countries where men live far shorter lives than women. Shown are rural areas of Ethiopia (top) and Kenya (bottom). (Sources of photos: (top) Rod Waddington, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (bottom) ELIX, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The average life expectancy at birth in these four countries is, incidentally, five-and-a-half to seven years longer for women than men, suggesting men might actually be the “vulnerable group”. Instead, men presumably will be left to fend for themselves in the allegedly hotter, drier, more hostile and unpredictable climate that is to come. Who knows, perhaps simply by stealing some of that delicious “nature-positive food” that will be grown by all those aid-receiving, longer-lived women and girls.

Even were we to stipulate that women and girls in certain developing countries are in greater need of Canadian largesse than their shorter-lived male compatriots, the evidence doesn’t appear to matter one way or the other, as the Liberals are immune to facts that undermine their woke agenda. Consider war-torn Ukraine, a country whose men are exposed to nearly all the risks of combat, do nearly all the fighting and dying – with 200,000 killed or wounded (many of them permanently crippled) since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 – and are subject to special laws preventing men aged 18-60 from leaving Ukraine, while over 6 million Ukrainian women and girls have sought safety abroad.

Among its aid programs, Canada in February announced it would contribute $4 million to help Ukraine remove some of the millions of dangerous mines sown during the war. But instead of focusing on the technical aspects of doing this difficult job safely and efficiently, i.e., getting the most mines removed for the effort expended, Canada has pressured Ukraine to ensure there are plenty of demining jobs for members of designated groups – namely women and transgenders. Along with this “gender-inclusive demining” aid, multiple other Canadian aid programs also explicitly tell the Ukrainian recipient agencies to focus “in particular [on] women and vulnerable groups” (other than men, of course).

“There is no Western nation that developed minus oil, minus [natural] gas,” says Jusper Machogu (top), a Kenyan engineer, farmer and advocate of modern agriculture and fossil fuel development in Africa, which he argues should be far higher priorities than worrying about the threat of future climate change. At bottom, Kenyan farm workers process maize in Uasin Gishu County. (Source of bottom photo: Jen Watson/Shutterstock)

Returning to the issue of climate, there are plenty of Africans who believe their continent is facing bigger and more immediate problems than the threat of future climate change. Jusper Machogu, for example, is a young Kenyan man who uses social media to advocate “fossil fuels for Africa” because he believes Africans above all need access to reliable, affordable energy. “Most people over here don’t really know what [the UN’s] Sustainable Development Goals are about or what the UN is truly doing in Africa,” Machogu says in a lengthy interview. “They say that there are these 17 big problems that Africans, or developing countries are facing. I’m surprised to see climate change as one of those problems.”

Machogu bristles at the hypocrisy of prosperous aid-giving countries now expecting Africa to develop in an ideologically prescribed – and, he argues, ineffective – manner. “There is no western nation that developed minus oil, minus [natural] gas,” he notes. “The four pillars of modern civilization are cement, fertilizer, plastics and steel.” This is the core argument made in How the World Really Worksthe 2022 book by Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba (Smil specifically cited ammonia, a key constituent of fertilizer). Machogu says Africa requires much more of each pillar – and all four in turn depend on large amounts of plentiful, affordable and reliable energy to produce (with fertilizer and steel also containing a fossil fuel as an ingredient).

In addition, natural gas and propane are much cleaner-burning fuels than the wood and dung still used by millions for cooking and heating. There’s even a gender-equity dimension, notes journalist Anthony Furey in a recent column: millions of African women and girls spend hours each day walking in search of wood fuel and carrying it back home. Making fossil fuels widely available at reasonable cost could begin to liberate them from this drudgery while improving air quality in homes and villages.

But instead of helping Africa develop more of its significant oil and natural gas potential, Western nations and multilateral institutions are relentlessly pushing wind and solar power. “They say we’re going to get you loans, but if we’re going to give you a loan, you must invest in renewable energy,” says Machogu. “When they say renewable energy, they don’t mean hydro or geothermal. Power usually means solar and wind.”

“If we’re going to give you a loan, you must invest in renewable energy”: Global Affairs Canada and other globalist institutions seek to control Africa’s development by agreeing to sponsor only solar and wind energy. Shown at left, solar panels outside shacks in a remote village with no electricity in rural Woqooyi Galbeed region, Somalia; at right, a wind and solar power installation on a farm in Upington, Northern Cape Province, South Africa. (Sources of photos: (left) Voyage View Media/Shutterstock; (right) Grobler du Preez/Shutterstock)

He is certainly right about Global Affairs Canada. A recent analysis by the Epoch Times shows that aid for renewable energy was the fastest-rising category of foreign assistance, reaching $555 million in fiscal 2023, and expected to rise further in the coming years. Virtually zero was allocated to natural gas or even nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide while generating electricity. Meanwhile, spending on traditional bread-and-butter areas like transportation, storage and disaster risk reduction has been cut sharply in recent years.

Machogu remains unconvinced that solar and wind power – which are expensive, intermittent and unreliable – are the solution for Africa. “What’s going to make an average African rich?” he asks rhetorically. “Solving agriculture. Today about six to seven out of 10 Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood. How do we solve agriculture? Of course, we need fossil fuels. We need farm machinery. We need irrigation. We need nitrogenous fertilizers. That’s what the crop needs to grow or to do better.”

The West’s climate fixation means that oil and natural gas development in Africa remains woefully underfunded, and hydroelectric facilities receive much of their capital from Communist China. Shown at top, liquefied natural gas project at Cabo Delgado, Mozambique; middle, the Mukuyu-1 exploration well in Zimbabwe’s Cabora Bassa Basin; bottom, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which will generate 5,100 megawatts of electricity on the Blue Nile. (Sources of photos: (top) Sigrid Ekman, retrieved from African Arguments; (middle) The Africa Report; (bottom) Daily News Egypt)

But on this issue, Canada is as stubborn as the EU, the World Bank and other international organizations with which its policies are aligned, refusing to provide any loans or other financial assistance for oil and natural gas development in Africa. As Machogu notes, even hydroelectric dams – a foundation of the electricity networks in numerous Western countries, especially Canada – are now virtually anathema. Ethiopia, for example, recently began producing power from the enormous Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the fabled Blue Nile, and wishes to build several more dams on other rivers. It seems a reasonable goal, as barely half of its population has access to electricity.

And yet while this dam site was originally surveyed using U.S. aid money in the 1960s, Western nations bowed out of the project one by one, while environmental groups as well as neighbouring Egypt fought vehemently against it, and the World Bank now stubbornly pushes only wind, solar and geothermal power. So Ethiopia had to scratch together funding from its own meagre public finances, from crowd-funding, investment by dam employees and, finally, a $1 billion loan from China. China unapologetically uses aid to advance its geopolitical agenda while enriching Chinese construction companies and equipment manufacturers to which some of the loan funds are tied. The story has been similar on several other recent Ethiopian dam projects. These are foreign policy win-wins for China, Ethiopia gets its dams – and Western nations look arrogant and inept.

Canada’s Liberal Party prides itself on its woke bona fides. From the early days of Trudeau’s appointment of a gender-equitable Cabinet “because it’s 2015” to its intimate ties with Canada 2020, the self-described “upstart think-tank for Canada’s progressive community”, the current government understands itself as a standard-bearer of progressivism. Most Canadians know that by now; but most perhaps don’t know that this agenda extends to pretty much every South American or African village where Canadian aid money finds its way.

After one recovers from the eye-watering – and rising – amounts of money that the federal government is spending on climate, contraception and the queer-nexus triad, the next question is, is it money well-spent? Even if you are ideologically aligned with the goals, are the people Canada’s government favours in developing countries – women, girls and LGBTQI+ – less poor than they were before? More climate-resilient? Eating nature-positive foods? Where is any bang for the billions of Canadian bucks? In what world could this magic be brought into effect, one where reducing the carbon footprint, providing contraception and changing the mores in developing countries increases the safety and wealth not only of the (sometimes unwilling) recipients, but of Canadians (as Freeland claimed her policy aims to do)?

The experience of other aid-giving countries suggests such an approach does not work and eventually may even backfire in the donor country. Freeland and Bibeau may have taken their lead in crafting the 2017 Feminist International Assistance Program from Sweden, which in 2014 had adopted a similar policy directive. Perhaps Global Affairs Canada should look once more to the Nordic country, because in 2022 Sweden announced it was abandoning its feminist foreign policy. Tobias Billström, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, that year told the newspaper Aftonbladet that, “Gender equality is a fundamental value in Sweden and also for this government, but we’re not going to continue with a feminist foreign policy because the label obscures the fact the Swedish foreign policy must be based on Swedish values and Swedish interests.”

Pushback from aid-receiving countries: “Many Western leaders have revealed themselves to be modern colonial masters,” asserts Nigerian scientist Obianuju Ekeocha, who warns of the West’s manipulative tactics to impose the globalist agenda on Africa. (Source of photo: Catholic Digest)

Something needs to give in Canada as well, because not only is the current approach not working, there’s at least some evidence it’s angering more and more people in aid-receiving countries. Groups have been founded, in fact, specifically to oppose Western aid if it comes with too high an ideological price.

Obianuju Ekeocha is a Nigerian scientist and founder of Culture of Life Africa, an organization that seeks to push back against what it terms “unbelievable cultural pressure that is beginning to erode and alter the trajectory of the African cultural values of life, marriage, motherhood, family and faith.” She has written and spoken extensively on the misalignment between the actual needs and desires of African women and the funding priorities of Western nations. To her, the 21st century coercive diplomacy and haughty ideological conditions evoke sinister overtones of relations in past centuries. “Many Western leaders have revealed themselves to be modern colonial masters, threatening to withdraw aid from countries such as Nigeria and Uganda unless they accept their global sexual agenda,” Ekeocha writes in her 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism Of The Twenty-First Century.

Machogu, for his part, goes even further. “I think it boils down to [a goal of] depopulation,” is his stark assessment. “They’re trying to keep Africa poor.”

Anna Farrow is a Montreal-based journalist for The Catholic Register.

Source of main image: Shutterstock.

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C2C Journal

Drinking by the Numbers: What Statistics Canada Doesn’t Want You to Know

Published on

From the C2C Journal

By Peter Shawn Taylor
“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify,” cautioned journalist Darrell Huff in his famous 1954 book How to Lie with Statistics. It’s still useful advice, although Canadians might hope such a warning isn’t required for the work of Statistics Canada. In an exclusive C2C investigation, Peter Shawn Taylor takes apart a recent Statcan study to reveal its use of controversial, woke and unscientific methods to confuse what should be the straightforward task of reporting on the drinking habits of Canadians in various demographic groups. He also uncovers data the statistical agency wants to keep hidden for reasons of “historical/cultural or other contexts”.

Statistics Canada would like to know how much you’ve been drinking.

In October, the federal statistical agency released “A snapshot of alcohol consumption levels in Canada” based on its large-scale 2023 Canadian Community Health Survey that asked Canadians how much they drank in the previous week. The topline number: more than half of those surveyed – 54.4 percent – said they didn’t touch a drop in the past seven days. This is considered “no risk” according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction’s (CCSA) 2023 report Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, which Statcan uses as its standard. Among those who did imbibe, 15.2 percent said they’d had one or two drinks in the last week, an amount the CCSA guidance considers “low risk”, 15.2 percent said they’d consumed between three and six drinks, considered by CCSA to be “moderate risk”, and the remaining 15.1 percent admitted to seven or more drinks per week, what the CCSA calls “increasingly high risk”.

Statcan then sliced this information several different ways. By gender, men reported being bigger drinkers than women, based on their relative share in the “high risk” category (19.3 percent versus 11.1 percent). By age, the biggest drinkers are those 55-64 years, with 17.4 percent consuming at least one drink per day. Perhaps surprisingly, the 18-22-year-old college-aged group reported the lowest level of “high risk” drinking across all ages, at 8.4 percent, an outcome consistent with other observations that younger generations are becoming more conservative.

Statcan’s data also reveals that Quebeckers are the biggest drinkers in the country with 18.1 percent in the “high risk” category, while Saskatchewan and New Brunswick had the greatest number of teetotalers. Rural residents are bigger drinkers than those living in urban areas. By occupation, those holding male-dominated jobs in the trades, equipment operation and transportation were the most likely to report drinking in the “high risk” category of seven or more per week. Finally, the richest Canadians – those in the top income quintile – said they drink more than Canadians in lower income quintiles, an outcome that seems logical given the cost of a bottle these days.

The demographic detail in Statcan’s alcohol consumption survey is extensive and largely in keeping with general stereotypes. The quintessential drinker appears to be a middle-aged blue-collar male living in rural Quebec. (Although the report notes an enormous discrepancy between self-reported consumption data and national alcohol sales, with self-reported amounts accounting for a mere one-third of actual product sold. This suggests many Canadians are far from truthful when describing how much they drink.)

Despite the apparent surfeit of information, however, several demographic categories are missing from Statistics Canada’s report. And not by accident. According to a “Note to readers” at the bottom of the October report, the survey “included a strategic oversample to improve coverage…for racialized groups, Indigenous people, and persons with disabilities. While this analysis does not contain results for these populations (primarily owing to the need to delve into historical/cultural or other contexts for these groups as it pertains to alcohol consumption), the Canadian Community Health Survey 2023 data is now available to aid researchers looking into health analysis for these populations.”

The upshot of this word salad: Statcan went to extra lengths to get high-quality information on the alcohol consumption of natives, visible minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities. And then it enshrouded these numbers in a cloak of secrecy, choosing not to release that information publicly because of “historical/cultural or other contexts”. Why is Canada’s statistical agency keeping some of its data hidden?

Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health

Before investigating the missing data, it is necessary to discuss a controversy regarding the alcohol consumption guidelines used by Statcan. As mentioned earlier, its survey is based on new CCSA standards released last year which consider seven or more drinks per week to be “increasingly high risk”. This is the result of recent CCSA research that claims “even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health.” By focusing on the incidence of several obscure cancers and other diseases associated with alcohol consumption, the CCSA recommends that Canadians cut back drastically on their drinking. For those who wish to be in the “low risk” group, the CCSA recommends no more than two drinks per week for men and women, and not downing both on the same day.

To your health: The “J-Curve” plots the well-documented relationship between moderate social drinking and a long lifespan, revealing the healthiest level to be around one drink per day, what the new CCSA standards call “high risk”.

Such a parsimonious attitude towards drinking is at sharp odds with earlier CCSA findings. In 2011, the CCSA released “Canada’s Low Risk Alcohol Guidelines”, which defined “low risk” drinking levels very differently. Under this older standard, Canadians were advised to limit their consumption to 15 drinks per week (10 for women) and no more than three per day. It also acknowledged that it was okay to indulge on special occasions, such as birthdays or New Year’s Eve, without fear of any long-term health effects.

These rules were based on ample medical evidence pointing to substantial health benefits arising from moderate drinking, given that social drinkers tend to live longer than both abstainers and alcoholics – a statistical result that, when placed on a graph, yields what is commonly referred to as the “J-Curve”. These rules also aligned with social norms and hence garnered broad public support.

The dramatic contrast between the 2011 and 2023 CCSA drinking guidelines has attracted strong criticism from many health experts. Dan Malleck is chair of the Department of Health Sciences at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, as well as director of the school’s Centre for Canadian Studies. In an interview, he bluntly calls the new CCSA guidelines “not useful, except as an example of public health over-reach.” Malleck argues the emphasis CCSA now places on the tiny risk of certain cancers associated with alcohol ignores the vast amount of evidence proving moderate drinking confers both physical and social advantages. This, he says, does a disservice to Canadians.

“The opposite of good public health advice”: According to Dan Malleck, chair of Brock University’s Department of Health Sciences, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction’s (CCSA) 2023 guidelines suggesting alcohol in any amount is a health hazard are unrealistic. (Source of photo: Brock University)

“The Opposite of Good Public Health Advice”

“There are two possible responses” to the CCSA’s new drinking guidelines touting near-abstinence as the preferred course of action, Malleck says. “People will hear the message that no amount of drinking is healthy and simply ignore the recommendations altogether because they’re so restrictive – and so we end up with no effective guidance. Or they’ll take it all at face value and become fearful that having just two beers a week will give them cancer. Creating that sort of anxiety isn’t useful either.” Considering the two alternatives, Malleck says the end result “is the opposite of good public health advice.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it appears Ottawa agrees with this assessment. While the CCSA is a federally-funded research organization, it is not a branch of the civil service. As such, its work does not automatically come with an official imprimatur. Rather, its reports have to be adopted by Health Canada or another department to become government policy. This was the case with its 2011 guidance. It is not the case with CCSA’s new report.

In response to a query from C2C, Yuval Daniel, director of communications for Ya’ara Saks, the federal minister of Mental Health and Addictions, stated that, “The Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction’s proposed guidelines have not been adopted by the Government of Canada. Canada’s 2011 low-risk alcohol drinking guidelines remain the official guidance.”

Too strict even for the Liberals: Federal Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks has chosen not to adopt the CCSA’s 2023 drinking guidelines as official policy – yet Statistics Canada insists on using them to measure Canadians’ drinking habits. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

It seems the CCSA’s new and abstemious drinking guidelines are too strict even for the federal Liberals. The 2011 standard, which considers anything up to 15 drinks per week to be “low risk”, remains the government’s official advice to Canadians. While this seems like a small victory for common sense, it raises another question: if the federal government has refused to adopt the strict 2023 CCSA drinking standards, why is Statcan using them in its research?

According to Malleck, the appearance of the new, unofficial CCSA alcohol guidance in Statcan’s work “legitimizes” the explicitly-unapproved guidelines. “It further reinforces these seemingly authoritative, government-funded recommendations” and obscures the sensible, official advice contained in the earlier guidelines, he says. It seems a strange state of affairs. But given other odd aspects of Statcan’s alcohol survey, it is in keeping with an emerging pattern of problematic behaviour at the statistical agency. Statcan is no longer merely gathering information and presenting it in an objective way, to be applied as its users see fit; the agency appears to be crafting its own public policy by stealth.

Uncovering the Missing Data

Recall that Statcan’s recent alcohol survey withheld consumption data regarding racial, Indigenous and disabled status for reasons of “historical/cultural or other contexts”. Although the statistical agency collected the relevant numbers, it then restricted access to researchers “looking into health analysis for these populations.” As a media organization, C2C requested this data on the grounds it was public information. After some back-and-forth that included the threat of a $95-per-hour charge to assemble the figures, Statcan eventually provided the once-redacted numbers for free. With the data in hand, it seems obvious which numbers were withheld and why.

Nothing about alcohol consumption by immigrant status or race appears newsworthy. Immigrants are revealed to be very modest drinkers, with 68 percent reporting no alcohol consumed in the past week, and only 7 percent admitting to being in the “high risk” seven-drinks-per-week category. Similar results hold for race; Arab and Filipino populations, for example, display extremely high rates of abstinence, at 88 percent and 80 percent, respectively. Disabled Canadians are also very modest drinkers.

The only category that seems worthy of any comment is that of Indigenous Canadians. At 20.1 percent, aboriginals display one of the highest shares of “high risk” drinkers in the country.

Out of sight, out of mind: Statcan’s recent report on alcohol consumption deliberately withholds data on Indigenous Canadians for reasons of “historical/cultural and other contexts”. (Source of photo: AP Photo/William Lauer, File)

According to Malleck, Statcan’s reference to “historical/cultural or other contexts” in withholding some drinking data is a clear signal the move was meant to avoid bringing attention to Indigenous people and their problematic relationship with alcohol. “A lot of people will now err on the side of caution when it comes to this kind of information [about Indigenous people],” he says. This is a phenomenon that has been building for some time. Nearly a decade ago, the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action made numerous demands about how governments and universities deal with Indigenous knowledge and history. “I can see the people at Statcan saying that this [new data] will play into the so-called ‘firewater myth’ and be too damaging culturally to justify its inclusion,” Malleck adds.

“The Unmentioned Demon”

It is certainly true that Canada’s native population has been greatly damaged by alcohol since the beginning of white settlement in North America. As early as 1713 the Hudson’s Bay Company told its staff at Fort Albany, in what is now northern Ontario, to “Trade as little brandy as possible to the Indians, we being informed it has destroyed several of them.”

Later, the pre-Confederation era featured many legislative efforts to limit native access to alcoholic spirits. Further, one of the purposes behind the creation of Canada’s North West Mounted Police (NWMP) was to interdict American whiskey traders at the U.S. border to prevent them from selling their wares to Canadian tribes, who were suffering catastrophically under alcohol. The NWMP were notably successful in that mission, earning the fervent gratitude of prominent Indigenous chiefs on the Prairies. More recently, the topic of alcoholism on native reserves has been the subject of several books, including former Saskatchewan Crown prosecutor Harold Johnson’s powerful 2016 work Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing my People (and Yours).

Canada’s native community has struggled with alcohol abuse ever since white settlement began. Many federal policies have attempted to address this, including the creation of Canada’s North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873. Shown, NWMP officer with members of the Blackfoot First Nation outside Fort Calgary, 1878.

With all this as background, it should not come as a surprise that Indigenous communities continue to struggle with high rates of alcohol use and abuse. In fact, such detail is easily accessible from other government sources. The federal First Nations Information Governance Centre, for example, reveals that the rate of binge drinking (five drinks or more in a day, at least once per month) among Indigenous Canadians is more than twice the rate of the general population – 34.9 percent vs. 15.6 percent. Reserves and Inuit communities also display extremely high rates of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder(FASD), which is caused when pregnant mothers drink. Some research shows FASD rates are 10 to 100 times higher among Indigenous populations than the general Canadian population. This C2C story calls FASD “the unmentioned demon that haunts the native experience throughout Canada.”

Given all this readily available information, it makes little sense for Statcan to collect and then withhold data about Indigenous drinking. Such an effort will not make the problem go away, nor change public perceptions. Indeed, the only way to reduce alcoholism on reserves and among urban native communities is to confront the situation head-on. The first step in Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step recovery program is, notably, admitting to the existence of the problem itself.

With regard to sensitivity about identity, Statcan showed no qualms about labelling Quebeckers as being the thirstiest drinkers in the country. Or that men employed in the trades, equipment operation and transportation tend to kick back with a beer more than twice a week. Further, Indigenous Canadians are not even the country’s biggest imbibers. That distinction belongs to the top quintile of income-earners, with 21.5 percent of Canada’s highest earners in the “high risk” category.

Habs fans at work: While Statcan appears unwilling to publish data revealing that Indigenous Canadians are among the biggest drinkers in Canada, it has no such qualms about identifying Quebec as Canada’s thirstiest province. (Source of photo: CTV News Montreal)

This effort to spare Indigenous Canadians the ignominy of being recognized as among the country’s biggest drinkers, even after devoting more time and effort to researching their habits, follows a 2021 federal Liberal directive that requires Statcan to spend more resources on certain targeted groups. The $172 million, five-year Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), which is referenced in the alcohol report’s footnotes, is an effort to collect more detailed data about Indigenous people, women, visible minorities and the disabled “to allow for intersectional analyses, and support government and societal efforts to address known inequities and promote fair and inclusive decision-making.”

Setting aside the tedious terminology of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movement, it may well be a reasonable policy goal to collect more and better information about underprivileged groups. With better information comes greater knowledge and, it can be hoped, an improved ability to plan. But such efforts are for naught if this additional data is then hidden from public view because it might cast favoured groups in a bad light.

Ottawa’s $172 million Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), unveiled in 2021, is meant to collect and distribute more detailed data on targeted groups including women, Indigenous people and the disabled. It doesn’t always work as promised.

Canada’s Statistical Agency Goes Random

The apparent data damage arising from the new DDAP is not limited to hiding results about Indigenous Canadians. It is also affecting results by gender. Recall that the October alcohol consumption report reveals a clear male/female split in drinking habits, with men drinking substantially more than women. On closer inspection, however, this distinction refers only to self-reported gender identity – not to biological sex. As a result of a separate 2018 directive, the statistical agency is now forbidden from asking Canadians about their sex “assigned” at birth.

This is in keeping with woke ideology favoured by the federal Liberals that regards gender as a social construct separate from biology. But such a policy entails several significant problems from a statistical point of view. For starters, it makes it difficult to compare results with previous years, when gender was defined differently. According to Statcan, this is no big deal: “Historical comparability with previous years is not in itself a valid reason to be asking sex at birth.” These days, ideology matters more than statistical relevance, even to those who once held sacred the objective gathering of high-quality data.

This new policy also means that in situations where biological sex is crucial to interpreting the data – health issues, for example – the results are now muddied by the conflation of gender with sex. This is particularly relevant when it comes to self-identified transgender or non-binary individuals. In following the new rules set out by the DDAP, Statcan now takes all transgender and non-binary responses and shuffles them arbitrarily between the male and female categories – what have since been renamed as Men+ and Women+. As Statcan itself reports, this data is “derived by randomly distributing non-binary people into the Men+ or Women+ category; data on sex at birth is not used in any steps of this process.”

Anti-scientific: As a result of the DDAP, Statcan now randomly distributes responses from people who self-identify as transgender or non-binary into its Men+ and Women+ categories, making a mockery of good statistical practice. (Source of photo: Shutterstock)

In other words, Statcan is now randomly allocating the responses it receives from anyone who says they are transgender or non-binary into the Men+ and Women+ categories. Transgender women who remain biological men may thus be included together with other biological women. Doing so is, of course, entirely unscientific. Randomizing data points that have been carefully collected undermines the entire statistical process and weakens the usefulness of any results. Taken to the extreme, such a policy could produce such medical data absurdities as rising rates of prostate cancer among Women+ or a baby boom birthed by Men+. Consider it a triumph of wokeness over basic science and math.

Statistical Irrelevance in Three Easy Steps

As its work becomes more overtly political and ideological following nearly a decade under the Justin Trudeau government, Statistics Canada is endangering its own reputation as a reliable and impartial source of data. The October survey on alcohol consumption contains three examples of this lamentable slide into incoherence which, if not halted promptly, will lead to growing irrelevance.

First is the presentation of controversial new CCSA alcohol consumption guidelines as an official standard by which Canadians should measure their alcohol use. In fact, these guidelines have no federal standing whatsoever; the actual official standards are much more permissive. It is not clear why Statcan would promote these unofficial and scientifically dubious recommendations. In effect, the agency has teamed up with a temperance-minded organization that seems determined to convince Canadians they are drinking too much booze.

This party can’t last forever: Statcan’s recent survey on Canadians’ drinking habits reveals the many ways in which the statistical agency is becoming increasingly ideological in how it collects (and hides) data. If left unchecked, this will eventually lead to its irrelevance as a source of reliable information. (Source of photo: CanadaVisit.org)

Second, Statcan wants to prevent Canadians from having ready access to information about alcohol consumption by Indigenous Canadians. This may be the result of some misconstrued sense of sympathy or obligation towards native groups. In doing so, however, the statistical agency is hiding an important public policy imperative from the rest of the country. It should be the job of Canada’s statistical agency to collect and distribute high-quality data that is relevant to the Canadian condition regardless of whether the resulting inferences are for good or ill. While the $172 million DDAP program was promoted as the means to shine a brighter light on issues of concern for marginalized groups, it now appears to be working in reverse – hiding from public view issues that should concern all Canadians.

Finally, Statcan’s gender-based data collection policy is doing similar damage – and could do vastly more in the future as long-term datasets become ever-more degraded. Also based on the Liberals’ Disaggregated Data Action Plan, the agency now collects responses from Canadians who identify as transgender and non-binary and then randomly allocates these between its Men+ and Women+ categories, undermining the quality and reliability of its own work. While the actual numbers for nonbinary Canadians may be perishingly small, such a flaw should be a big deal for anyone who cares about rigorous statistical validity. And surely Statistics Canada should care.

Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

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C2C Journal

Net Gain: A Common-Sense Climate Change Policy for Canada

Published on

From the C2C Journal

By Robert Lyman
Most Canadians have come to agree that the federal carbon tax needs to go. But while the rallying cry “Axe the Tax!” has been a deadly partisan tool for Pierre Poilievre, it does not constitute a credible election campaign platform, let alone a coherent environmental policy for a new government. The Conservative Party needs to develop both, writes Robert Lyman. The election this past week of Donald Trump as U.S. President creates an urgency to remake Canada’s climate policy on more realistic, sensible grounds. Drawing upon the pragmatic, economics-driven approach of the Copenhagen Consensus, Lyman proposes a middle path that discards the uncompromising, self-destructive ideology of the Justin Trudeau government while recognizing that most Canadians won’t accept doing nothing.

The Justin Trudeau government has made reducing greenhouse gas emissions the pre-eminent goal of public policy. In 2021 it passed the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, binding present and future governments to a process intended to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to set incremental five-year emission reduction targets and plans towards that end. Net zero essentially means eliminating almost all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the consumption of hydrocarbons – crude oil, natural gas and coal – in the Canadian economy, and doing so within 29 years of the new law’s passage.

This presents an immense challenge and is effectively impossible in the intended timeframe. Canadians currently rely on fossil fuels to meet about 73 per cent of their energy needs. These energy sources provide services essential to Canadians’ incomes and wellbeing: secure, reliable and affordable heat, lighting and motive power to move people and goods, as well as the food, medicine and other critical services to sustain them. Without these energy sources, Canadians would all be far poorer, colder, less mobile and less able to compete in the global economy.

Impossible dream: With fossil fuels currently meeting 73 percent of Canada’s overall energy requirements and fulfilling critical needs from heating to medical services, getting to “net zero” emissions anytime soon seems delusional. (Sources of photos: (top two) Pexels; (bottom two) Unsplash)

At least four trends are coming together to make the present policy course untenable:

  1. The Canadian public is becoming far more aware of the financial costs of the emission reduction measures, including especially the impact of “carbon” taxes (technically, taxes on fossil fuel-related emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)) and higher electricity rates from switching away from lowest-cost generating options. Federal climate-related spending, by the government’s own admission (see page 125 of the pdf version of the linked document), is now in the range of $20 billion per year, while the economic cost of working towards net zero has been credibly estimated at $60 billion per year.
  2. The public – notably young people and seniors – are becoming more aware of the effects of climate-related regulations and taxes on the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, and on employment opportunities.
  3. There is a wide and growing disparity between the promises of politicians to reduce emissions and what is actually happening; no national emissions “target” has ever been met or is likely to be met.
  4. Rapidly growing emissions in many developing countries (especially China and India), which now collectively generate 68 percent of the world’s total, demonstrate that net zero will not be achieved globally. Furthermore, reductions achieved regardless of cost in Canada (which produces approximately 1.5 percent of global emissions) will yield negligible global benefits in terms of temperature or weather.

The Temptation of a Different Kind of “Net Zero” Policy

Based on these trends, it might be argued that Canada should perform an immediate policy U-turn and cancel all federal measures founded upon any claim of impending climate catastrophe. This would give new meaning to the term “Net Zero Policy”: a government whose climate change policy is to have no policy. Enthusiasm for such an approach must, however, be tempered by the recognition that it runs counter to the position held by all the main political actors in Canada, including notably the mainstream media. Policy, like politics, best evolves in the realm of compromise and consensus.

“Axe the Tax” has its limits: Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre (top) has pledged to get rid of the hated consumer carbon tax and eliminate comprehensive electric vehicle mandates, but he’s expected to maintain the pricey “producer” carbon tax on industrial emitters. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Paul Daly; (middle) WSDOT, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom) Shutterstock)

Thus, one should consider where might lie a “middle ground” that could garner the support not only of those strongly opposed to all elements of current policy – which can loosely be described as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s core base – but also of moderates, i.e., people who do not doubt the general notion of climate change but who shy away from radical or ruinous policies to deal with it. This disparate category likely includes much of the business community, what used to be called “Red Tories”, some centrist Liberals disaffected with Trudeau and some working-class NDP voters suspicious of that party’s current direction.

Politics at its most basic will require that the Conservatives have something to put in their campaign platform entitled “climate change”, “emissions” or, more broadly, “the environment”. So far, Poilievre has been cobbling together policy ideas seemingly ad hoc. As practically every Canadian knows, he pledges to get rid of the consumer carbon tax – the one everyone pays at the gas pump or on their natural gas heating bill.

Less understood, however, is that Poilievre is widely believed to intend to maintain the “producer” carbon tax on industrial emitters – an equally steep, equally escalating levy that is burdening industry with billions of dollars in additional taxation. Additionally, Poilievre has promised to get rid of some major Liberal-imposed regulations – like the mandate to transition to entirely electric vehicle production by 2035 – but would rely even more heavily on other technocratic regulations at the industrial level.

Some of these policies make sense on their face; some might not make sense at all. What is clear, though, is that the Conservatives do not have a complete climate change and/or environmental policy – at least not one they have shared with the public. Eliminating the consumer carbon tax as an unfairly imposed cost and needless drag on the economy as well as a symbol of climate policy over-reach would be an important and politically popular way to demonstrate a more common-sense approach.

It is not enough, however, and it would leave a new government vulnerable to the accusation that it lacked a coherent and well-considered approach. Attempting to govern without a clearly articulated overall policy on climate would politically damage even a solid majority government; in a minority situation, it could be enough to destabilize the government altogether and prompt an early election.

A Better Way

There is a better way – a middle way between the current ideological approach and a no-policy-policy. It is inspired by the work of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. This ongoing project seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare in a range of areas, from battling diseases like malaria to advancing national economic development to addressing climate change, through methodologies based on welfare economics, which centres on cost-benefit analysis.* The Copenhagen Consensus was conceived and launched in the early 2000s by Bjorn Lomborg, the famous Danish environmentalist. In each policy area examined, subject matter experts present potential policy solutions, which are evaluated and ranked by a panel of economists, thus emphasizing rational prioritization through economic analysis.

In 2009 the Copenhagen Consensus assembled an expert panel to consider the best responses to climate change and rank them as priorities. The panel was asked to answer the question: “If the global community wants to spend up to, say $250 billion per year over the next 10 years to diminish the adverse effects of climate changes, and to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?”

In the resulting report, the top priorities generally focused on investments in scientific research and technology development and commercialization, while measures to reduce CO2 emissions using currently available technologies were ranked lower, because these were found to incur high costs in relation to the expected environmental benefits. Of 15 possible policy measures to respond to climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus panel ranked carbon taxes the very worst – something of obvious relevance to Canada. Also of interest in the Canadian context was the experts’ strong endorsement of research into carbon storage (something that Alberta and Saskatchewan are very enthusiastic about), planning for adaptation and the expansion and protection of forests.

A better way: Founded by Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, the Copenhagen Consensus Center uses rational economic analysis to advance global welfare in areas from battling disease to addressing climate change. (Source of left photo: TED Conference, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Copenhagen Consensus approach to climate policy presumes that human-induced climate change is occurring and that it probably will have adverse effects, but it contends that other social and environmental issues are more serious threats to humanity and should be addressed as higher priorities. Its careful analyses came to recognize the limitations of currently available technologies in achieving a cost-effective transformation of the global energy system. This is why it advocates prioritizing a significant increase in funding of basic science to accelerate the discovery and commercialization of new emission-reducing technologies. It also places priority on measures taken to adapt to (rather than seek to prevent) potential climate changes and to enhance the overall resiliency of the energy system.

Climate Change Policy Implications for Canada

The Copenhagen Consensus’ cost-benefit-based prioritization of climate change policies is applicable to Canadian policy-making and governance approaches in several important and broad areas, at not only the national but international and inter-provincial levels. What follows is a brief, simplified discussion of the most important aspects, keeping in mind that some of these are large issues in themselves and not resolvable overnight.

Remove the Pressure of Overly Ambitious and Arbitrary Targets

Canada has never met any of the targets set at the international or national levels regarding either the magnitude of emission reductions or the arbitrary dates by which these would be reached. The use of such arbitrary and unrealistic targets should be reduced or avoided. A first step in applying the Copenhagen Consensus’ recognition of the immense difficulty and complexity of achieving an energy transition, along with the need for new technologies whose development does not occur according to a government-controlled timetable, would be for Canada to postpone the “Net-Zero by 2050 goal” to at least 2070 if not 2100.

Adopt a Multi-Goal Framework

Canadian climate policy would henceforth be developed within a multi-goal public policy framework. Rather than making emission reduction the preeminent goal, the federal government would seek to optimize climate policy alongside multiple other public policy objectives including economic prosperity (growth, employment, investment and trade), social harmony, environmental quality, financial responsibility, energy security, defence and promotion of good federal-provincial and international relations, among others.

“Arbitrary targets”: Applying Copenhagen Consensus rational analysis would mean abandoning or postponing Canada’s “Net-Zero by 2050” goal and focusing instead on practical environmental improvement projects. Shown at bottom, the Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Plant in Edmonton, Alberta. (Sources of photos: (top) JessicaGirvan/Shutterstock; (bottom) Urban Edmonton)

Prioritize the Real Environmental Problems

Despite what one reads and hears in the mainstream media, Canada has very high environmental quality and the areas that need improvement are relatively few. These include solid waste management, sanitation/wastewater treatment and sulphur dioxide emissions per unit of GDP. Most of these are provincial and/or municipal responsibilities, but the federal government can play a role in funding capital investments. Where the federal government has jurisdiction and must regulate, regulatory efforts should focus on addressing tangible environmental problems with practical, cost-beneficial, affordable solutions to further clean up the air, water and soil, and the results should be measured and tracked by comprehensible and publicly available metrics.

Adhere to Technological Realism

A common-sense approach would recognize that energy transitions take a long time. The pace of transition away from fossil fuels must, accordingly, be guided by the rate at which new scientific discoveries can be applied to the development of new products and services and then commercialized to the point of true economic viability. A common-sense policy approach in Canada would abandon the presumption that governments can and should attempt to hasten the technology commercialization process by “picking winners”, granting large subsidies to favoured firms or otherwise trying to centrally plan the changes in the energy economy. Instead, the new approach would entail higher levels of government funding for basic research and development.

Promote Energy Security and Reliability

A new Canadian climate policy would repeal or substantially amend the Clean Electricity Regulations that mandate the elimination of hydrocarbon-based electricity generation by 2035, a goal that this recent study concludes is completely unfeasible. It would also require that future federal or provincial regulation of GHG emissions be based upon a systematic review of the potential impacts on the viability and competitiveness of Canadian industry. Finally, it would eliminate the impending federal cap on oil and natural gas industry emissions (which was unveiled on November 4 and imposes a 35-percent rollback in GHG emissions by 2030) and take other measures to ensure that Canada, which has the world’s third-largest crude oil reserves as well as world-scale natural gas reserves, can continue to increase energy production to meet the needs of domestic and export markets.

The steep cost of compliance: The Justin Trudeau government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan will add an estimated $55,000 to the average price of a new home, pointing to the need to eliminate costly and pointless regulation. (Source of photo: pnwra, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Reduce Housing Costs

According to the Fraser Institute, the federal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan could add about $55,000 to the average cost of a new home built in Canada. Even more stringent and costly regulations would undoubtedly follow after 2030 to meet the net zero target. A new Canadian climate policy would abandon this plan and leave the establishment of building codes, zoning and construction approvals in the hands of provincial and municipal governments. This would contribute meaningfully to addressing Canada’s housing affordability crisis.

Legislate Wisely

A new policy would include amending or repealing the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. The entire law is a litigation “trigger” because it gives climate activist organizations weapons that they can use to engage in “lawfare” – the strategic use of legal proceedings to hinder, intimidate or delay an opponent.

Depoliticize the Regulation of Energy Infrastructure Projects

A new policy would return the regulation of energy infrastructure and rate-making to one that takes place at arm’s length from government political and policy direction. This would require changes to the federal minister’s control of the Canadian Energy Regulator. It would also be highly desirable to reform the system of environmental assessment and review by placing strict time limits on the duration of infrastructure project reviews. Today, regulatory reviews of major energy projects often take five years or longer to complete, and some have taken over 10 years.

The federal Impact Assessment Act (having last year been found largely unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada) would be substantially amended so that the resulting federal law returns to being a review of the national environmental impacts (and any local impacts as these pertain to areas of clearly federal jurisdiction) rather than an exercise in jurisdictional duplication and an assessment of consequences for the entire planet.

A common-sense climate change policy would also streamline, limit the scope of and quicken the currently often 10-year-long environmental assessment process. Shown, the LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C. under construction, January 2024. (Source of screenshot: Northcoast Drone/YouTube)

The principle of “whoever hears the evidence should decide” would be brought back into the law, with an appeal to the courts on a question of law only and an appeal to the federal Cabinet on a question of policy. This is how the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has worked for several decades.

The arbitrary and harmful bans on oil tanker traffic on the Pacific Coast and on new hydrocarbon exploration and development in Canada’s Far North would be removed.

Promote Federal-Provincial Harmony

In the pre-2000 period, federal climate policy explicitly recognized that measures should not entail undue costs and burdens on any region or province. This went out the window in the Trudeau era and became a leading cause of federal-provincial discord. A new policy would re-institute this as a cardinal principle. Among other things, it would also be essential to ensure that there was ample coordination and consultation with all affected provinces before any new international commitments were made.

Focus on harmony: To promote more efficient cross-border trade, Canada’s regulatory standards should align with those of the U.S. The incoming Donald Trump Administration is likely to discard electric vehicle mandates and “clean” fuel standards, policy shifts that will affect Canada. (Sources of photos: (top) AP Photo/Evan Vucc; (bottom) Sundry Photography/Shutterstock)

Harmonize Canadian and United States Regulatory Regimes

It would be recognized that to facilitate more seamless cross-border trade with Canada’s largest trading partner, the United States requires that regulatory standards and codes developed in Canada, especially involving the regulation of fuel efficiency/emissions intensity of vehicles and appliances, be closely aligned with U.S. federal standards. It is widely expected that the incoming Trump Administration will discard electric vehicle mandates and “clean” fuel standards, policy shifts that clearly will affect Canada. Although this is not to suggest that Canada allow its policies to be dictated by the U.S., close attention should be paid.

Facilitate Truly Responsible Investing

Canada has committed to adopting the new Sustainability Disclosure Standard under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), which imposes mandatory sustainability-related disclosure and climate-related financial disclosure. These and similar regulatory initiatives are increasing the burden on Canadian firms to report not only their own estimates of GHG emissions but also to try to guess those of their suppliers and customers. This is absurd on its face and creates another trigger for endless litigation when such guesses turn out wrong, prompting accusations of fraud. A new Canadian climate policy would severely restrict the use of such accounting measures.

Build Adaptation and Resilience

A new Canadian climate policy would place greatly increased, perhaps primary, emphasis on measures to increase the resilience of Canadian infrastructure and economy to future climate changes. Adaptation measures can avoid or reduce adverse future impacts by, for example, changing human behaviour in advance, such as land use rules that prohibit construction of buildings in flood-prone areas, or by taking actions to protect valued resources, communities and landscapes. Many adaptation measures also increase resilience towards climatic variability such as droughts and storms, making them potentially attractive policies even in the absence of long-term human-induced changes. They can pay dividends to society even if all the concerns about climate change turn out to be greatly exaggerated.

A new climate change policy should include measures to increase the resilience of Canadian infrastructure and the economy to future climate changes. Shown, (at top) a storm in coastal Nova Scotia; (at bottom) flooding in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan; (bottom) The Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward)

Who Might Implement the Copenhagen Consensus in Canada?

It is clear that the Trudeau government is incapable of such a significant policy reform as summarized above. It is at least conceivable that, were Trudeau to be replaced before the next election, his successor might consider some of these measures; conceivable, but not likely. Most probably, the task of implementing such broad policy changes would fall to a new Conservative federal government. The party’s promises to “Axe the Tax” correctly address the mounting public concern about the impact of carbon taxes on the cost of living and competitiveness of Canadian business, as well as the unfairness with which they have been applied.

Fairly soon, however, the current Official Opposition is likely to take on the responsibility of actually governing. To respond effectively to the economic and political threats posed by climate catastrophism, advocates of policy change must go beyond merely targeting individual policies for cancellation based on complaints about the harm they do. They must think through what a realistic, credible, politically palatable – and cost-effective – climate policy framework would look like. The time to start is now.

*Cost-benefit analysis is a tool economists use to compare the estimated costs and benefits (or opportunities) associated with a proposed undertaking. It involves tallying up all the current and projected long-term costs and benefits, estimating the financial equivalent of those for which dollar equivalents are not available, and converting everything into present-value terms using discount rates. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then the decision-makers should rethink whether to proceed.

Robert Lyman is a retired energy economist who served for 25 years as a policy advisor and manager on energy, environment and transportation policy in the Government of Canada.

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