Economy
The people will reject the globalist ‘climate’ agenda
From the Fraser Institute
” representatives of governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has revolted. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates “represent.” “
It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, such as the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global total CO2 emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Likewise, the 2015 Paris Agreement contained historic language binding countries to further deep emission reductions, yet the COP28 declaration begins (paragraph I.2) with an admission that the parties are not complying.
Nonetheless we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus. COP agreements used to focus on one thing—targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto of global central planning. Some 90,000 government functionaries aspire, in their own words, to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design, and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take it away and they’d appeal to something else.
After all, the climate change issue doesn’t necessitate these plans. Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, etc. Mainstream scientific findings, coupled with mainstream economic analysis, prescribes moderate emission-pricing policies that rely much more on adaptation than mitigation.
The fact that the UAE Consensus is currently non-binding is beside the point. What matters is what the COP28 delegates said they want to achieve. Two facts stand out—the final consensus document announced plans that would cause enormous economic harm if implemented, and it was unanimously approved by everyone in the room.
The first point is best illustrated by the language around eliminating fossil fuels. Climate policy is supposed to be about optimally reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As technology develops to decouple emissions from fuel use, there may eventually be no need to reduce the latter, but activist delegates insisted on the language anyway, making it an end in itself. Fossil fuels are essential for our economic standard of living, and 30 years of economic analysis has consistently shown that despite GHG emissions, phasing them out would do far more harm than good to humanity. Yet the Consensus statement ignored that, even while claiming to be guided by “the science.”
The second point refers to the fact that representatives of governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has revolted. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates “represent.” Other than a few elected officials, we didn’t vote for any of them. And even if some heads of state go to a COP meeting intending to oppose the overall agenda, they would not be able to stop it and would be browbeaten into signing the final package.
The UAE Consensus is the latest signal that the real fault line in contemporary society is not right versus left, it’s the people versus (for lack of a better word) the globalists. A decade ago this term was only heard on the conspiracy fringe but has since migrated towards the mainstream as the most apt descriptor of an enormous and influential transnational permanent bureaucracy, which aspires to run everything, even to the public’s detriment, while insulating themselves from democratic limits.
A hallmark of globalists is the way they exempt themselves from rules they want to impose on everyone else. COP28 and Davos meetings perfectly illustrate this—thousands of delegates flying in, many on private jets, to be wined and dined while telling everyone else to learn to do without.
In the cases of both COVID-19 and climate change, the same elite has proven itself to be adept, not at using science to support good decision-making, but at invoking “the science” as a talisman to justify everything they do including censoring public debate. Complex and uncertain matters get reduced to dogmatic slogans by technocrats who ensure political leaders are force fed a narrow one-sided information stream. Experts outside the process are accorded standing based solely on their obeisance to the preferred narrative, not their knowledge or qualifications. Critics are attacked as purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and so the existence of opposition to government plans becomes proof of the need to suppress free speech.
But eventually the people get the last word. I am struck, in this context, that despite nonstop fearmongering about an alleged climate crisis, the public tolerates climate policy only insofar as it doesn’t cost anything.
The climate movement might think that by embedding itself in the globalist elite it can accelerate policy adoption without needing to win elections. I think the opposite is happening. The globalists have coopted the climate issue to sell a grotesque central planning agenda that the public has repeatedly rejected. If the UAE Consensus is the future of climate policy, its failure is guaranteed.
Author:
It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, such as the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global total CO2 emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Likewise, the 2015 Paris Agreement contained historic language binding countries to further deep emission reductions, yet the COP28 declaration begins (paragraph I.2) with an admission that the parties are not complying.
Nonetheless we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus. COP agreements used to focus on one thing—targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto of global central planning. Some 90,000 government functionaries aspire, in their own words, to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design, and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take it away and they’d appeal to something else.
After all, the climate change issue doesn’t necessitate these plans. Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, etc. Mainstream scientific findings, coupled with mainstream economic analysis, prescribes moderate emission-pricing policies that rely much more on adaptation than mitigation.
The fact that the UAE Consensus is currently non-binding is beside the point. What matters is what the COP28 delegates said they want to achieve. Two facts stand out—the final consensus document announced plans that would cause enormous economic harm if implemented, and it was unanimously approved by everyone in the room.
The first point is best illustrated by the language around eliminating fossil fuels. Climate policy is supposed to be about optimally reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As technology develops to decouple emissions from fuel use, there may eventually be no need to reduce the latter, but activist delegates insisted on the language anyway, making it an end in itself. Fossil fuels are essential for our economic standard of living, and 30 years of economic analysis has consistently shown that despite GHG emissions, phasing them out would do far more harm than good to humanity. Yet the Consensus statement ignored that, even while claiming to be guided by “the science.”
The second point refers to the fact that representatives of governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has revolted. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates “represent.” Other than a few elected officials, we didn’t vote for any of them. And even if some heads of state go to a COP meeting intending to oppose the overall agenda, they would not be able to stop it and would be browbeaten into signing the final package.
The UAE Consensus is the latest signal that the real fault line in contemporary society is not right versus left, it’s the people versus (for lack of a better word) the globalists. A decade ago this term was only heard on the conspiracy fringe but has since migrated towards the mainstream as the most apt descriptor of an enormous and influential transnational permanent bureaucracy, which aspires to run everything, even to the public’s detriment, while insulating themselves from democratic limits.
A hallmark of globalists is the way they exempt themselves from rules they want to impose on everyone else. COP28 and Davos meetings perfectly illustrate this—thousands of delegates flying in, many on private jets, to be wined and dined while telling everyone else to learn to do without.
In the cases of both COVID-19 and climate change, the same elite has proven itself to be adept, not at using science to support good decision-making, but at invoking “the science” as a talisman to justify everything they do including censoring public debate. Complex and uncertain matters get reduced to dogmatic slogans by technocrats who ensure political leaders are force fed a narrow one-sided information stream. Experts outside the process are accorded standing based solely on their obeisance to the preferred narrative, not their knowledge or qualifications. Critics are attacked as purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and so the existence of opposition to government plans becomes proof of the need to suppress free speech.
But eventually the people get the last word. I am struck, in this context, that despite nonstop fearmongering about an alleged climate crisis, the public tolerates climate policy only insofar as it doesn’t cost anything.
The climate movement might think that by embedding itself in the globalist elite it can accelerate policy adoption without needing to win elections. I think the opposite is happening. The globalists have coopted the climate issue to sell a grotesque central planning agenda that the public has repeatedly rejected. If the UAE Consensus is the future of climate policy, its failure is guaranteed.
Author:
From Resource Works
By Geoff Russ
For major projects, what is old is new again
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s second wave of “nation-building projects” sounds transformative: six new energy and mining proposals, plus a northern corridor, added to the first tranche unveiled in September, and included in the freshly passed federal budget for the fiscal year.
Together, Ottawa says, they amount to more than $116 billion in investment and are central to “realizing Canada’s full potential as an energy superpower.” That is the pitch in the federal news release.
Look closely, though, and a different picture emerges. For major projects, what is old is new again. Almost every file now being “fast-tracked” was already on the books, sometimes for a decade or more.
The new referrals to the Major Projects Office (MPO) are all familiar: the Nisga’a-led Ksi Lisims LNG terminal on B.C.’s north coast; BC Hydro’s North Coast Transmission Line; Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins; Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Matawinie mine north of Montréal; Northcliff’s Sisson tungsten project in New Brunswick; and the Inuit-owned Iqaluit Nukkiksautiit hydro project in Nunavut. The “Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor” in B.C. and the Yukon is added as a long-range concept.
Long timelines and longstanding obstacles
None of these is a fresh idea. As the Globe and Mail notes in a project-by-project rundown, Ksi Lisims has been in development for years and already faces two Federal Court challenges from nearby First Nations and opposition from Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders who fought Coastal GasLink. The North Coast Transmission Line was identified in 2023, with B.C. legislation to fast-track it and term-sheet co-ownership deals with First Nations already in place. The Sisson mine has been stalled at the pre-construction stage for more than a decade, despite earlier approvals and new public money to update its feasibility study.
Iqaluit hydro is hardly a novelty either. As Globe reporting shows, dam concepts near the city have been studied since the mid-2000s, with the current Inuit-owned proposal building on that earlier work and backed by federal engineering funds. The Crawford nickel project was acquired in 2019 and has spent years lining up investors and a complex financing stack, documented in both CBC and Financial Post coverage. Matawinie received its Quebec authorization in 2021, has an impact-benefit agreement with the local Atikamekw Nation and now enjoys federal price-floor guarantees on graphite.
The first tranche, announced in September, follows the same pattern. LNG Canada Phase 2 in Kitimat, new nuclear at Darlington, Contrecoeur container capacity at the Port of Montréal, McIlvenna Bay in Saskatchewan and the Red Chris expansion in B.C. were all in various stages of planning long before Carney entered office. The MPO is not inventing a new project pipeline; it is trying to accelerate the one Ottawa already had.
Acceleration is the point — and industry welcomes it
Acceleration is, to be fair, the point. The Calgary-based MPO, led by former Trans Mountain head Dawn Farrell, is designed to run permits in parallel, not one after another, and to coordinate financing through bodies like the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund. Farrell told CBC that work which might have taken “five or six more years” could be cut to roughly two. In a country where large projects regularly die of regulatory exhaustion, that is significant.
Industry likes the signal. Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby says MPO referral “puts us in the fast lane,” even without the more controversial “national interest” label in Bill C-5 that would allow cabinet to set aside parts of the Fisheries Act, Species at Risk Act or Impact Assessment Act. Inuit proponents of the Iqaluit project welcome Carney’s description of their hydro plan as a breakthrough for Arctic sovereignty, replacing millions of litres of diesel.
But a superpower strategy this is not
Still, if this is what becoming an “energy superpower” looks like, it is a modest start.
Notably absent from Carney’s list is any new oil pipeline. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spent months pushing a concept for a bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to the northern B.C. coast, doing provincial groundwork in the hope a private proponent will one day take it over. A BBC report sets out the feud with B.C. Premier David Eby, who dismisses the idea as “fictional” and “political” and insists no company wants it, accusing Smith of jeopardizing B.C.’s LNG ambitions. Smith has called that stance “un-Canadian.”
Western frustration is growing. In the National Post, Whitecap Resources chief executive Grant Fagerheim warns of “fury from Alberta and Saskatchewan” if a pipeline to tidewater is never prioritized and argues producers are tired of a U.S.-dominated system where Canadian barrels sell at a discount while others capture the margins. He favours an energy corridor carrying oil, gas, power and rail, not just more rhetoric about nation-building.
Northern ambitions lag behind rhetoric
Another gap is the North. The Indigenous-led Arctic Gateway partnership, Manitoba and Ottawa are already spending heavily on the Hudson Bay Railway and planning new storage and loading systems to expand the Port of Churchill for grain, potash, critical minerals and Arctic resupply. Carney talks up a “huge host of opportunities” in northern Manitoba, but Churchill sits only on the MPO’s lower-profile “transformative strategies” list, with a full plan now pushed out to 2026.
Meanwhile, the one project that has fundamentally shifted Canada’s oil export position is the long-delayed Trans Mountain expansion. As Resource Works points out, TMX now sends diluted bitumen from Burnaby to Asia, shrinking the old “captive discount” and giving Canada genuine leverage in global markets. But TMX predates Carney’s government by more than a decade and only exists because Ottawa nationalized a struggling private pipeline to get it built.
Evolution, not revolution
Carney’s major-projects push is real, and for the companies involved, the prospect of faster permits and clearer federal backing is very good news. Yet for a government that talks about mobilizing a trillion dollars and remaking Canada as an energy superpower, the current list is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For now, Ottawa is mostly trying to build what was already on the drawing board. The tougher choices on pipelines, ports and interprovincial trade still lie in front of it.
Headline photo credit to THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
From the Fraser Institute
By Jason Childs
From 2015 to 2024, the government sector in Canada—including federal, provincial and municipal—added 950,000 jobs, which accounted for roughly 30 per cent of total employment growth in the country, finds a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“In Canada, employment in the government sector has skyrocketed over the last 10 years,” said Jason Childs, a professor of economics at the University of Regina, senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Examining the Growth of Public-Sector Employment Since 2015.
Over the same 10-year period (2015-2024), government-sector employment grew at an annual average rate of 2.7 per cent compared to only 1.7 per cent for the private sector. The study also examines employment growth by province. Government employment (federal, provincial, municipal) grew at a higher annual rate than the private sector in every province except Manitoba over the 10-year period.
The largest gaps between government-sector employment growth compared to the private sector were in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. The smallest gaps were in Alberta and Prince Edward Island.
“The larger government’s share of employment, the greater the ultimate burden on taxpayers to support government workers—government does not pay for itself,” Childs said.
A related study (Measuring the Cost to Canadians from the Growth in Public Administration, also authored by Childs) finds that, from 2015 to 2024, across all levels of government in Canada, the number of public administrators (many of who
work in government ministries, agencies and other offices that do not directly provide services to the public) grew by more than 328,000—or 3.5 per cent annually (on average).
“If governments want to reduce costs, they should look closely at the size of their public administration,” Childs said.
Examining the Growth of Public Sector Employment Since 2015
Jason Childs
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