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Ongoing water crisis is a national embarrassment

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From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Matthew Cameron and Ken Coates

Cameron and Coates call for an increased sense of urgency from government and offer several policy initiatives to improve water access for First Nations communities.

Access to clean drinking water is a necessity, yet delivering it to all 40 million Canadians, particularly Indigenous communities, has proven to be elusive. Successive federal governments have both acknowledged the problem, yet have failed to fully eradicate drinking water advisories, which remain in place in at least 27 Indigenous communities.

In a new paper, The water conundrum and Indigenous communities in CanadaMatthew Cameron and Indigenous Program Director Ken Coates shed light on the water insecurity crisis on Canada’s reservations and recommend a number of multijurisdictional policy initiatives, urging policymakers adopt an increased sense of urgency in systematically address the problem – not just throwing money at it.

The authors identify several key barriers to resolving the water insecurity crisis:

  • Community location: some communities are located too far away from freshwater reserves; many of these places were settled in the 1950s and 1960s, without scientific study of the suitability of their locations for water purposes;
  • Long-term maintenance: trained personnel often work in stressful conditions with little or no local backup, making it difficult to find and retain these workers;
  • Little margin for error: nationally determined Canadian water quality standards are, appropriately, difficult to meet, setting a high bar for small, isolated communities;,
  • Poor national understanding of the challenges: Canadians who live off reservation are largely unaware of the urgency of the crisis in Indigenous communities.

Cameron and Coates recommend the following policy initiatives to address the crisis:

  • Continuous transparency; authorities should make information about water delivery systems and water treatment facility down-times available to the public;
  • Region-wide water management systems: these would provide for a sharing of personnel, professional backup, and collective learning about water systems maintenance and treatment facilities, thereby creating a maintenance economy;
  • Option of relocation: in extreme cases, where water supplies are unacceptable and alternatives too expensive, communities could be given the option of voluntary relocation and rebuilding in a location with better access to potable water;
  • More attention to remote solutions: giving agency to local Indigenous governments and/or companies to resolve the crisis;
  • Increasing urgency: Indigenous Canadians wonder if the country cares or even knows about their lack of access to clean water– greater awareness among Canadians can push politicians to seek policy alternatives.

“Understanding the challenges in full, handling emergencies expeditiously, developing and implementing long-term solutions, and committing publicly to providing First Nations with adequate and appropriate water supplies is not an act of generosity or an optional exercise. Maintaining safe drinking water is a foundational responsibility of government,” conclude Cameron and Coates.

“Further delays should not be acceptable.”

To learn more, read the full paper here:


***

Matthew Cameron is a Yukon-based researcher and academic. He is an Instructor at Yukon University, where he has taught in the Liberal Arts, Indigenous Governance and Multimedia and Communications programs since 2016.

Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow and Director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a Professor of Indigenous Governance at Yukon University.

Business

Saskatchewan becomes first Canadian province to fully eliminate carbon tax

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian province to free itself entirely of the carbon tax.

On March 27, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the removal of the provincial industrial carbon tax beginning April 1, boosting the province’s industry and making Saskatchewan the first carbon tax free province.

“The immediate effect is the removal of the carbon tax on your Sask Power bills, saving Saskatchewan families and small businesses hundreds of dollars a year. And in the longer term, it will reduce the cost of other consumer products that have the industrial carbon tax built right into their price,” said Moe.

Under Moe’s direction, Saskatchewan has dropped the industrial carbon tax which he says will allow Saskatchewan to thrive under a “tariff environment.”

“I would hope that all of the parties running in the federal election would agree with those objectives and allow the provinces to regulate in this area without imposing the federal backstop,” he continued.

The removal of the tax is estimated to save Saskatchewan residents up to 18 cents a liter in gas prices.

The removal of the tax will take place on April 1, the same day the consumer carbon tax will reduce to 0 percent under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction. Notably, Carney did not scrap the carbon tax legislation: he just reduced its current rate to zero. This means it could come back at any time.

Furthermore, while Carney has dropped the consumer carbon tax, he has previously revealed that he wishes to implement a corporation carbon tax, the effects of which many argued would trickle down to all Canadians.

The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) celebrated Moe’s move, noting that the carbon tax was especially difficult on farmers.

“It puts our farming community and our business people in rural municipalities at a competitive disadvantage, having to pay this and compete on the world stage,” he continued.

“We’ve got a carbon tax on power — and that’s going to be gone now — and propane and natural gas and we use them more and more every year, with grain drying and different things in our farming operations,” he explained.

“I know most producers that have grain drying systems have three-phase power. If they haven’t got natural gas, they have propane to fire those dryers. And that cost goes on and on at a high level, and it’s made us more noncompetitive on a world stage,” Huber decalred.

The carbon tax is wildly unpopular and blamed for the rising cost of living throughout Canada. Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $80 per tonne.

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Automotive

Electric cars just another poor climate policy

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From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

The electric car is widely seen as a symbol of a simple, clean solution to climate change. In reality, it’s inefficient, reliant on massive subsidies, and leaves behind a trail of pollution and death that is seldom acknowledged.

We are constantly reminded by climate activists and politicians that electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. Canada and many other countries have promised to prohibit the sale of new gas and diesel cars within a decade. But if electric cars are really so good, why would we need to ban the alternatives?

And why has Canada needed to subsidize each electric car with a minimum $5,000 from the federal government and more from provincial governments to get them bought? Many people are not sold on the idea of an electric car because they worry about having to plan out where and when to recharge. They don’t want to wait for an uncomfortable amount of time while recharging; they don’t want to pay significantly more for the electric car and then see its used-car value decline much faster. For people not privileged to own their own house, recharging is a real challenge. Surveys show that only 15 per cent of Canadians and 11 per cent of Americans want to buy an electric car.

The main environmental selling point of an electric car is that it doesn’t pollute. It is true that its engine doesn’t produce any CO₂ while driving, but it still emits carbon in other ways. Manufacturing the car generates emissions—especially producing the battery which requires a large amount of energy, mostly achieved with coal in China. So even when an electric car is being recharged with clean power in BC, over its lifetime it will emit about one-third of an equivalent gasoline car. When recharged in Alberta, it will emit almost three-quarters.

In some parts of the world, like India, so much of the power comes from coal that electric cars end up emitting more CO₂ than gasoline cars. Across the world, on average, the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car using the global average mix of power sources over its lifetime will emit nearly half as much CO₂ as a gasoline-driven car, saving about 22 tonnes of CO₂.

But using an electric car to cut emissions is incredibly ineffective. On America’s longest-established carbon trading system, you could buy 22 tonnes of carbon emission cuts for about $660 (US$460). Yet, Ottawa is subsidizing every electric car to the tune of $5,000 or nearly ten times as much, which increases even more if provincial subsidies are included. And since about half of those electrical vehicles would have been bought anyway, it is likely that Canada has spent nearly twenty-times too much cutting CO₂ with electric cars than it could have. To put it differently, Canada could have cut twenty-times more CO₂ for the same amount of money.

Moreover, all these estimates assume that electric cars are driven as far as gasoline cars. They are not. In the US, nine-in-ten households with an electric car actually have one, two or more non-electric cars, with most including an SUV, truck or minivan. Moreover, the electric car is usually driven less than half as much as the other vehicles, which means the CO₂ emission reduction is much smaller. Subsidized electric cars are typically a ‘second’ car for rich people to show off their environmental credentials.

Electric cars are also 320440 kilograms heavier than equivalent gasoline cars because of their enormous batteries. This means they will wear down roads faster, and cost societies more. They will also cause more air pollution by shredding more particulates from tire and road wear along with their brakes. Now, gasoline cars also pollute through combustion, but electric cars in total pollute more, both from tire and road wear and from forcing more power stations online, often the most polluting ones. The latest meta-study shows that overall electric cars are worse on particulate air pollution. Another study found that in two-thirds of US states, electric cars cause more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars.

These heavy electric cars are also more dangerous when involved in accidents, because heavy cars more often kill the other party. A study in Nature shows that in total, heavier electric cars will cause so many more deaths that the toll could outweigh the total climate benefits from reduced CO₂ emissions.

Many pundits suggest electric car sales will dominate gasoline cars within a few decades, but the reality is starkly different. A 2023-estimate from the Biden Administration shows that even in 2050, more than two-thirds of all cars globally will still be powered by gas or diesel.

Source: US Energy Information Administration, reference scenario, October 2023
Fossil fuel cars, vast majority is gasoline, also some diesel, all light duty vehicles, the remaining % is mostly LPG.

Electric vehicles will only take over when innovation has made them better and cheaper for real. For now, electric cars run not mostly on electricity but on bad policy and subsidies, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, blocking consumers from choosing the cars they want, and achieving virtually nothing for climate change.

Bjørn Lomborg

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