NDP leadership candidate Thomas Mulcair wants tar sands subsidies to stop

As a former Quebec environment minister, Thomas Mulcair knows how to mix it up on ecological issues.

However, in a sit-down interview at the Georgia Straight offices, the Outremont MP and candidate for the leadership of the federal NDP said it would be “unrealistic” to call for a total ban on further tar-sands exploration in Canada.

“If you look at the fact that it represents eight to 10 percent of our economy, you don’t call for the absolute shutting-down,” Mulcair said. “You have to remove the subsidies, the $1.6 billion that we were giving to the tar sands [annually]. Even Canada’s own finance minister turned that [removal] down, but in the wake of the G8 meetings in 2010, it had been called for all countries to stop subsidizing their oil-production sector. We’ve got to get back to a level playing field.”

More than once during the interview, Mulcair said the true costs of tar-sands exploration need to be “internalized” so that market prices reflect the environmental degradation resulting from the energy-intense process of refining raw bitumen from unconventional deposits whose extraction leaves huge tracts of scarred land and tailings ponds in its wake. This can be done by switching from subsidies to a “polluter pay” or “user pay” type of pricing for fossil-fuel extraction, where money goes to fund renewables as finite resources are wound down, Mulcair explained.

Mulcair said he has a quote from David Suzuki translated into French on the front page of his calendar in Ottawa. The quote, wherein Suzuki claims “we are the environment, and the environment is us,” is featured in footage captured by Toronto filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson for his 2010 documentary about Suzuki’s life, Force of Nature.

Suzuki has often criticized economists in general for externalizing environmental costs, meaning the true costs associated with resource extraction are hidden or deliberately distorted.

“We are, in fact, subsidizing the tar-sands production with taxpayers’ money, and we’re at the same time removing the smallish subsidies—the one cent per kilowatt-hour—for newer, clean renewables,” Mulcair claimed. “It’s clear that the same people who are pleading for a pristine marketplace that effects the best choices based on that marketplace are, in fact, skewing the process.”

Speaking in more general terms earlier in the interview, Mulcair claimed that “a succession of Canadian governments have been an international embarrassment on the environment.

“It started with the Liberals, who, in an incredibly cynical move, signed Kyoto with no plan and no intention to meet its short-term targets,” he added. “You don’t have to take my word for that. Eddie Goldenberg, Jean Chrétien’s former chief of staff, admitted as much in a speech to the Economic Club in London, Ontario, in March 2007.”

Mulcair is especially critical of the Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Late NDP leader Jack Layton—along with people from many other organizations—was also critical of Canada’s record on the environment under Harper, a fact the Straight relayed to Environment Minister Peter Kent last month.

“I would respectfully disagree with those you cite in their criticism,” Kent—a former TV journalist and anchorman with NBC in the U.S. and CBC in Canada—told the Straight in Vancouver’s Chinatown on October 13. “Canada has, as a signatory to Copenhagen and to the Cancún agreements, made a very firm—and it is an ambitious commitment to achieve 17-percent reductions by 2020.”

Kent said he does not feel that the target is low; he feels it is realistic. Kent also claimed he has seen other targets from other countries that are ambitious but unrealistic. However, Mulcair said the Conservatives have no plan to achieve even this realistic goal.

“It’s not an accident that the Conservatives found a news reader to become environment minister,” Mulcair added of Kent, brother of Calgarian filmmaker and former news anchor Arthur “Scud Stud” Kent. “They simply wanted someone to parrot their lines, the same way they are still using our diplomats right now to parrot their lines on the tar sands. It’s an extraordinary circumstance to watch him [Kent] stand up day after day after day and give answers that really don’t make any sense.”

Mulcair admitted it is tough for politicians to push the environment at election time if a climate of fear prevails.

“It’s a bit of a game right now in Canada,” Mulcair said. “Anytime you talk about the environment, you simply get the answer, ‘Oh, they’re trying to kill the economy.’ ”

However, Mulcair said it is possible for popular sentiment to reach the political sphere and policymakers in Ottawa. He cited his home province, Quebec, where local opposition led to awareness of the damage caused by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract unconventional deposits of natural gas from shale rock formations. This eventually led to a provincewide moratorium on the process there, Mulcair added.

“They were driven out of the province.”