Canada's PM Trudeau claims climate champion role while embracing Big Oil?
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has offered himself as a global leader on climate change, unveiling an ambitious new environmental plan...
May 23, 2017 — Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has offered himself as a global leader on climate change, unveiling an ambitious new environmental plan that includes phasing out coal-fired power plants, a tax on carbon, and big investments in renewable energy.
But at the same time, Trudeau has promised to help expand Canada’s role as an energy exporter.
He’s backed controversial pipeline projects including Keystone XL that would cross into the United States and is pushing for big new investments in the tar sands oil fields of northern Alberta.
Trudeau insists that he’s striving for a kind of third way, embracing big oil while also acknowledging the imminent threat of climate change and respecting aboriginal sovereignty. Critics say he’s making promises that contradict each other and risks alienating the progressive voters who elected him in 2015.
Trudeau the climate champion
Speaking last year before the United Nations assembly in New York City, Prime Minister Trudeau made the case that swift action is needed to curb carbon pollution, especially by prosperous developed societies like Canada.
“We know that it will be the world’s poorest citizens who will be hardest hit by climate change, displace by rising sea levels, left hungry by failed crops, more vulnerable to disease,” Trudeau said.
Last June, Trudeau unveiled a sweeping national plan to curb carbon pollution and to begin pivoting his country to a post-oil economy. “Today we made an important down-payment on that cleaner future with a new continental climate change strategy,” he said, addressing Parliament in Ottawa.
Trudeau’s plan is big and bold and it builds on promises he made at the climate summit in Paris. The Liberal leader wants to phase out Canada’s use of coal to generate electricity, taxing carbon while investing hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars in renewable energy. This is the Justin Trudeau – green, progressive, sort of the anti-Donald Trump – who often grabs headlines in the US.
Trudeau the friend of big oil
But Trudeau had a very different message and tone when he spoke in March at a gathering of oil and gas executives in Houston, Texas, where he promised to expand development of Canada’s tar sand oil fields. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” he said.
Industry seemed startled to hear a card-carrying Liberal from Canada speaking their language. “We’re on our way to getting three new pipeline projects underway, which will help connect Canada’s oil patch with energy markets around the world,” Trudeau declared.
The prime minister was such a big hit with oil executives, even the presenter up on stage seemed a little surprised. “You’re getting a standing ovation,” he said.
But this balancing act – climate warrior on the one hand, oil industry booster on the other – is starting to make people on both really angry.
"He's as big a hypocrite as there is."
“I don’t know whether he’s confused or if he’s just a straight up liar, but those seem like the two possibilities,” said Bill McKibben, a climate change activist from Vermont, one of the founders of 350.0rg. He wrote a scathing essay about Trudeau published in newspapers and websites across the U.S. and Canada.
McKibben says the science is clear. If Canadians dig up the tar sands, which are thick with carbon and mercury and heavy metals, Trudeau's environmental promises turn to smoke.
“Donald Trump is a danger and a charlatan, but at least he’s not a hypocrite. That’s what Trudeau is. As long as he’s trying to build Energy East and all these other pipelines, Keystone, he’s as big a hypocrite as there is.”
McKibben is furious in part because Trudeau embraced one of President Trump’s first executive actions, giving Federal approval for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. In fact, Trudeau lobbied hard for the Canadian project that would pipe tar sands oil across tribal lands in North Dakota toward refineries on the Gulf Coast.
“In both the conversations I’ve had with President Trump now, Keystone XL came up as a topic and I reiterated my support for the project,” Trudeau acknowledged.
Canada's "oil patch" shapes the debate
To understand how Trudeau wound up in this tight spot, trying to squeeze big oil into an agenda that also includes big environmental action, you have to travel to the part of Canada that Trudeau calls the oil patch.
Fort McMurray is a gritty industrial town in northern Alberta. Draw a line due north from Montana for about 800 miles and you find a vast network of strip mines and processing plants on the bank of the Athabasca River.
On the outskirts of Fort McMurray sits a small theme park and science center that celebrates big oil. On this afternoon, kids are playing in miniature hard-hats. People here are proud of what they do, proud of the energy they pull from a cold, hard land.
One of the video screens shows a cheerful cartoon figure boasting about Alberta’s tar sands industry: “Did you know that this very moment thousands of tons of oil sand are being mined by some of the biggest machines in the world?”
Tom Brennan is an oilfield worker, a mechanic in his late twenties, who’s come with his girlfriend to show her what his industry is about. He said he's heard enough about the environment.
“The average blue collar person, you’re attacking their livelihood,” he said, noting that Alberta is in the middle of a recession caused by slumping oil prices. Brennan wants Canada’s government to focus less on climate and the environment and more on creating a new generation of high-paying oil jobs for people like him.
“This is what [working class Canadians] know and what they do and we’re the general mass. This is their bread and butter. You take it away from them and they’re faced with, what the hell do we do after that?”
So in Trudeau's balancing act, this is one of the most fragile, precarious pivot points. Polls show that people in Canada's liberal cities – places like Toronto, Montral, and Vancouver — want action on climate. They want it to be real and they want it now. But out here in the oil patch, the conversation is really different.
Anger from oil workers
After unveiling his carbon tax plan, Trudeau held a town hall meeting in Alberta. Sitting on a stool with sleeves rolled up, he got blasted by an oil industry worker: “There is one of two things, Mr. Prime Minister, you’re either a liar or you’re confused and I’m beginning to think it’s both. You cannot come down to this province and attack the single biggest employer.”
Trudeau is one of the most skilled politicians you'll encounter, with famously boyish good looks and a talent for talking about complicated policies in down-to-earth, layman's terms. But this exchange clearly knocked him off balance.
“We have to manage a transition [from oil] and that’s why I have approved pipelines that the previous government wasn’t able to do.” A prime minister who offers himself as a climate change pioneer found himself boasting that he’s done more for the oil industry than Canada’s last prime minister, Conservative Stephen Harper, who was former oil industry executive.
Elizabeth May says this is a risky game for a Liberal prime minister to play. She heads Canada’s Green Party and serves as a member of parliament from British Columbia. She's been a Trudeau supporter and says she’s had private conversations left her convinced he knows the science, knows that the earth's climate is running out of time.
May thinks Trudeau is trying to square a circle that just can't be squared. “It’s not a political test. It’s a test of character. And it’s a test for him as a human being. What’s more important? Your kids’ future? Or a standing ovation in Houston?”
"The environment and the economy go together."
The Trudeau government insists this balance can work. Trudeau is so committed to this idea that he appointed a trade lawyer, not a scientist or an energy expert, to serve as Canada's minister of the environment and climate change. “I’m as much an economic minister as I am an environment minister,” Catherine McKenna said during a visit to Washington this spring.
McKenna pointed to Justin Trudeau's success at that oil industry conference in Houston as a sign of where Canada is going. “Who would have thought, the Prime Minister got three standing ovations from oil and gas companies. He made the case the environment and the economy go together,” she said.
Even as Canada aims to export more tar sands oil, the government here says the country's other promises — cutting back the use of coal, developing more renewables — will mean overall reductions in carbon pollution. But the new pipelines and coastal refineries Trudeau hopes to build are long-term investments. Critics and industry leaders alike say they'll tie Canada's future to big oil for decades to come.
