Month: April 2007

Waiting for a Green Plan

Just touched down in Toronto for the media lockup with Environment Minister John Baird. At that lockup Baird will detail the industrial regulations his government will  ring in in order to lower Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and halve emissions of other pollutants. This is a highly managed communications event. There are three separate lockups in downtown Toronto. Media are locked up at Polson Pier in Toronto’s waterfront from noon to 4 pm. Baird will give a press conference inside the lockup at 2:30 or so but no news about the plan will come out until after stock markets close at 4 pm.

Activists are locked up from 2 to 4 pm at a hotel in Yorkville and industry types are locked up at a hotel  near Toronto’s theatre district, also from 2 to 4 pm. On our flight to Toronto this morning, were two key advisors from the Prime Minister’s Office: Mark Cameron and Rohit Gupta. Gupta, who was once a top Bay Street analyst before joining the PMO is briefing financial analysts on the plan.

Meanwhile, in Calgary, Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn will meet with oil and gas industry representatives. That meeting will conclude, we are told, at 4:30 pm Toronto time. No one has told us where that meeting is being held.

And in Montreal, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier will be the government’s point man there.

There are no Baird press conferences after 4 pm although we are told he has a number of one-on-one interviews scheduled with a variety of media organizations.

Prime Minister Harper will also be in Toronto later today — actually, he’ll be north of Toronto in Thornhill — for an unrelated event where he’s speaking to a group of firefighters. His office says he will  take no questions from reporters at that event.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion will respond to the green plan also in Toronto. He is at an event in Richmond Hill this evening. The NDP and Bloc Quebecois will likely respond from Ottawa.

Again — all will be revealed at 4 pm today. CTV Newsnet will  have live coverage starting at that time. My colleague Rosemary Thompson will be in the lockup here and should be reporting as soon as she can once the lockup lifts. Look for lots of coverage as well on Mike Duffy Live tonight (5 pm/8 pm EDT) on Newsnet. And I’ll have a report ready for use by CTV’s regional newscasts over the dinner hour and we may have more to say on CTV National News tonight at 11 pm.

 

Chretien for Yeltsin

Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien will lead the official Canadian group at former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s funeral.  This was put out by the Prime Minister’s Office last yesterday:

PRIME MINISTER ANNOUNCES REPRESENTATIVES FOR CANADA AT STATE FUNERAL OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper has asked Senator Gerald Comeau, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, and former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to represent Canada at the State funeral of the former President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.

The funeral will take place on Wednesday, April 25 at Christ the Saviour’s Cathedral in Moscow, at 2 p.m. local time.

 

Tory Green plan leaked

Yesterday afternoon, at about 4:30, someone in Environment Minister John Baird’s office went to a fax machine, looked up the fax number for one of Baird’s offices, punched the number into the machine, and sent off some confidential documents containing elements of the Government’s green plan.

But there was a problem: The fax number in the directory that the staffer relied on had an error. It was wrong. The staffer had misdialed. Now, most of the time, when someone misdials a fax number, it ends up going to a regular voice line — we’ve all heard that annoying screech when a fax machine gets a wrong number — but in this case, by some great fluke, the staffer who misdialed hit another fax machine — the one in the Opposition Lobby in the House of Commons!

And so it was that a Liberal staffer waltzed by and picked up the fax, saw that it was about Environment stuff and figured it must be for the Liberal Environment Critic David McGuinty. A page delived the misdirected fax to McGuinty while he was sitting in the House of Commons waiting to vote on a couple of motions last night.

McGuinty realized he had something hot so, at about 6:30 or so, he, Stephane Dion, and senior Opposition Leader Office staff gathered to decide what to do.

And so it was that about 8:20 pm last night, the call went out to news organizations that McGuinty was to hold a press conference at the unusual hour of 8:40 pm.

McGuinty would announce that he had received details of Baird’s environmental plan — due to be officially released tomorrow in Toronto — and that it had market-moving information in it. McGuinty called on Baird to immediately release the plan and to call in the RCMP to determine how such a mistake could be made. After all, if it was faxed in error to the Opposition, it could have been faxed in error to anyone.

The Liberals made no copies of the documents they received and refused to tell us what was in the document. McGuinty said he was taking the copies up to the House of Commons Sergeant-At-Arms and would give them to him.

So we immediately started putting out calls to the Governnment and got quick responses from Baird’s office. Turns out what McGuinty had received was a draft of a speech that Baird was planning to give tomorrow, a few hours ahead of the actual release of his plan. The actual plan had not been divulged.

Baird’s office decided to post the whole speech — as yet undelivered — on its Web site.

And so that’s how, this morning, we have some idea of what Baird will announce tomorrow. You can read the leaked speech for yourself and you will find these points:

  • Today (at about 9:30 am Ottawa time), Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn will ban the use of incandescent lightbulbs.
  • Within 5 years, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions will start to drop, and will be cut by 20 per cent compared to today’s levels by 2020.

Many more details to be released today and tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Canada maintains G7 lead in broadband penetration

Canada continues to be tops among the G7 group of industrialized nations when it comes to relative number of high-speed Internet connections in the country, according to the most recent stats released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD measured 23.8 broadband subscribers in Canada per 100 people. But while that was tops in the G7, that was only good enough for ninth spot among the 30 OECD countries. Denmark was tops with 31.9 subscribers per 100 people.

The U.S. was number 15 in the OECD and 5th in the G7 at 19.6 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants.

And get this: Japan leads the OECD in fibre connections directly to the home with 7.9 million fibre-to-the-home subscribers in December 2006. Fibre subscribers alone in Japan outnumber total broadband subscribers in 23 of the 30 OECD countries. (!)

Roll up the Rim, Kandahar-style

The Tim Horton’s coffee shop on Kandahar Airfield is running its own version of the popular “Roll Up the Rim” contest. Here in Canada, the top prize is a Toyota Camry hybrid but for the troops in Afghanistan, the top prize is $1,000. There are five of those top prizes and contestants can also win hats, digital cameras, and Tim Horton’s stuff.

Plus you probably want to hold on to one of those cool ‘camouflage” cups with “Kandahar 2007” printed on them.

This photo was taken by Sgt. Roxanne Crowe, of the Canadian Forces combat camera unit.

Inside the OLO, at the new Globe and Mail

Our friends at The Globe and Mail — CTV and The Globe are owned by the same company — have a new look today for their print edition and their Web site has been expanded and tweaked. Over there, you’ll find Jane Taber’s look inside Stephane Dion’s Opposition Leader’s Office (OLO) and, according to Taber’s sources, it’s not yet clear who’s calling the shots:

In the nearly five months since the convention the complaints have grown to include a lack of consultation with MPs, not enough emphasis on party renewal and dissatisfaction with research and travel staff in the Opposition Leader's Office.

As Mr. Dion continues to struggle in the public opinion polls, there are also concerns that his closest advisers are all members of the Paul Martin team that reduced the Liberal Party to minority status in 2004 and then lost everything in 2006.

 

 

Google accused of aiding "cultural genocide" in Tibet

My good friend Oxblood Ruffin, the top Canuck in that famous hacker outfit The Cult of the Dead Cow, posts an essay accusing search engine giant Google Inc. of aiding in the cultural genocide of Tibet and asking the Silicon Valley-based company to stand up to the Chinese and lead the way in forcing the Chinese government to eliminate Internet censorship.

“Ever since Google announced that it would deploy its emasculated server farms into Mainland China, the search giant's collaboration with Chinese censors has been widely criticized by the human rights community, free speech advocates, and the United States Congress.  Although Google claims to have consulted with many nameless NGOs before deciding to export its censorship technology to China, it failed to take anyone's advice not to proceed.  Google apparently knew better than its critics.  Google even took the step of hiring
someone from the Council on Foreign Relations to improve its public image with respect to corporate responsibility and geo-strategy.  Regardless, Google's arguments for continuing to capitulate to Chinese demands are misplaced, self-serving, and uninformed.  They are also a threat to Western security interests.

…

It would only take one prestigious IT company to put the government of China on notice and create a chain reaction that could, in time, benefit Tibetans and Chinese alike.  Google has a unique opportunity to match its technical innovations with ethical leadership.  It can respectfully assert its values to the government of China and curtail some of its operations.

Baird on CTV's Question Period

On CTV's Question Period today, co-host Craig Oliver asked Environment Minister John Baird about his doom-and-gloom forecast if Canada commits to meeting its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol:

Oliver: Canadians can be forgiven if they don't know exactly who to believe on this issue. Disaster, if we do, disaster if we don’t. We're joined by the Minister of the Environment, John Baird. Mr. Baird, looked to me like you've built in assumptions and then, basically, you got exactly the report you wanted.
Baird: We took the Liberal private member's bill and said, if we wanted to strictly follow the bill, the letter of the law, we'd have to, we'd have to set in various measures that would begin to meet the targets in eight months. But people don't realize is Kyoto actually kicks in 2008. It's an average between '08 and 2012, and the reality is the Liberals seem to be, and Stephane Dion seems to be trying to replace ten years of bad environmental policy with ten years of bad economic policy.
Oliver:: But you know, this is now Sunday afternoon. You've had the weekend to think about it. Reaction in the country doesn't seem to be over the top. But it seems that your report, wouldn't you admit, was a trifle over the top? I mean, recession?
Baird: I think if you look at the economists who validated the report, one of them came out and said maybe he was a little bit light, it could have been worse than what he had signed off on. The reality is that the choice is not between Kyoto strictly adhered to or doing nothing. We'll come forward with a tough approach, a balanced approach, a approach that will allow us to make meaningful cuts in the greenhouse gases that are harmful, destroying the planet, and also being cognizant of keeping Canadians working.
Oliver:: Now obviously this Liberal plan that you said would lead to the kind of economic disaster that you claimed it would, if it became law, would be unacceptable to the government. You would have to make this a no-confidence vote if it ever went in to the house, correct?
Baird: Well, it's already cleared the house, and it's being debated in the senate now.
Oliver:: If it came back from the senate.
Baird: The report is a little bit too cute by half. What it requires is what passed into law is that the government would have 60 days to study it. Then they would send it off to the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy for more study, and it would come back to the house for further debate. We're not going to wait for the senate to act. We’ve already been rolling out a really ambitious agenda to reduce harmful greenhouse gases.
Oliver:: So that bill is never going to see the light of day?
Baird: Well, we'll see what the senate does.
Oliver:: You’re not going to bring it in.
Baird: We'll have to obey the law, but we've brought forward the plan that the bill calls for, and the Liberals don't have a plan. That’s why they asked us to develop one under their criteria for them. The reality is that there was no cost to implementing the protocol, and the Liberals would have done it years ago. You know, Dalton McGuinty, Buzz Hargrove, you know, virtually everyone in the country acknowledges there'll be a substantial cost. I think Canadians are prepared to pay. Canadian industry will have to contribute, but it'll be done in a balanced and meaningful way.
Oliver:: What about C-30 by the way? There's the other bill, which originally started as a government bill, the clean air act, and then was added to when you made a deal with the NDP for a short time. Is that bill ever going to see the light of day? Will that ever come into the Commons?
Baird: We'll see. Jack Layton, I think, tried to make the Parliament work by saying, listen, if we debate this bill right off the go before it was even debated in the house. We sent it to committee. You know, Conservatives on the committee supported amendments from all three of the opposition parties, but the Liberals together with the Bloc Quebecois really didn’t, weren’t particularly cooperative. They put the Liberal campaign platform into the bill, which is not even compliant with Kyoto to begin with.
Oliver:: When are we going to find out what your plan is? We've heard enough about Liberal plan, NDP plan. When are we going to finally find out what you're promoting?
Baird: Well, we've put a lot of initiatives on the table, programs, things in the budget. Things like transportation. Things like car strategy. Things like renewable energy. We also have brought forward a partnership with the provinces. We've got all the provinces now rolling together towards cleaner air and reducing greenhouse gases. The final part will be the industrial emissions strategy. We're going to be for the first time in Canada regulating industry.
Oliver:: When?
Baird: And we'll be coming forward very shortly with that.
Oliver:: I've been hearing “very shortly” since the beginning of March.
Baird: Well we're just about done. I mean this is, this is the most ambitious regulation I think any federal government has ever done. We’re going to regulate the entire industrial sector for both greenhouse gases and for our pollution. We want to make sure it's tough.
Oliver:: Why can't you give us a date?
Baird: We'll be coming forward with it very shortly, Craig, and we'll invite you to come.
Oliver:: Okay. Now, essentially though, it looks to me like you're not ready to make any major compromise, and neither are the Liberals, on how we approach global warming, so basically we're going to eventually go into an election campaign, whenever that is, with two different versions or Canadians are going to have to decide. This is going to be little bit like the free trade debate. Would you say that's true, and would you welcome that?
Baird: I would hope, I would hope long before an election is held that our industrial regulatory strategy is unveiled and is working for Canadians. I think it would be wrong to simply punt it off to the next parliament. We're going to act. You know industry has been fighting tough regulation for years, and being very successful with the Liberals. Environmentalists want perfection. Do you know what? The debate is about to end. The Canadian government's going to act.
Oliver:: Let me finally ask you something that's a little bit away, quite a ways away from what you're discuss, but you're a friend of the Prime Minister and one of his ministers. What about this image consultant who's also said to be a psychic? What's going on there? What do you think of that?
Baird: Well, it's, it's absurd. It's absolutely ludicrous to think that the Prime Minister would have an image consultant or a psychic on staff. That's simply silly. He wouldn't waste his own money, let alone the taxpayers' money on that. What this woman does is she's part of his tour team, a hard-working tour team. Every Prime Minister has had a tour team. In fact, the Prime Minister's is actually smaller than his recent predecessors, and I just think it's silly season here in Ottawa.
Oliver:: Okay, Mr. Baird, thank you.
Baird: Good to be here.
Oliver:: And we look forward to very soon. We've been hearing very soon for so many weeks. I don't know how you put a time on very soon.
Baird: Well it will be shortly, short order.

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A Conservative show of force

Earlier this week, Conservatives in Ottawa staged what I’d call a show of force — letting Ottawa know that, after 15 months of their minority government, that they’ve taken over the joint.

On the same night at Ottawa landmark hotel, the Chateau Laurier, two dinners were held in banquet rooms right across from each other. The combined guests of honour included two Conservative prime ministers; five former Conservative premiers; and dozens of Conservative MPs.

In one room, enjoying filet mignon served very late because of all the speeches ahead of time, were about 500 people including Prime Minister Harper and Prime Minister Mulroney and (listed as I spotted them):

  • Federal cabinet: Secretary of State Jason Kenney, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn.
  • Former premiers: Roy Romanow (Saskatchewan)
  • Senators: David Angus, Noel Kinsella, Raynell Andreychuk, Gerry St. Germain.
  • Conservative MPs: Dave Mackenzie; Dean Del Mastro, Rahm Jaffer, Colin Mayes, Rick Dykstra, Steven Fletcher, James Rajotte, Lee Richardson, Peter Goldring, Ted Menzie 

Across the hall, in another room, the (Preston)Manning Centree for Building Democracy was celebrating its first ‘graduates’. In that room, roast beef was on the menu. Reform Party founders Preston Manning and Cliff Fryars were joined by about 210 people, by my count, which included (in order, pretty much as I spotted them):

  • Federal cabinet: Environment Minister John Baird, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Rona Ambrose, Chief Government Whip Jay Hill, Health Minister Tony Clement, Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg
  • Former premiers: Ralph Klein (Alberta), Bernard Lord (New Brunswick), Gary Filmon (Manitoba), John Hamm (Nova Scotia).
  • Conservative MPs: Art Hangar, Diane Ablonczy, Jim Abbott, Leon Benoit, Michael Chong, Sylvie Boucher, Lynn Yelich, Pierre Poilievre, Chris Warkentin
  • Other notables: Conservative campaign director Doug Finley, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor

—

Montreal paper asks if it's green enough

Neat idea in The Montreal Gazette this morning. The newspaper looks at its own operation and grades itself on its own sustainability footprint. Reporter Marian Scott has a long piece inside the paper about her own paper and the newspaper business generally:

…we looked at every aspect of our business: printing, distribution, advertising sales and newsgathering.
We checked the heating bills for our printing plant and downtown office and counted everything from newsprint – 15,000 metric tonnes this year – to the 61,500 Styrofoam cups used in our coffee machines. What did we learn? The biggest part of our footprint – by far – is paper.

The newsprint in one year’s worth of The Gazette consumes the equivalent of 186,816 trees.

To produce that much newsprint uses enough energy to heat 2,472 homes for a year and enough water to fill 272 swimming pools, and emits as much carbon dioxide (C02) as 1,500 cars.

The paper’s publisher Alan Allnutt says in a letter to readers that this public self-assessment is the beginning of  process that he plans to continue to reduce his paper’s impact on the environment:

Already, we have found that we – and the whole newspaper industry – have come a long way over the past couple of decades. A share of the newsprint The Gazette uses is made of recycled paper and the rest is made from wood chips that are a byproduct of the lumber industry – the trees are not cut down solely to be ground into pulp. The mills that produce our newsprint are state-of-the-art. Our own printing plant, which we opened in Notre Dame de Grace five years ago, is continually making environmental improvements, from using vegetable-based inks to steadily decreasing energy use.

Our product, the daily newspaper, is recycled in growing amounts in Montreal.

Still, further improvements in all these areas are inevitable. Increasing use of online versions of newspapers, like the digital Gazette, will help.

There are other parts of our operation where we don't do nearly as well as we'd like. We're an information business, and it's clear in our offices that the dream of a paperless society has not come true. We have recycling bins everywhere, but we shouldn't be using all the paper that ends up in them. As of this week, company policy will require everyone to do double-sided printing and copying whenever and wherever possible.

The delivery of the paper is heavily dependent on vehicles, and while it will be harder to find a solution to that, we know that education of our distributors and carriers will be a good first step.

We are, after all, in the same boat as everyone else: We have to balance our desire to do better on the environmental front with our need to prosper as a business – providing a vital service to our readers, as well as jobs for our employees. We do believe, however, that becoming a greener, more environmentally sustainable operation will be good both for society and for business.

 

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