Leaving the Liberals these By-elections
For this real-world example, YOUR household has an ever-growing credit card debt of over $80,000 – On which you MUST pay compound interest – on time – or face financial ruin. Your income is $30,175 and your expenses add up to $34,778, so your debt – and the interest keeps growing – next year you’ll owe over $85,000!
No matter what, your kids and grand kids and great-grand kids are going to be on the hook for all of that debt – plus the compound interest!
So, now, I knock on your door, and I ask you to go out and borrow an extra $3,000. Not to invest in yourself. But to give to me, just so I can give it to Canada’s Big Oil companies…
What would you say to that?
Because that’s exactly what Mark Carney and his by-election candidates are asking you to do.
Those are Canada’s 2026 actual budget numbers: the debt, receipts and expenditures, each divided by all the households in Canada. And now, he’s asking you to give another $45 billion to Big Oil ($3,000 per household). While Canada burns.
In my adult life, I first voted PC, but when they dropped the P (both in name and policy) then shifted to the Liberals in every election since, actively campaigning for Nate Erskine-Smith, and supporting him any way I could – both financially, and by connecting him to climate experts, as he researched climate policy – areas where followers of the Clean50 will know I am particularly well connected.
But despite all that – I will not be voting Liberal in the August 31st by-election.
I believe we need to send the PM a message that he will hear loud and clear, by sending NDP candidate Shannon Devine to Ottawa in Beaches East York to replace Nate, and by supporting the best positioned of the non-Conservative candidates in North Vancouver-Capilano to replace the ousted Jonathan Wilkinson.
So for the first time in ~40 years, I will be voting NDP federally. It’s unarguably the best thing to do for the environment, Canada’s future – and for our kids.
My reasons are many – but here’s the key ones:
- the incredible damage Carney’s changes have done in rolling back Liberal climate and environment policies – the critical policies for which I voted (and which Carney initially promised to continue, before reneging and meeting endlessly with oil lobbyists)
- $45 BILLION dollars pledged for a pipeline and carbon capture, all to help the wealthiest companies on the planet – companies that are ~60% foreign owned – and presently gouging all of us at the pump, while earning MASSIVE windfall profits based on Trump’s gyrations. A sun-setting industry which makes up only 3.5% of our GDP(for now) – and about 1.5% of employment. (Google it – it’s not the 35% of GDP most believe!)
- Carney’s backtracking on the expansion of Billy Bishop, and the high risk once these elections are over he offers jets and runways to Ford in exchange for Ford’s support for the ALTO high-speed rail.
- Carney’s endless concessions to oil companies and Alberta – unaccompanied by meaningful support for renewable energy or the Canadian-owned clean economy players, export-ready, and in a market set to triple globally by 2035. They’re not even pretending: Natural Resources Minister Hodgson’s lobbyist meetings last fiscal year: Oil: 83 Renewables: 0 Environmental Groups: 2 Clean Tech: 0
There’s no question voting NDP would be a message that would significantly impact the Government’s thinking on climate, the environment and their giving our money to oil companies – and without jeopardizing either the Liberal majority, or risking the Poilievre led government of which we were so afraid, the last time we voted.
So if you have the time, here’s more details…
Let’s start with the gifts to big oil : Money we don’t have. That we actually have to borrow first. Amounting to over $1,000 for every single person in the country – and roughly $3,000 per household. A gift that will increase our existing $64.5 Billion dollar deficit by 70%. And that’s actually almost as much money as we spend on Defense ($48 Billion) and Health transfers ($50 Billion). And the 45 Billion doesn’t include the inevitable overruns – or the Port facilities we then need to build to complete the job.
So, would you borrow another $3,000 to give to ESSO or Suncor? Knowing your offspring would be paying for that forever? I know I certainly wouldn’t. The PM needs to hear that.
More critically – it’s money we could instead be using to invest in the growing clean economy – already actually bigger in Canada than the oil industry (clean economy ~$250 Billion direct and indirect GDP – oil industry claims $209 Billion in direct and indirect GDP) – and – the clean economy is Canada’s future:
The CLEAN economy is on track globally to TRIPLE by 2035 – the oil industry to collapse by 2050. This is a massive missed opportunity to instead capitalize on the worlds’ fastest growing economic sector – and that already supports 3 times more jobs in Canada than Big Oil!
The “Henry VIII” Decree: To enable Big Oil, new rules allow any single one of the Cabinet ministers to bypass ALL LAWS except only the criminal code – to ignore environmental protection laws, the species at risk laws, the pollution laws and any others, if it’s within their purview, and they alone deem it to be in the “national interest”. The term “national interest”? Undefined.
They also don’t have to even tell anyone they suspended the law(s)! Subject to cabinet secrets indefinitely. They can seize property without constraint and run a railway or a pipeline through it – and no one can stop them. Or even necessarily know about it… So… essentially we’re giving ex-oil executive Tim Hodgson – a Calgary MP and now the Minister of Natural Resources, who has met with oil lobbyists an average of twice a week while Parliament was sitting – and with environmental groups just twice (and never with either clean tech or renewable energy folks) the same rights as King Henry the 8th claimed for himself: The power to order just about anything.
Other items:
Canceling the EV mandate – it was working, and that pissed off Big Oil in a big way. The narrative the oil companies have tried to spread for years – “range anxiety” – “what happens to all the batteries” – “they don’t work in Canadian winters” – are falling flat and people share their experiences. Range anxiety has dramatically decreased as charging station infrastructure has exploded. Batteries are lasting WAY longer than people thought they would, and even when they’re replaced, the market for used EV batteries is so high re-cyclers have gone bankrupt! And while range is a little diminished in winter with heaters switched on, the number of trips made that run batteries to their limit are few.
As a result, the demand for transportation fuels has dropped at least 10% in both Canada and the USA – and Hormuz prices have led to a dramatic uptick in the number sold of late.
Canceling the 2 Billion Trees Program; First off – we need roughly 16 billion trees planted to replace the total devastation the new super heated fires have wreaked in the Boreal Forest sine 2010. They’re hotter – no pine cones survive to reseed. A recent study said 7 Billion to replace 15% of those lost since 2020. And that was before another 40,000 square kilometers burned so far this summer. But getting seeds and creating seedlings takes time, So the 2 billion trees program was off to a slow start – but at the point it could actually become operational… Carney canceled it.
Actively supporting the extraction and shipping of LNG (every bit as harmful as coal);
LNG sounds good. It does burn cleaner than coal. But we have to consider the total life-cycle emissions: LNG is 70% methan, which is 28 times worse than CO2 for producing global warming. It’s hard enough to corral that it escapes everywhere: during extraction, during transit, as it gets loaded on to ships, as it’s off loaded – and that’s all as methane! Overall, shipping Canadian LNG to India does not help the climate in any remotely useful way.
Enabling more methane emissions (28x worse than CO2);
To appease the Alberta premier and Big Oil, Carney greatly reduced the methane emission standards required. Independent satellite data shows that emissions in Alberta and Saskatchewan are already FAR greater than industry reports (which are based on “estimates”. Dropping the standard is cheeaper for big oil – but costs Canadians.
Dropping the industrial carbon tax to the point of meaningless;
Literally no jobs were lost due to the pollution tax on carbon – or on the industrial carbon tax – but many thousands of jobs relied upon their being a meaningful incentive for businesses and home owners to decarbonize. The clean economy – 250 BILLION dollars in Canada – bigger than the oil economy at 209 Billion, relies upon that inventive. Over 700,000 jobs in the clean economy – versus 150,000 and falling in the oil industry. Just this morning a 1.5 Billion dollar investment that relied upon a meaningful carbon price went bankrupt in Edmonton.
Others: Failing to consult indigenous peoples; failing to deliver on the promised housing mandates.
Net, If you care about climate and the environment – and by extension, added health care costs, air quality, and community preparedness to tackle significant weather events – so far, this government has been an abject failure.
But they just announced the biggest clean energy project in North America!
Key word – “announcement”. Please don’t be misled by Monday’s NL/QC Churchill Falls story.
It’s a completely premature announcement describing an agreement to (maybe) make an agreement later – and the timing of which was cynically and prematurely advanced to persuade BEY voters whose canvassers are hearing about pipelines on your door steps. It’s also designed to distract from the “cancel the EV mandate” announcement they buried late the Friday night beforehand.
Please consider how best to advocate for your children… Climate action matters – and especially with the tariff war – we need to strengthen our CLEAN industries – who are our future. Not gift Big Oil $45 Billion and a new port…
If you want a sign or to support the campaign, email me and I’ll happily make the best connection: gpitchford ~at~ deltamanagement ~dot~ com.
