Mulroney is back to put PM on the spot
COMMENT:An uncommon week in Canadian environmentalism. Last week Patrick Moore emphasized the health and environmental costs of coal-fired electricity generation (See Patrick Moore on the real costs of coal, 16-Apr-1006.). This week it's an Earth Week Gala tribute to Brian Mulroney, Canada's "greenest" prime minister. Put on by Sierra Club of Canada and other environmental groups. Who's next? Ralph Klein?
Mulroney is back to put PM on the spot
Deirdre McMurdy
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Make the environment a priority, Canada's 'greenest' leader to tell Harper at gala tonight
If politics makes strange bedfellows, political tributes can make even stranger dinner partners.
At a tribute to former prime minister Brian Mulroney's environmental legacy in the Adam's Room of the Fairmont Chateau Laurier tonight, hard core environmental activists, corporate power brokers, policy wonks and politicians will break bread for the first time in memory.
But despite the honours and accolades, the Earth Week Gala is much more than just a victory lap for Canada's 38th prime minister, who hasn't made an official speech in Ottawa in 13 years.
Mr. Mulroney plans to hold Prime Minister Stephen Harper's feet to the fire, urging him not only to put environmental issues on his government's list of five priorities, but to put them at the top of that list. His message: leadership trumps process when it comes to saving the planet.
Although Mr. Harper's commitment to the Kyoto Accord has, thus far, been vague, Mr. Mulroney intends to sound the alarm on the subject of global warming and the issues -- including the threats to Arctic sovereignty -- from the melting of the polar ice cap.
If that's not enough to make Mr. Harper squirm, the main course is sustainably harvested Arctic char, and the environmental groups behind the gala have printed their top five environmental priorities on the evening's menu.
At the top of that list is the re-deployment of about $1.5 billion in annual oilpatch subsidies, which the groups want directed to conservation and other initiatives. There's also concern about the review of toxic chemicals, which is slated for completion by September.
"Yes there's a political agenda at this dinner, but politics doesn't have to be partisan," says Toby Heaps, the editor of Corporate Knights, the magazine that sponsored the survey leading to Mr. Mulroney's designation as Canada's "greenest" prime minister.
He adds that "Mr. Harper may feel he's being put on the spot, but it's really an opportunity for him to take a stand. So far, his government's environmental position is a blank slate."
(Environment Minister Rona Ambrose won't be attending the event because she has a scheduling conflict.)
Just a year ago, when the magazine's survey of Canada's leading environmental stakeholders chose to honour Mr. Mulroney's accomplishments, he was in hospital and too ill to consider a celebration.
Once he was on the mend in January, however, Elizabeth May, head of the Sierra Club in Canada, approached him again about organizing the event.
After Mr. Mulroney thoroughly vetted the jury and its methodology, he agreed to participate in the gala, which has become the hottest ticket in Ottawa. The Chateau's ballroom was already booked, forcing organizers to settle for a smaller space, for which 308 tickets sold out in just four days.
Ms. May concedes that when Mr. Mulroney was in office, she was one of his biggest critics, constantly pushing for more gains at every turn. The subsequent years, she says, have made her more appreciative of the Mulroney-era legacy, which includes the 1987 Montreal protocol to protect the ozone layer, the language of sustainability adopted in 1988, the first climate change conference in Toronto and the Acid Rain Accord with the United States in 1991.
At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Mulroney was the first leader to sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which led to the Kyoto Protocol.
For Mr. Harper, the gala comes just a day after a group of top Canadian climate scientists and oceanographers called on his government to develop a national strategy on climate change.
The 90 researchers sent a letter to Mr. Harper yesterday citing several examples of global warming, such as the rapid rise in Arctic temperatures.
The Harper government has promised to proceed with a "make-Canada-clean" air plan, but there has been little information on what that plan may contain.
In conversation, Mr. Mulroney has emphasized that of all his political efforts, his environmental record has given him the greatest personal satisfaction since he left office. And despite the fact he has refrained from weighing-in on political issues since 1993 -- with the exception of criticizing the Liberals' edgy relationship with the U.S. -- his concern about the absence of a Harper government's environmental to-do list, is prompting him to speak out.
To date, Mr. Mulroney has kept his connections to the new Tory regime discreet. Former Tory cabinet minister Don Mazankowski initially brokered informal chats between Mr. Harper and Mr. Mulroney and he was aware of the explosive nature of the cabinet appointments of David Emerson and Michael Fortier before most of Mr. Harper's circle.
The transition team headed by Derek Burney, a former Mulroney chief-of-staff and Canadian ambassador to Washington, also continued the thread, as did the presence of such seasoned political advisers as Camille Guilbaut and Marie Josee Lapointe.
Mr. Mulroney is also a key player in terms of the Tory push to gain ground in Quebec: Mr. Harper is openly emulating his predecessor's successful coalition of western Canada and Quebec, where he gained ground in the last election with the victories of such Mulroney stalwarts as cabinet ministers Lawrence Cannon and Maxime Bernier.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who will be present tonight and who still refers to Mr. Mulroney as a mentor, shares ground with Mr. Harper when it comes to seeking his political counsel.
Despite the demand on his political acumen, Mr. Mulroney remains firmly rooted in his work on a number of international boards of directors.
He has said he plans to work full tilt at making money for his family until he's 70, the mandatory age of retirement for most corporate directors. Although clearly, financial security isn't the only legacy he intends to leave.
dmcmurdy@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen
Brian Mulroney, environmental prince. Who knew?
Robert Sheppard
REALITY CHECK
CBC News Online
April 19, 2006
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Robert Sheppard began his career at the Montreal Star (may it rest in peace), spent 22 years at the Globe and Mail and was recently senior editor at Maclean's magazine. He has co-authored a book on the Canadian Constitution and writes on a variety of subjects.
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The political rehabilitation of Brian Mulroney takes a quantum leap forward
Thursday evening as he is fêted in Ottawa by a top-drawer crowd of
environmentalists and Conservative supporters as the greenest prime
minister in living memory. Mulroney only recently recovered from a long
hospitalization with pancreatitis. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)
I hope this doesn't sound too churlish, especially with what seems like all of Ottawa and the cream of the environmental community lining up to honour Brian Mulroney as the greenest prime minister in recent history. But this really is a notion that comes at you out of the blue.
The man does have his achievements. The free trade agreement, though flawed, has generally served Canada well. On the international scene, the former Conservative prime minister certainly punched above his weight in helping bring an end to apartheid and civil war in the former Yugoslavia. And though I was no fan of Meech Lake, I'd give him marks for the particularly caring way he reached out to Quebec at a critical time in our nation's history.
But the environment? Yes, he closed the deal with Washington on an Acid Rain Treaty, ending a 10-year political fight that began in the Trudeau years. And, at least later in his tenure, he appointed strong ministers to the environment portfolio such as Lucien Bouchard and the up-and-coming Jean Charest, now premier of Quebec.
Both amassed huge budgets but also seemed more than a little distracted in the job: Bouchard left in a huff within two years to form the Bloc Québécois. Charest hung on while first the Charlottetown Accord, which he helped mightily to defend, and then the Conservative government went down to defeat.
The 1980s and early '90s, the period in which Mulroney was prime minister, was a time of fierce environmental battles, it should be remembered. Acid rain was a headline-a-day for years on end. There were celebrated fights with clear-cutting loggers in places like South Moresby Island, Clayoquot Sound and the Carmanah valley.
Dumping industrial pollutants into the Great Lakes and raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River were fast becoming huge political issues. As were the controversial Rafferty and Alameda dams in southern Saskatchewan, and the Oldman River dam in Alberta, for which Ottawa was taken to court for refusing to order a proper environmental assessment.
Environmentalists barely had a kind word to say about the Mulroney government in the day. And now they are lining up for tickets?
A cynic's take
I really do feel badly suggesting this, but I can't help feel that this event to honour Mulroney at something called the Earth Week Gala Dinner may have some ulterior motives associated with it.
It is of course sponsored by a magazine called Corporate Knights, a left-leaning publication that makes a point of honouring business execs who do the right thing by the environment.
And this idea of polling 12 "prominent Canadians" (10 of them environmentalists, one was former Liberal environment minister Sheila Copps) to determine the greenest PM in modern times came about just two years ago when pro-Kyoto Paul Martin, who likes to paint himself as the environmental PM, was in power.
Martin wasn't in great odour with environmentalists (and certainly not with leadership rival Copps) two years ago, however. He was being his usual prevaricating self. And you can see these environmentalists – they're clever clogs – wanting to light a little fire under him.
Flash forward to today. There is an anti-Kyoto Conservative prime minister in office in Stephen Harper. What better way to light a little fire under him, and perhaps create a new set of environmental issues that don't have the letters Kyoto in them, than to honour one of his mentors who has just recovered (and bravo to that) from a long illness.
The Mulroney record
From what we know of this competition for greenest PM, Mulroney took five of the 12 ballots, or 41 per cent, which seems like an appropriate score to judge his handling of some of the big environmental issues of his time.
Acid rain: The treaty with Washington was clearly a big feather in his cap, though one could argue it was the former Trudeau government that set the table by promising to cut Canada's sulphur emissions in half.
Nevertheless, Mulroney made the Reagan administration take this seriously and his deal led directly to the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990 and a concerted crackdown on sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions from the big coal-fired power plants in the U.S. Midwest. They were largely responsible for the acid rain that was destroying Ontario and Quebec waterways.
The charts and maps on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website tell the story. Nitrogen oxides, a big smog contributor, haven't fallen as much but both pollutants are noticeably less than what they were in 1990.
St. Lawrence and Great Lakes action plans: These were the big high-profile projects of Bouchard and Charest. Cleaning up the St. Lawrence was a priority of the Quebec Liberal government and Mulroney's regime in Ottawa went at it with two five-year programs worth about $100 million each. However, as the Auditor General wrote in two reports, in 1993 and 1996, these action plans kept getting pushed back, suffered from the absence of long-range strategic planning and a host of other co-ordinating problems.
Global warming: Mulroney was initially out in front on this one but then things began to slip. In the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio the Mulroney government promised to stabilize Canada's greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels. In the 1993 election the Chrétien Liberals went one better, promising a 20 per cent reduction, but then this fell back to six per cent less than 1990 levels in the actual Kyoto negotiations, a target Canada is unlikely to live up to in any event.
Forestry: The Mulroney government did step up in1987 to declare South Moresby Island, ancestral home of the Haida, a national reserve, to protect it from further logging. But it did seem largely on the sidelines as B.C. in particular tore itself apart in the '80s and early '90s, in an emotional jobs versus trees debate.
When it was over, the group Environment Probe wrote in one of its newsletters that there was an unexpected environmental benefit to Mulroney's 1988 free trade agreement with the U.S. By that it meant that pressure from U.S. lumber producers was forcing Ottawa and the provinces to increase stumpage fees and end the kind of government subsidies that had encouraged the low quality clear-cutting methods of the past.
It was kind of an ironic tip of the hat. But perhaps that was all the Mulroney environmental policies truly deserved.
By ALAN FINDLAY
Toronto Sun
Thu, April 20, 2006
Environmentalists urge Harper not to undo ex-PM's good Works
OTTAWA -- Environmentalists feting Brian Mulroney tonight as the greenest prime minister in Canada's history worry that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will let the former PM's conservation legacy die on the vine.
The Sierra Club of Canada's Elizabeth May, who initially trumpeted Mulroney's acid-rain reductions and other sustainability accomplishments last summer, said the federal government's criticism of the Kyoto accord and recent elimination of funding to several climate change projects could be devastating.
"I'm deeply worried about what the Harper government is doing to the environment," said May. "Unless there's a better program coming in, it will be a disaster."
May and several other environmentalists helped an environmental magazine called Corporate Knights select Canada's "greenest" prime minister last year.
Too ill to receive the award last summer, Mulroney will speak on pressing environmental issues at a Chateau Laurier ceremony tonight.
Harper is also expected to speak at the dinner.
World Wildlife Fund Canada president emeritus Monte Hummel hopes Mulroney will use centre-stage tonight to press Harper to make the environment a priority.
"It's very important to have a Conservative prime minister standing up and saying to Mr. Harper there's nothing about being a Conservative that means you can't be exemplary on that file," said Hummel.
Harper said in Winnipeg yesterday that Canada wants to work with other countries to find a better way of spending money committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said Kyoto's targets are unattainable.
"That's just the reality. But we do want to make progress," said Harper.
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 20 Apr 2006