Green shift, what green shift? Live-blogging energy, environment, and economy at Canada at 150

1:52 PM: I’m running late, had to get some things done in the press room and then head over to the mall to pick up a few necessities. So I missed the bulk of the afternoon keynote from Sheila Watt-Cloutier, former Canadian President and International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

I did catch a bit of her address though, and what I heard was very interesting. She was largely talking about energy and climate change, also adding her perspective as an Inuit leader.

A few bullets: the Conservatives are doing nothing on the environment, the Liberals talked a lot but did very little as well. No matter which party is in government, she said we need more than words on climate change. We need a strong, comprehensive, meaningful plan for action.

She also added she worked with Stephane Dion on these issues, particularly when he was environment minister, and she said his commitment to these issues is substantial.

2:07 PM: It’s a two-speaker panel on Geopolitics and Canadian Interests in the North American Energy Market. First speaker is Michael Phelps. No, not that Michael Phelps. It’s the former chairman and CEO of Westcoast Energy Inc.

One of the things he said that struck me was that there is no will or consensus for meaningful action on climate change in the United States. He’s never seen it more divisive, and doesn’t expect any real action from there soon. The message being, Canada can’t wait for the United States to get its act together before we take meaningful action – which has been Stephen Harper’s consistent excuse for inaction.

Also, he said fossil fuels aren’t going away (well, they are running out, but you know what he means) so we need to make them cleaner and more sustainable, but also find, develop, and support as many energy alternatives and other forms of energy as possible.

2:15 PM: We’ll never get to 0 carbon says Dan Gagnier, chairman of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, but we should get it as low as possible. He dreams about getting to 0, and I tries in my own life. But carbon is a fundamental element of the universe. But if we got to 80 per cent of our goal of 0, he said, he’d be ecstatic.

Phelps said you have to price carbon, and in his view the only way to do it effectively and meaningfully is through carbon taxation. And myself and the other five Dion loyalists in the room applaud, while the others look uncomfortable.

2:26 PM: Phelps says the only thing that will change consumer behaviour is price – in the context of gasoline prices, reducing consumption, and getting out/away from cars. Hard to disagree with that. If se saw gas regularly at over $2.00/litre, even the well-off would drive less.

Maybe we do need higher-priced gas? Eddie Goldenberg just breezed by, I should ask him how that would look on a campaign brochure…

2:32 PM: Questioner asks if you crazy panellists seriously want the Liberal Party to go our and campaign – again – on a carbon tax, because, seriously, were you around during the last election. OK, I editorialize, but that’s the gist.

Phelps gamely steps up and says he knows the politics of it. He’s looked at cap and trade but calls it opaque and open to gaming; carbon tax is still the right policy. BC did it and it’s working, but they don’t want to talk about it. He said “I’d be standing on a soap-box and saying you should use less carbon because you’re going to pay for it.” Still, he recognizes while it’s the right policy, politically it’s suicidal, “I’d rather do the Mackenzie Valley project that run on a carbon tax.,” he said, referring to the controversial pipeline project I believe he helped sheppard.

2:39 PM: Next questioner says he takes issue with the position that the last election was about a rejection of a carbon tax by the electorate (he didn’t mention if he believes it was Stephane’s English or something). We lost the last election on many things, he says. If it’s the right thing to do, we should do it, which gets strong applause, and not just from the Dionistas this time.

Gagnier says people need to understand the benefits, if they see it as tax they’ll run for the hills. There are carbon taxes in Europe and there it’s revenue neutral. If you cut back other taxes, like income taxes it can work, he says. Give people a choice and they’ll make the right one.

I have to say, here is an issue where the gap between academia/policy wonkery and real politick is illustrated starkly. What do you do when you know, from a scientific, from an academic, from a fact-based discussion, what the right thing to do is, when you also know it is near death to sell politically. Because if you can’t get elected, you can’t do sweet all.

I’m not sure a carbon tax is necessarily unsaleable. I think we just did a particularly shitty job if selling it, and had a number of strikes against us before we even started. So I think it is possible for politicians to make these tough sells.

Should we go back to a carbon shift platform again, though? Well, I was talking with a friend yesterday about the need for our party to find some balls, and that would be pretty dammed ballsy. I’m certainly not eager to dive back into that pool, though. I’d need to see a lot more consensus, and public buy-in, before I’d support campaigning on it.

As a Dion guy, while I can’t help but feel a degree or ironic vindication, I also can’t help but wonder, where the hell were all these people when we were campaigning on this, and getting savaged on BS distortions? Now industry is coming out in favour, joining the environmental groups. We could have used them in 2008.

I guess my feeling is if they want us to put a carbon tax on the agenda, they’re going to need to step up and buy into the idea first. They should start campaigning for it, soften the ground, then maybe we’ll be comfortable jumping in. But not before.

2:55 PM: Next energy panel is up now, but I was writing through the break so I’m going to grab a beverage, back shortly.

3:07 PM: Really delicious treats in the coffee break; as a BCer I rightly choose a Nanaimo bar.

We’re back with another panel, dubbed Clean Energy and Canada’s Potential in the Low Carbon World: What’s Missing? One of the panellists, I think it was Steven Guilbeault, Co-Founder of Équiterre, just said that one in four of people that voted Liberal in the last election did so on the Liberal environmental policy, much higher than the other parties. That’s an interesting stat.

3:23 PM: And we’re back to a carbon tax again. I wonder how this very interesting debate would be going if this Hyatt was in Calgary, not Montreal?

One panellist says even Exxon is in favour of a carbon tax now and if Exxon is in favour, he’s not sure who could possibly be still opposed – except, perhaps, Stephen Harper. Oh, I’m sure we could find a few others. Or Harper could...

3:29 PM: Another panellist makes an interesting point about thinking more broadly. In Spain, he says, they wanted to get cars out of the city centre so they put a heavy tax on bringing cars downtown, although they didn’t call it a carbon tax. They got the intended result – much less cars in the city centre – but there were also unintended consequences. Cars are a major household expense, and once that capital was freed-up, spending increased substantially on health, on education, on entertainment. So you need to look beyond the immediate goal to the spinoffs.

3:45 PM: Hey, it's former Chretien-era natural resources minister Herb Daliwhal! Long time, no heard from. Is David Anderson here? Maybe he and Herb can arm-wrestle for old time's sake.

4:08 PM: Coffee break time again, lots of great conversation on the topics in the room continues out in the hall during the breaks. Lots of discussion on the policy and political merits of a carbon tax.

Meanwhile, saw Gerard Kennedy during the break, holding up a laptop as he stood in a corner, doing a skype webcam call back to the satellite Canada at 150 event in his riding of Parkdale-High Park. Great to see, and a fantastic example of how this event is not just limited to those in the room, but is interacting with Liberals and interested Canadians across the country.

4:23 PM: Last panel of the day is on a digital economy strategy. Hope Stephen Harper is listening, his throne speech said Canada needed a digital economy strategy, but declined to say anything about what it could be. Maybe something to do with computers. So maybe some ideas for him here.

If we’re going to get into copyright though, let me just say, why in the hell does the copyright lobby have such a vice-grip on the nads of all our political parties? It pisses me off. Find some balls to bring sanity to copyright, there’s my digital economy plea.

Also, apparently they have the Internet on computers now.

4:29 PM: Maybe I’ve followed these issues too closely, as it crosses over into my day job, but I’m not really hearing anything yet that I haven’t heard before. Or anything about what we should do about it.

4:36 PM: I misread the session title, it’s not about the digital economy, it’s about culture and the digital world. And my interest level just dropped substantially. Expect light live blogging or here on out.

4:54 PM: Pretty sure I just heard a panellist ask if these questions coming in to the panel over twitter were “live” and saying that, if so, that’s cool? And they’re on a panel on something involving the digital world? Wait until they see how I can predict the weather with my phone!

5:10 PM: I’m sorry but I’m shaking my head about this call for cultural protection for Canadian cultural creators in a digital/Internet world. They need to stop playing the victim-card. You could say the fittest will survive, but it’s not just that.

Artists should look at the Internet as the best thing that ever happened to them. Why? Because it’s a low-cost transmission medium. No longer do creative professionals need a publishing house, or a broadcaster, to buy their show and broadcast it to audience and compensate them through a portion of advertising sales. That model is passé.

Smart content creators can use the Internet to bypass the middlemen and go straight to their audience. They need to monetize, but going direct to their audience, if they have content people value, will be cheaper for their audience and more lucrative for the artists.

So don’t kvetch to me about the need for cultural protectionism because of the web. The web is an opportunity they could seize – if they don’t insist on seeing themselves as victims in need of protection.

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Video: On CBC's Power and Politics

Every Friday, CBC's Power & Politics show has a bloggers panel. This week, I was invited to participate in the panel along with conservative blogger Adrian MacNair, CBC resident blogger extraordinaire Kady O'Malley, and of course host Evan Solomon.

I've done some radio stuff before, and I did one taped interview for CTV Newsnet during the Liberal convention in Montreal, but this was my first time with live tv and I was rather nervous. I always like to joke I have a face for radio and a voice for print.

It was an interesting experience. It was done by satellite with Adrian in Vancouver, and Evan and Kady in Ottawa. So I rushed home to shave and change (decided against a tie because, after all, I'm a blogger) and headed downtown to the Mother Corp. HQ on Front Street. A producer brought me in through the halls I recognized from Ken Finkleman's The Newsroom, and into the non-fictional CBC newsroom, where the shoot the satellite pieces.

It's an interesting set-up. At one end of the large, open-concept room there's a little raised platform with a camera and two chairs, that's where they shoot the pieces. And around us, the producers and journalists were at work. I had some time to kill so I took a seat in the newsroom and had a look around. I think they were working on that night's The National beside me, they were watching a live closed-circuit feed of the Montreal/Boston game, and Wendy Mesley came by to check in with them.

When the time for my segment approached I sat in the large chair and they wired me up with an ear piece and mic. It was a little weird because you're told to look directly into the camera and pretend the person you're talking to is there, but you can't see anything there, it' a blank screen. So it's hard to feel like you're really talking to someone. There's a monitor off to the left, but if you look at it you're looking off camera and appear shifty. The camera guy actually tilted the monitor away from me to I guess help me resist temptation, but I still looked over when I was off camera to try to feel a little more comfortable. I think it would be a lot more fun to do it with the other guests in studio.

Content-wise, the segment felt like it went pretty fast, and I think it went alright. I was rather nervous and felt I didn't remember to make all the points I wanted, and I feel I didn't do a good job of what they primarily wanted: talk about how the blogs have shaped the two issues we were discussing, the climate change e-mails and the Afghan torture documents.

On the e-mails, the point I tried to make was that, first of all, I doubt any of the bloggers going crazy on both sides have actually read all 3000 pages of e-mails. Those I've read that have, and considered them in context, conclude there isn't much at all to this story. But by and large, this is red meat for the deniers and a few bad pr days for supporters. But at the end of the day, climate change denial is no longer a mainstream position. There is broad societal acceptance that climate change is real, and we need to act. There is disagreement on what the action should be, for sure. But even the Conservative government agrees climate change is real. Denial is an increasingly fringe position, and no coordinated campaign to hack climate scientists around the world to steal e-mails is likely to change that. But the blogs do give these groups the opportunity to spread their theories and find like-minded supporters, and spread their views with or without the MSM.

On the torture e-mails, on this one I don't think the blogs have been necessarily active in shaping the story. There have been cases where the media have ignored a story for whatever reason, and after much publicity on the blogs they were forced to cover it. In this case though, the media and the blogs have both been all over it from the start. The blogs have been doing some good watchdog work though -- they were all over Christie Blatchford -- and have been helpful tracking the shifting changes in Conservative positions from day to day and keeping things in context. That's perhaps the best difference blogs can make: they can be more analytical and big picture. The MSM tend to focus on spot news without considering the wider context.

Things seemed to veer off there when Adrian took what seemed to me a shot at Kady's journalistic ethics, which naturally Kady and Evan took exception to and led to a spirited back and forth while I watched a little incredulous from Toronto, pondering if I should have prepared an attack line against my hosts (maybe something like "Evan Solomon, Don Newman was a way snappier dresser!").

I thought Adrian was off-base. The climate gate nonsense has gotten plenty of media play, certainly more than it deserves. To compare it to the torture e-mails is a false comparison. The torture story speaks directly to the behavior of the Canadian government, and has wide-ranging consequences for both the government and our mission in Afghanistan. The climate story may impact support for stronger action on climate change going into Copenhagen, but that's debatable. And while the people pushing the e-mail story insist it's the scandal of the millennium or something, they're unable to prove their case definitively. So instead, they play that favourite tool of the right: blame the media.

Finally, we ended with the sites of the week. I picked The Pundit's Guide, great non-partisan site for tracking party nominations, and for analysis and data on party fund raising and spending. Adrian went with the Canadian Blog Awards (where I'm nominated for Best Political Blog, btw, if you'd like to go vote early and often) and Kady went with Wikileaks.

Without further ado, the video:

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