The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour (COMMENT)

By Whitehorse Star on February 19, 2015

A small First Nations/aboriginal/Metis crowd gathered around Betty Anne Lavallée, National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), last Saturday afternoon at the Skky Hotel in Whitehorse. 

The city is one of 12 stops during the 2015 CAP Grassroots Engagement tour.

The format was one of conversation around a large table set up. 

Chief Lavallée provided context on the mandate and history of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples that had been founded in 1971 under the name Native Council of Canada (NNC).

Out of 1.4 million, one million aboriginal people in Canada live outside of reserve or settlement lands and in CAP, their interests have a voice, which is one of unity.

She is concerned about a “continuation of genocide by pen, not by sword.”

CAP has a long history and list of achievements fighting for the improvement of aboriginal survival and rights while carefully respecting existing rights.

One example was CAP involvement in the precedence of the 1999 Corbière case, based on which First Nation members, or band members, living outside settlement lands have achieved voting rights.

In the Daniels decision of the Supreme Court, Non-Status Indians and Metis were included in the terms of Section 91 (24) of the 1867 Constitution Act.

In 2013, the federal government’s appeal to reinstate the old division was rejected by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The case was named after the late Saskatchewan Metis elder Harry Daniels, who had initiated and carried the file and who had been national chief for many years.

Before and during 1982, Daniels had been responsible for another breakthrough.

From the 1982 Constitution Act, Part ll Section 35 (2), onward: “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” include the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples.

In the spirit of Daniels, who is well remembered for fighting, in his words, “shrinking the definition of who is an Indian,” National Chief Lavallée poses the challenge, “How to unite when we are divided by government?”

Some of those gathered last Saturday have senior responsibilities in health, education and judicial community services and programs.

In the discussion, connections and findings of understanding surfaced of how political agendas operate on a nitty-gritty level trying to abolish aboriginal existence in Canada.

Deceptive and supposedly tough-on-crime policy designs aim at racializing and dulling Canada by unfairly, unequally over-policing and consequently over-incarcerating aboriginal people, and artificially undoing public safety structures such as:
• Test case funding towards direction finding of positive judicial precedence;
• Court justice workers;
• Access to legal council with traditional knowledge;
• Aboriginal community outreach workers and meaningful programs in penitentiaries; and
• Resources for families in need. 

Non-aboriginal people should also worry about being colonized by an increasingly totalitarian state and join aboriginal people in opposing the new anti-terror Bill C-51. 

National Chief Lavallée understands it as an out-of-control device to “put elders in jail because they peacefully protect their traplines,” which is already happening in central Canada and the Maritimes.

The chief and the participants alike felt that the current federal government is particularly destructive in its actions and aspirations, but previous governments have also taken attacks to the extreme. 

One such dark moment of complicity with extremism was brought up that had set tone and direction for things to come.

Paul Martin, as prime minister, had hired Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political science professor and then Stephen Harper mentor and operative, as history consultant in the feds’ drawn-out land dispute with the Metis.

Flanagan is spearheading the concept of a Canadian Manifest Destiny. He asks openly for the abolition of aboriginal rights, land titles and the disregard of agreements and treaties.

In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal at fever pitch. 

He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”

Chief Lavallée said it’s a good thing a growing number of aboriginal candidates are coming forward across the country to run in the coming federal election.

There was interest in forming a Yukon territorial organization of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

It looked like a discussion that has the energy to go on.

Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

This commentary responds to the June 11 letter to the editor by Wilf Carter – “How to ensure cheap energy in the Yukon”.

Wilf Carter compared wind energy cost with old, legacy hydro power, not expensive energy from new hydro projects like Mayo B, and also missed the mark on realistic wind kWh prices for Yukon.

It is a frequently made error which heads towards expensive energy because costs for new hydro dams and LNG plants spiral upwards and wind farms continue to become cheaper to build and run.

Some of Mr. Carter’s worthwhile knowledge could have been updated during the last week of May.

On invitation of the Yukon Conservation Society, Don Pettit and Steve Rison, from the privately owned and community-based Peace Energy Cooperative and wind developer, talked to Yukoners.

The main topic was one of the largest wind farms in western Canada, the 102-megawatt capacity Bear Mountain Wind Park development that went online in the B.C. power grid 2009, on budget and on time.

At a production cost of about seven cents per kWh and about 11 cents kWh compensation through B.C. Hydro, it is profitable, and produces several times the energy needed in the Dawson Creek area.

A whopping 280 gigawatt hours of energy annually also represent more than half of the about 450 GWh energy the Yukon grid burns through.

Unlike Bear Mountain, the first Yukon industrial-scale wind development on Mt. Sumanik, that is now approached by the Yukon Energy Corp., does not tie into the stability of a large power grid.

However, like Bear Mountain, it will produce a reliable, switchable and conventional base load characteristic, as most of its seasonal surplus will store in the Aishihik lake hydro reservoir.

Local engineers and researchers had fruitful exchanges, especially on details and no-brainer benefits of the overdue Mt. Sumanik wind project.

Petitt and Rison responded, only from a commercial angle, to a question on the controversial and large Site C Hydro development that its energy may be too expensive and obsolete after a decade of construction.

While a Mt. Sumanik 10-20 MW capacity will be smaller than Bear Mountain, it will have a similar large turbine efficiency and low transmission cost combined with the usual somewhat higher equipment freight and installation expenses.

The hands-on business expertise from Dawson Creek aligned with Yukon engineers who don’t want the competitive and proven Mt. Sumanik wind farm be endlessly kicked down the road with ever more supportive but overdrawn, wasteful and repetitive studies.

Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

This commentary responds to the June 11 letter to the editor by Wilf Carter – “How to ensure cheap energy in the Yukon”.

Wilf Carter compared wind energy cost with old, legacy hydro power, not expensive energy from new hydro projects like Mayo B, and also missed the mark on realistic wind kWh prices for Yukon.

It is a frequently made error which heads towards expensive energy because costs for new hydro dams and LNG plants spiral upwards and wind farms continue to become cheaper to build and run.

Some of Mr. Carter’s worthwhile knowledge could have been updated during the last week of May.

On invitation of the Yukon Conservation Society, Don Pettit and Steve Rison, from the privately owned and community-based Peace Energy Cooperative and wind developer, talked to Yukoners.

The main topic was one of the largest wind farms in western Canada, the 102-megawatt capacity Bear Mountain Wind Park development that went online in the B.C. power grid 2009, on budget and on time.

At a production cost of about seven cents per kWh and about 11 cents kWh compensation through B.C. Hydro, it is profitable, and produces several times the energy needed in the Dawson Creek area.

A whopping 280 gigawatt hours of energy annually also represent more than half of the about 450 GWh energy the Yukon grid burns through.

Unlike Bear Mountain, the first Yukon industrial-scale wind development on Mt. Sumanik, that is now approached by the Yukon Energy Corp., does not tie into the stability of a large power grid.

However, like Bear Mountain, it will produce a reliable, switchable and conventional base load characteristic, as most of its seasonal surplus will store in the Aishihik lake hydro reservoir.

Local engineers and researchers had fruitful exchanges, especially on details and no-brainer benefits of the overdue Mt. Sumanik wind project.

Petitt and Rison responded, only from a commercial angle, to a question on the controversial and large Site C Hydro development that its energy may be too expensive and obsolete after a decade of construction.

While a Mt. Sumanik 10-20 MW capacity will be smaller than Bear Mountain, it will have a similar large turbine efficiency and low transmission cost combined with the usual somewhat higher equipment freight and installation expenses.

The hands-on business expertise from Dawson Creek aligned with Yukon engineers who don’t want the competitive and proven Mt. Sumanik wind farm be endlessly kicked down the road with ever more supportive but overdrawn, wasteful and repetitive studies.

Fracking comes in carbon price clothing, Whitehorse Star 5 June 2015

Fracking comes in carbon price clothing, Whitehorse Star 5 June 2015

The answer to JP Pinard’s core question, “ … no carbon pricing at all?

Unequivocally yes; the carbon pricing design is proven to incentivize emission increases, let’s keep it out of Yukon in all its carbon tax and carbon trade forms.

This piece answers questions put to me by JP Pinard in the May 25 Star following my critical opinion piece on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry from May 21.

I admire your work, from wind mapping projects in Yukon, studies and public education on renewable energy and even a Tedx presentation on wind power integration with electric thermal storage heating, ETS, all the way to an actual wind farm development with the Kluane First Nation.

These and other achievements as an engineer have earned even more opportunity and should not be stopped by carbon pricing.

The macroeconomics reviews of carbon pricing by the heavy hitters say so.

We are talking about serious study and weighing energy and climate policies through thousands of pages. I don’t stop at the reiteration of ideas or slogans but work to the bottom of actual track records.

In its preface of the study, Carbon Trading —How it Works and Why it Fails, published by the widely respected Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, we read:

“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.” and

Under the headline Taxation:

“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes have many of the same problems as carbon trading.”

The late Hermann Scheer, father of large-scale renewable energy success stories of many countries, writes in his book Energy Autonomy (2006) The economic, social and technological case for renewable energy and recalls:

“… EUROSOLAR had warned in its campaign ‘Our air is not for sale’ that carbon trading slowed down the transition to emissions-free energy supply rather than speeding it up”; and

“The most prominent example of this is the report on renewable energy submitted by the German Bundestag’s Scientific Advisory Council in January 2004. According to this report, the Renewable Energy Sources Act, ‘in the interest of economic rationality and ecological reason, (should) be abolished’ in favour of a scheme for trading in fossil emission rights.”

More people have listened, observed and made themselves heard:

There is the June 2013 protest letter (energyjustice.net) signed by 86 grassroots groups from 11 countries against the carbon tax message of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby.

“We write out of concern that the current ‘carbon fee and dividend’ approach as advocated by Citizen’s Climate Lobby and the Climate Protection Act of 2013 fails on all three accounts (economy, ecology and by inviting false solutions).”

On April 12, 2013, the Guardian reported and linked to protest actions and statements by 100 European Union civil society groups protesting against carbon markets and against “…, Ignoring the structural (not fixable!) nature of the scheme’s failure.”

In a modern media culture, not surprisingly, a big part of the structural, inherent, not fixable, incentive for greenhouse gas emission increase is in the language itself of “putting a price on carbon”.

The invention of the “carbon tax”, always leveraging “cap and trade”, and all the carbon price variations are not accidental.

No more than other bread and butter constructs of sound bite engineering by the advertising agencies which once gave us healthy cigarettes for pregnant women.

Slick language shifts don’t come out of the blue; they have a purpose to fire brain synapses and activate dynamics towards different implications than what appears to be.

For example, people know there are useful business entities such as doctor’s offices, or pharma manufacturing involved in universal medicare delivery.

But the slogan of public private partnerships, P3s, hides medicare privatization, American health care, and people short on cash don’t get surgery.

Or why have elites of various stripes become so enamoured with the “social licence”?

Because it extracts and conjures benefits of minority solutions and bad projects while falsely hiding behind the simple image of public support or democratic agreement, when it is not there.

OK, then; what is the difference between the fuzzy carbon price-tax-trade and, say, a specific tax on gasoline?

The latter is just a budget item, and the government could decide to reinvest it in electric transportation infrastructures.

There, energy use comes down about sevenfold, which brings the cost down of doing business in the community, thus opening up wealth creation and a stronger tax base.

On the other hand, as as soon as the word “carbon price” is spoken, it takes power away from local people, regional as well as national governments and economies, and hands it and the money to rent seekers in corporations and international finance.

Then it’s down to begging and hope for renewable crumbs of tokenism to fall down from the carbon play table.

These incentives for greenhouse gas increases from the carbon price are so many, they are hard to count.

Bringing on fracking through the back door is another attraction to many of the carbon pricers who seek to shirk responsibility for destroying entire regions.

Over the horizon carbon offset trade, financial free trade and out of control stock markets tend to create scenarios where nobody is in reach anymore to be accountable.

Lack of accountability through corporate domination is a big problem already, made worse by the carbon price ideology wherever it takes hold.

Talking point extensions from the “carbon price” were also picked up by environmental NGOs, municipal planners and political parties doing harm to their integrity.

Supposedly, one should look toward the oil industry for climate solutions and therefore saving energy, not renewable energy, is a first priority. The nonsense we get spoon-fed every day.

Unfortunately, many have gotten stuck with this dead-end strategy which minimizes energy savings to diminishing returns and never gets a real start on replacing the emission source technologies, especially of extreme fossil extractivism.

In contrast, a priority on renewable energies and economies multiplies energy savings directly, which also elevates and inspires energy efficiencies across the board.

Time for some housekeeping on NGO websites and college curriculi as well; throwing out the carbon trade proposals would be a good start.

And no, putting the price on carbon does not recycle into anything and does not need to; the carbon price is straightforward garbage.

Naomi Klein presents a fitting title for the first chapter in her climate bestseller This Changes Everything: The Right is Right, but only on account of denouncing the crown jewel of neoliberalism, the corrupt carbon price. And it’s super-dumb to give the climate deniers a ball.

Carbon pricing is proven to be in zero sum opposition to renewable infrastructure initiative, renewable energy source legislation and against pulling back on the annual five trillion globally of fossil fuel subsidies (IMF analysis).

“Putting the price on carbon” lies in effect to people that there are no oil subsidies as energy markets are supposedly functional already.

The oil-minded federal government knows it too, and gave support to Alberta and B.C. carbon schemes, and its talks with the U.S. have already concluded in an understanding on harmonizing carbon pricing standards.

Also, CBC News reports on its politics page, Dec. 17, 2014:

“Stephen Harper is still taking a hard line against introducing a ‘job-killing carbon tax’, but in an interview with CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge, the prime minister has indicated for the first time (recently) a willingness to accept a price on greenhouse gas emissions.”

The master demagogue can suck and blow simultaneously better than anyone.

It seems we won’t hear much more of Harper’s carbon schemes until after the fall election.

And, with considerable naiveté, the opposition parties appear willing to die once again heroically for the folly of carbon price.

No matter what the track record and evidence, some have a hard time to wrap their heads around what seems counterintuitive to them.

The carbon price supposedly dis-incentivizes carbon, but in fact, does the opposite.

Of course, any kind of scientific, scholarly or legal discovery regularly clarifies optical illusions.

The policy alternatives are not complicated.

Carbon pricing incentivizes greenhouse gas emission increases, and reliably corrupts carbon accounting.

There is no practical or constructive relation between stacking up costs in a separate and parallel carbon finance scenario, to infrastructure realities.

Also, the carbon price ideology falsely tries to say that incentivizing to use a bicycle or a horse buggy instead of a truck, say today, is the main option.

Putting stuff like that upfront that is irrelevant in the infrastructure planning and is used a lot to push back against wind farms and EVs.

Whereas working with energy markets, renewable energy source legislation and energy prices, not carbon pricing, is practical, and has proven in several jurisdictions to minimize or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.