Transcript: Season 4, Episode 10

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 10, Season 4
Sunday, November 16, 2014

Host: Tom Clark
Guest Interviews: Collin Carrie, Don Drummond,
Hershell Ezrin, Mark Kennedy, Parvaneh Pessian
Location: Ottawa

On this Sunday, a blockbuster announcement from the US and China that puts the heat directly on Canada to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions, we’ll ask the government where it stands.

Then, do voters trust their politicians? A new study with some shocking details on how voters regard political representatives, we’ll look at how to turn it around.

And, two federal by-elections being held tomorrow, what they might teach us leading into the next federal election.

It is Sunday, November the 16th and from the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark. And you are in The West Block.

Well, it was a stunning announcement, last week the United States and China, the world’s two largest polluters, agreed to significant cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions; the US by 2025, and China by the year 2030. For America, this builds on a previous commitment. It agreed to cut GHGs 17 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Canada agreed to exactly the same. Now Washington pledges cuts of 26 to 28 per cent, just five years later.

Well I’m joined now by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment, Collin Carrie. Mr. Carrie, your government has always said that we move in log step with the United States when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, so will we meet these new standards?

Collin Carrie:
Well I think our history is when it makes sense to lead, we lead, and when it makes sense to look at an integrative approach, we look at that.

Tom Clark:
When do we lead?

Collin Carrie:
Well if you look at our electricity sector, I think you are aware that we have one of the greenest electricity sectors in the entire world. Over 80 per cent of our electricity comes from non-emitting sources.

Tom Clark:
Well you’re right in the sense that we’ve controlled or we’ve got emissions standards for electricity and for transportation, but I’m asking about the new standards agreed to by Washington and China. Because this is the new American standard, 26 per cent by 2025, are we in or are we out?

Collin Carrie:
Well we always welcome when some of the two largest emitters actually get together and make new commitments. If you look at the amount of greenhouse gases, China and the United States are responsible for 39 per cent. This is very significant. Of course, we want to see the details of the agreement and how it rolls out. Canada only accounts for 2 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Tom Clark:
We’re the ninth largest emitter in the world, are we in or are we out?

Collin Carrie:
Well we were committed to decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions but as you know with the Paris in 2015, we’re not going to pre-suppose any of the negotiations and agreements that come before that sessions that we’re going to be dealing internationally, so we’ve always said that any agreement has to be fair and equitable, and all the major emitters have to be onside. So we see this as a welcoming advance.

Tom Clark:
Okay, you’re not going to answer whether we’re in or out, but let’s deal with what we have committed to, what the prime minister has committed to. The agreement that we are going to join the United States in reducing our GHGs by 17 per cent by 2020, from 2005 levels. Are we going to make that?

Collin Carrie:
I’m confident that we’re going to be moving towards that target. That target is a 2020 target…

Tom Clark:
Well it’s moving towards the target, are we going to reach 17 per cent by 2020?

Collin Carrie:
Well we’re committed to decreasing the greenhouse gases consistently. We’ve already, like I said Tom, we’ve regulated our transportation sector. We’ve regulated our electricity sector and if we look at the facts, since 2005, between 2005 and 2012, our government has seen a decrease in greenhouse gases by 5.1 per cent while our economy is growing 10.6 per cent. So it’s a balance between….

Tom Clark:
Let me stop you there though because in that period, Mr. Carrie, we had a thing called a recession and so a lot of factors closed, but if you take a look at our greenhouse gas emissions from 2009 to where we are today, they’re going up. But I come back to this, we made a solemn commitment to reduce our emissions by 17 per cent by 2020. Either we get there or we don’t. Your department, Environment Canada, has said we’re going to miss it by at least 20 per cent. Are we going to miss it?

Collin Carrie:
Well everybody’s entitled to their own opinion Tom.

Tom Clark:
Well this is Environment Canada, it’s not an opinion, it’s what your department is saying.

Collin Carrie:
Basically what the facts are the facts. We are seeing for the first time in the history of Canada, and if you compare it to what was under the Liberals, we’re looking at a huge difference…

Tom Clark:
No we’re not going to go back there, what we’re going to talk about is the commitment that you made in 2009 to meet this 17 per cent target by 2020. And your department says we’re not going to get there, we’re going to miss it by about 20 per cent.

Collin Carrie:
And like I said, 2020 is still a far, far way away. We’ve already regulated two of our biggest sectors; our transportation and electricity. We are moving towards regulating other sectors and we’re confident that we’re going to be decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions consistently to 2020.

Tom Clark:
You talk about oil and gas standards in this country. You promised them in 2009. You promised that they’d be out there by 2012. It is now almost 2015, they’re not around, when are we going to see them?

Collin Carrie:
Well as I said earlier, you asked the question where it makes sense to lead, we lead and where it makes sense to integrate, we are working with our….

Tom Clark:
When are we going to see them?

Collin Carrie:
Well I can’t give you a specific time Tom. What’s really important…

Tom Clark:
Are we going to see them before 2020?

Collin Carrie:
Well as I said, I can’t give you a specific time, but…

Tom Clark:
We may not see them at all?

Collin Carrie:
…but just as we did with the transportation sector, we’ve been given kudos for getting an agreement with the United States, but I don’t know if the Liberals and NDP want to move forward to unilaterally binding Canada to certain regulatory agreements, and when we have an integrated market between Canada and the United States in our oil and gas sector, I don’t think Canadians, anybody who knows this sector, it doesn’t make any sense to put Canadians at a competitive disadvantage with the United States and put 275,000 jobs at risk because Canada doesn’t coordinate.

Tom Clark:
I apologize because we are out of time and I wish we had more time to do this. I just point out though that this was your commitment that was made, that we’re not going to meet. But Collin Carrie…

Collin Carrie:
And they’re committed to getting there. It’s just a challenge when you’re looking at these integrated sectors.

Tom Clark:
Collin Carrie thank you very much for being here, I appreciate your time.

Collin Carrie:
Thank you Tom.

Tom Clark:
And joining me now from Phoenix, Arizona is Don Drummond, a member of the Eco Fiscal Commission. That’s a group of independent environmentalists, politicians and economists who are working together on Canada’s economic and environmental goals.

Mr. Drummond thanks very much for being here. You heard Collin Carrie, what are your thoughts?

Don Drummond:
I’m not surprised he didn’t indicate an official position of the Canadian government vis-à-vis the agreement the United States and China are on reducing greenhouse gas emissions because I suspect the Canadian government did not know those two countries were working on that agreement, but as Mr. Carrie said, the Canadian policy has been to match up with the policy in the United States. So I think this is a game changer, but there are two stages. It would be fairly easy for the government to say, okay, 26-28 per cent reduction by 2025, we’ll match the United States but the more difficult and controversial issue will actually line up the policies necessary to get there because as you were suggesting and he wasn’t seeming to agree necessarily, were nowhere near in line with hitting the target we’ve got right now, so you can mow the more serious commitment but if we don’t line up the policies, it really doesn’t matter.

Tom Clark:
You know Don, what I’m hearing from the Conservatives or from the government in general, is that you know in a sense, there is a choice between a good economy and a good environment. Not mutually exclusive but they say they’re not going to do anything to hurt the economy in order to help the environment. Is that a fool’s choice?

Don Drummond:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely you could do really stupid things with the sole objective of an environmental cause and wreck your economy but who would ever suggest that, and there’s lots of arrays of possibilities to do it in a smart and efficient way, or you can have both. You can support economic growth and you can achieve various environmental commitments. And there’s a world of records out there. Many of the northern European economies, Norway is an example. In Canada we’ve have successful policies implemented in British Columbia, some more targeted in different provinces that are having these types of effects of supporting the environment without wrecking the economy. There doesn’t need to be that trade-off.

Tom Clark:
Yeah, and I’m fascinated that the Eco Fiscal Commission because it’s a group of very respected people in their fields who are working on this problem, but if you could sort of synthesize for me the single most important thing that you think we can do as a country right now to get to where we have to be in a few years from now?

Don Drummond:
I think just to get beyond this hang up that anything we do in the environment is going to wreck the economy. Just to recognize, put on the table, there are efficient mechanisms and appropriate changes and behaviour that can achieve both goals, a strong economy and a good environment. Let’s just accept that. Let’s work on the details and implement them and not have this environment of fear.

Tom Clark:
If I could address the elephant in the room for a minute, and that is, you know the dreaded carbon tax out there. And yet, you know there are a lot of countries that are moving that way and rebalancing the tax system. Is that a direction that you think that we should be moving in?

Don Drummond:
Yeah, I think a carbon tax has to be a component of an efficient environmental package. It wouldn’t be the only component though and there is some degree of bits and pieces of that already. We have gasoline excise taxes. It’s not on the full range of carbon emissions, so it’s not the whole factor. And some elements, efficiency may be best achieved through regulatory change and in some cases, we may actually be better off buying credits from reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in other countries. There’s a whole range of options to be put onto the table which carbon tax may just be one component of it.

Tom Clark:
In the 30 seconds we’ve got left Don, what are the consequences of us not meeting our target goals?

Don Drummond:
Well we would be continuing to contribute to the deterioration of the global environment, particularly global greenhouse gas warming. Others would be as well. We wouldn’t necessarily be alone, but I think that hurts Canada. It hurts Canada’s reputation and we’ve all had a vested interest in that, whether we’re Canadians, Americans, Chinese or anybody else in the country (world) and we all have an obligation to do something about it. And we should be thankful the two biggest emitters in the world have at least verbally undertaken a commitment to do something about it. Hopefully Canada can join that effort.

Tom Clark:
Don Drummond always good talking to you, thanks very much for joining us today.

Don Drummond:
Thank you Tom, bye.

Tom Clark:
Well after the break, we’ll find out which politicians voters most trust and what’s keeping Canadians from the polls.

And then, tomorrow’s by-elections, both should be easy wins for the Conservatives but will one of them provide a November surprise?

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well we’re heard it before, the trust factor for politicians has hit rock bottom. But a new study by Ryerson University tells and even bigger story. It shows at what point we lose trust in politicians and how many of us, actually believe that they are corrupt. Here it is, your weekly West Block Primer:

Meet Fred, he’s the local politician down at City Hall. Everybody trusts Fred. Now, after a few years, Fred runs for a higher office. He wins and he’s now a member of the provincial legislature. People still trust Fred but not as much as they did before.

Fred decides to move on and campaigns for the federal seat. He wins and he’s off to Parliament Hill, but something has changed. That trust factor that voters had in Fred before, well it’s peeling away. Doctors, police officers, and judges are trusted way more than Fred.

And while Fred gets settled in the new house, voters back home believe he is now making decisions to benefit his family and friends. Forty per cent of them think Fred and his housemates are using public money for personal gain. And another 30 per cent of them believe those federal politicians are taking bribes.

So next time Fred goes back to the voters to stay on in Parliament, one out of every five of those people who trusted Fred at City Hall won’t vote for him because those supporters now believe that Fred is corrupt.

Well in fact, those one in five won’t vote at all. Joining me now, Hershell Ezrin the distinguished visiting professor of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. Hershell good to have you on the show.

What was the most worrying thing that you found in this study?

Hershell Ezrin:
Well there were many different things. We were worried that people found that they didn’t want to vote. Actually one in four under the age of 45 said that they wouldn’t vote, but we also discovered that generally speaking, they believed that all politicians are doing things that are really quite awful. And they’re lying to Parliament. They’re lying to media. They’re lying to their constituents. They’re taking bribes; a significant number said that, as you said, but even more important, they also believe that their personal lives should now be exposed in a way that we never thought of before, that we should be learning about. Do they pay taxes? Do they have abuse problems? Do they have addiction problems? Because they want to know more about these politicians and if they don’t know more, many of them are saying not only will they not vote for the particular politicians, they may not even vote for their party anymore because they don’t have the same party loyalty that they used to have.

Tom Clark:
You know, this is fascinating stuff and for anybody who doesn’t know, Hershell Ezrin has been around the Canadian political scene for let’s say a long time. He’s got a lot of experience. But Hershell, it wasn’t like this 40 years ago, I suspect. What do you think changed in the last few decades?

Hershell Ezrin:
Well I think a number of things have changed, including the availability of information through the internet, through digital communications. We seem to have access and we demand instant accountability in a way that we never used to believe that we had access to that information before. But there are some other things also that have happened. We’ve had a lot of scandals over the last several years and they have a memory because we can go and look them up on Google every day.

Tom Clark:
Or on the Jimmy Fallon show if it’s about Rob Ford, your former mayor.

Hershell Ezrin:
That’s true.

Tom Clark:
Hershell, I mean there’s such rich stuff here and I encourage anybody to get a hold of this study to read it because it really is ground breaking, but let’s just spend a minute or so talking about how we turn this around or can it be turned around?

Hershell Ezrin:
Well public told us that they really expect transparency. They expect accountability and transparency. Over 80 per cent of people said that they want to have more information. They want laws that allow for more transparency, but the other thing that we found is that they don’t actually forgive very easily. A very large number of people said that unless somebody resigned when they were found to be doing something bad, they didn’t really want to forgive them. And the old saws that you used to say, you know you apologize, you say you won’t do it again. They weren’t as important. Even paying the money back didn’t seem to have the same impact as resigning.

Tom Clark:
Wow and that has an impact up here when you’re talking about resigning and paying money back. It goes right to the Senate scandal. So, a politician going into the 2015 election federally Hershell, what should she or he know, or do, as a result of what you have discovered in this study?
Hershell Ezrin:
They better be prepared for a lot of scrutiny because everybody is going to be looking and trolling through personal records, personal issues, and I think that they have an expectation, and that’s one of the problems of this whole process in the end. Ultimately, it may well be that people don’t want to run for public office in the same way that they used to, and that’s one of the greatest worries that I have coming out of this study.

Tom Clark:
Hershell, I wish we had more time to talk, but it’s been terrific. A really fascinating study and I appreciate your time today. Hershell Ezrin a visiting distinguished fellow at Ryerson University.

Well up next, tomorrow’s by-elections, will the Conservative fortress be breached? We have a view from the ground.

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well we all know that the 2015 election campaign is well underway. Now all parties are road testing their campaigns in by-elections that are going to a vote tomorrow. Take a listen to how Finance Minister, Joe Oliver rolled out the Conservative road test last week:

Joe Oliver:
As you can see, our government is delivering, and our prime minister is providing the leadership. Now is not the time for risky experiments or a flighty trip back to discarded ideas and failed policies.

Tom Clark:
Jim Flaherty’s old riding, Whitby, Oshawa is one up for grabs and it seemed like a sure thing for the Conservatives, but a foreign poll released late last week, suggests that this race could be much closer than expected.

Joining me now to unpack all of this, Mark Kennedy, Parliamentary Bureau Chief for the Ottawa Citizen. And from Toronto today, Parvaneh Pessian, she’s a reporter with Whitby This Week and she’s been covering politics in that region for nearly a decade. Good to have you here.

Parvaneh, let me start with you, Forum poll says that the Liberals and Conservatives may be statistically tied going into this vote. From what you are hearing on the ground and what you are seeing in that area, does that make sense to you?

Parvaneh Pessian:
Well I think it’s going to be an interesting race in this riding, no matter what happens. All three of the major parties have very strong candidates. And of course, there has been a lot of Conservatives support in this riding for the past eight years that Jim Flaherty was the MP of the riding. And he was someone that was very well respected and very well liked in the riding, and all the party members know that. And they are aware that it’s going to be a big fight to replace him and to fill his shoes.

Tom Clark:
Do you get the sense though Parvaneh that the Liberals are making progress in this area that they may be contending for this riding?

Parvaneh Pessian:
I do get that sense. Just talking to a lot of people, they are saying that they are tired of the Stephen Harper government, that they’d like to see a fresh face in government. They are connecting very well to Celina Caesar-Chavannes who is the Liberal candidate in Whitby, Oshawa. She’s been knocking on doors extensively in the riding and they’re finding that they are able to relate to her very well.

Tom Clark:
I want to come back to you in a second Parvaneh but I want to go to Mark Kennedy. I mean who would have thunk, as they say, that Jim Flaherty’s riding much actually be a competitive race this time?

Mark Kennedy:
It’s a remarkable race and I’ll tell you why. On Monday night, we are going to be getting so much spin from all the different parties Tom that we’re going to be dizzy. And here is why, think of it this way, in the last election, the Tories got 58 per cent of the vote and the Liberals got 14 per cent of the vote. So in many ways, the Liberals can’t lose this time. All they need to do is get 20, 25, 30, 40 per cent of the vote and they win. If they win this election, it’s horribly bad for Stephen Harper because he won’t be able to explain how this happened. If he wins, but the Liberals come in with a significant increase in their vote margin, they will portray that as a sign of what’s to come. And on that basis, I’ve got to tell you, you know I’m never keen on saying that by-elections are important of what is to come, but I think in this case, it’s a prelude to the next election campaign…or general election campaign. Whether that’s next spring or next fall, it will be a battle of on the Tory side, smaller government and less tax and on the Opposition side, bigger ideas. What we need to do is basically improve our communities. And frankly, watch for this because it’s now beginning to emerge in the public policy debate, climate change and whether Stephen Harper will ever really do anything on that.

Tom Clark:
You bet and Parvaneh, I want to go back to you on that because as you talk to people in that area, is any of the stuff that Mark was just talking about resonating because really in a sense, this by-election in Whitby, Oshawa is in that very important 905 area. It’s suburban Canada. That’s why you know the Conservatives broke out their family tax credits just in time for this by-election. On the ground, is that what people are talking about and especially are you getting any sense that people are talking about the importance of the climate change issue which could portend for 2015?

Parvaneh Pessian:
I haven’t been hearing a lot about that. The biggest concern I would say is the economy. People are concerned about jobs. They want well-paying jobs in the area. They don’t want to have to commute outside of the community to access those high quality jobs. So that’s the main thing that I’ve been hearing a lot about. Yesterday, there was a seniors debate…a by-election debate at a seniors home where they were talking about some of the main issues in the by-election and income splitting came up. and a lot of people were saying that they felt that that’s something that’s not going to benefit their family, whether they’re coming from a single parent family or two partners that make about the same amount of money. They felt that that’s not going to be a benefit to them at all.

Tom Clark:
And that’s interesting Mark what Parvaneh is saying because the Conservatives really hung their hat on that big election promise. It ate up most of the surplus.

Mark Kennedy:
Well yeah, I mean politically they’re hanging their hat on that and they’re hanging the government’s finances on it. Let’s face it, the other thing we heard this week from Joe Oliver, is that unlike the last forecast, which is we were going to have a budgetary surplus of $6.4 billion dollars in 2015-16, it’s now down to $1.9 billion dollars and that’s because of some tax cut promises that Stephen Harper is already making. And so the question will be, is it tax cuts? Will that attract voters or will it be something else?

Tom Clark:
A time for a change, which is a very powerful thing. Parvaneh Pessian in Toronto, Mark Kennedy here in Ottawa, thank you both very much. I appreciate your time.

Parvaneh Pessian:
Thank you Tom.

Mark Kennedy:
Thank you.

Tom Clark:
Well that’s our show. I’m Tom Clark. Have a great week. We’ll see you back here next Sunday.