We have said that Canada’s Energy Minister, Joe Oliver, is too closely associated with the fossil fuel companies that the Minister’s department is supposed to regulate. We suspect that the failure of his department, coupled with a lack of pressure from Environment Canada to regulate the tar sands, is attributable to this coziness.
Oliver’s extravagant compliments of the tar sands as part of his sales pitch to US businesses to press for approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline demonstrate this near unity of interest between the regulator and the regulated industry.
Yesterday at Chicago Oliver use the word “green” in referring to the tar sands. While you are thinking that one through, here’s another Oliver puzzler.
Oliver also claimed that Canada’s environmental record is unmatched. We admit there is one “achievement” in the field of GHG emissions that cannot be matched. Canada was the first country to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, an international convention that Canada signed sixteen years ago.
There is a second unmatched Canada “achievement”. Canada tops the world in the number of times it has won the “Fossil of the Day” award, an “honour” democratically voted by the environmental organizations attending the annual Conference of the Kyoto Parties. No other country is even close to Canada.
This extraordinary exaggeration by a Minister of the Crown undermines a fundamental of democratic government: regulators must be objective and not identify with the success of the industry they are regulating.
