The Political Physicist

There is now wide-spread knowledge of the Labour Party’s recent left turn under leader Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and its surprising success in recent elections. This, coupled with the even more surprising rise of Bernie Sanders in the United States, opens the question of whether something similar could happen in Canada. Cue Niki Ashton’s candidacy in the ongoing federal leadership race of the New Democratic Party (NDP). As a Canadian living in Britain I’ve followed her campaign with great interest to see how it stacks up against the Corbyn project.

One area where I have been distinctly disappointed in Corbyn has been on energy and climate policy. Rather than argue for a rationally planned, publicly owned electricity system, he has pandered to the current “progressive” fad of an energy market made up of many small, competing renewable energy generators. Instead of replacing the private energy suppliers, he has opted to merely to add a public supplier to the market. While nuclear energy is not rejected, it is clearly seen as secondary to renewable energy and will also remain in the private sector. I have argued in the past why renewable energy will not be sufficient to power Britain and why a competitive energy market is an obstacle to addressing climate change.

Meanwhile, very little concrete is said by Labour about tackling climate change. There is a commitment to have 65% clean energy by 2030, which is either an ambitious goal they have not developed policy to meet or an extremely unambitious one stemming from a confusion of “energy” and “electricity”. In the election manifesto there is some vague talk of home insulation and electrifying the railways (although the latter was not discussed in an environmental context), but otherwise nonelectric energy use is unaddressed. A supplementary document mentions other technologies such as heat pumps, district heating, carbon capture and storage, and electric vehicles but says little about the type or scale of investments to be made in them, or how they come together in a broader climate plan. Indeed, the need for a comprehensive climate plan seems to be ignored, with a piecemeal approach of disconnected commitments offered instead.

In stark contrast to Corbyn, Ashton has made fighting climate change a central feature of her campaign, rather than just one area to which to direct stimulus funding. While not perfect, there is a lot about her proposals which are very good. First and foremost, rather than talk about tackling climate change in terms of sacrifices people will have to make (as do many environmentalists), she does so by laying out a positive vision of the country we want to live in. She describes how her policies will bring better employment, housing, and communities. She even extends this to workers in polluting industries, sketching a framework which would see them usefully redeployed. This is the sort of approach which will motivate people to take action.

Unlike many liberal environmentalists, such as those in the Green Party of Canada and its provincial affiliates, Ashton recognises the role which the public sector must play in fighting climate change; collective solutions are favoured over individual actions. Rather than the usual emphasis on feed-in-tariffs and independent electricity producers, she stresses that new energy infrastructure will be public. Like Corbyn she calls for a public investment bank to fund projects, but she goes further and proposes an additional crown corporation¹ called Green Canada². This entity would not only assist in basic research in green technology, but commercialise and manufacture it. It would

Accelerate pollution-fighting technology by funding open-source research into solutions for the climate change challenges we face and invest in public sector clean energy innovation. Every scenario for avoiding runaway climate change includes a technological breakthrough we don’t have yet. The public sector has an important role to play in fostering innovation. Green Canada will partner with our public universities to fund and carry out basic and applied research in renewable energy and energy efficiency at dedicated new research institutes. The rewards of research breakthroughs will be shared by all of us: selected successful research will be the basis for new manufacturing projects run directly by Green Canada. In time, this crown corporation will grow into a complex green technology actor, reinvesting funds into research, taking on strategic production tasks that aid in meeting climate goals and providing the federal government with streams of revenues for other needs.

This exactly the sort of approach needed for decarbonisation. Just as importantly, it reintroduces the idea of public ownership not simply to run what is unprofitable, but for the purpose of economic development and innovation. This pledge is honestly one of the most exciting proposals I have seen from a politician in my lifetime.

The other exciting aspect of Ashton’s proposals are the Green Canada Advisory Boards. Four such boards would be created, working in forestry, agriculture, fishing, and energy and made up of representatives of workers, environmental experts, different levels of government, industry, and indigenous people. Together they would direct the operations of Green Canada and set best practices. One advantage of such a system is that it would give workers in polluting industries a say over how they are to be reformed or wound down. This would make it easier to achieve buy-in for potentially controversial reforms. More broadly, this would begin to provide democratic control over public industry, something which has been missing from crown corporations in the past. While Corbyn has paid lip-service to this goal, Ashton has done more to spell out what it could look like.

Ashton’s pledges are a bit weaker when it comes to non-electric forms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Indeed, she currently lacks a clear schedule for reductions, although a promise is made to convene a group of experts for this purpose. Presumably the Green Canada Advisory Boards for agriculture and forestry would be responsible for addressing GHG emissions from their respective sectors and from land use change. Home heating is explicitly mentioned as an issue which needs to be addressed, but more details could be provided. It would also be good if district heating schemes were developed, given that they fit well with Ashton’s emphasis on collective ownership.

Electric vehicles are mentioned with a laudable emphasis on building charging infrastructure, particularly on federal property such as post offices. Unfortunately, no commitment is made to electrify the government fleet of vehicles—creating a large initial market for them—although this may have been an oversight. Electrifying local public transit is another important issue which she addresses. However, her goal of phasing out the sale of internal combustion engines by 2040 is not ambitious enough. She also does not address transport over longer distances, particularly of freight. We need to electrify Canada’s railways and move goods off of roads and onto trains. Ideally this would be achieved by nationalising the rail companies and folding them into the public passenger operator, Via Rail.

My final concern is that Ashton seems intent on powering Canada using only renewable energy. If this can even be done³, it will almost certainly require a significant build-out of new hydro dams. These are often controversial, given that they flood large areas of land, and can lead to conflicts with local aboriginal groups. Given Ashton’s (laudable) championing of aboriginal issues and the Left’s opposition to the Site C hydro damn in British Columbia, I’m not sure the will would exist to pursue this. Hydro is also distributed very unevenly across the country, meaning some provinces would become extremely reliant on others for their electricity. I rather doubt this would be well received, especially for those which would come to depend on Quebec. Ideally, a renewable plan would see the creation of a single national power company out of existing provincial ones, to utilise hydro nation-wide. However, constitutionally this would require all provinces to agree and I can’t see hydro-rich ones (particularly Quebec) doing so. Indeed, such jurisdictional issues will make it more difficult for the federal government to pursue any green energy policy and Ashton does not address this.

For provinces without much hydro and which want a degree of self-sufficiency in electricity, the options are carbon capture and storage or nuclear. Neither of these are mentioned in Ashton’s proposals, although I was very pleased to see that they are not explicitly ruled out either. My preference would be for nuclear, as nuclear waste will likely be easier and cheaper to store than carbon dioxide. Canada also has existing expertise in nuclear energy on which to build, with over half of Ontario’s electricity coming from this source. To this end, I would like to see Ashton commit to renationalise CANDU Energy⁴ and fold it into Green Canada.

These criticisms aside, Ashton has laid out a very good initial blueprint for fighting climate change. While more detail is needed on some issues, this is only a policy proposal for party leadership and it can be expected to undergo further development before a general election. Despite this, in some areas it is already better developed than the policies which the Labour Party ran on. Furthermore, unlike Corbyn’s proposals, there are no fundamental problems with what Ashton has put forward; any changes which I want to see made only involve tweaking or expanding upon the framework already developed. I sincerely hope that these proposals will gain broad attention within Canada and beyond. In particular, socialists and environmentalists in the UK would do well to take notice.