General

This is a guest post by Derek Wong, sustainability consultant and founder of the blog Carbon49.com.

Did you know our government spends money subsidizing fossil fuel energy to keep prices artificially low?

A new International Monetary Fund (IMF) study uncovers just how much these subsidies amount to and urges governments to stop these market distortion practices. So just what kind of numbers are we talking here?

Using the IMF’s numbers – the Canadian portion from the full report (pdf) – I calculated the real price we pay for fossil fuel energy and the results are astonishing. With additional data provided to me by the IMF office in Washington, I discovered energy subsidies are higher than I expected. In fact, far higher.

Interestingly, the release of the study was widely covered by mainstream media around the world in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and in a particularly good analysis from the Wall Street Journal.

But it was strangely left untouched by Canadian media.

Prior to the release of the Canada Revenue Agency’s 2003 guidelines on charities and political activities, individuals from Canada’s voluntary sector expressed the belief that Canada’s policy should look a lot more like England’s.

The rule that says Canadian charities must limit political activities to 10 percent of their time and resources should be scrapped, they said, and a Canadian charitable commission, similar to that which exists in the UK, should be set-up to regulate the sector.

Charitable organizations in England have historically enjoyed both government support and the legal right to speak out, and the Third Sector (voluntary sector) has a track record of making social change. The past decade, though, has been one of massive change for law and policy on charity in England. In some respects, Canada does seem to be taking some cues from England when it comes to the voluntary sector, but probably not in the way those who asked for it back in 2003 had hoped.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. For Part 1, click here.

Like every other country in the world, Canada has promised to help keep global warming to less than 2 degrees C. However Canada's political and corporate leadership are committed to turning the country into a fossil-fuelled “energy superpower.” With a drug lord's just-providing-a-service hypocrisy Canada has openly declared it's future is tied to the profits from dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-heating carbon into the atmosphere every year.

And the world's new energy superpower plans to grow those annual emissions to 1.5 billion tonnes by 2020 giving one of the least populated countries a gigantic carbon bootprint.

Most of this climate-wrecking carbon energy will come from Canada's tar sands located just underneath the pristine boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta. The oil industry likes to call them “oil sands,” although there is no liquid oil only a tarry bitumen mixed deep in the sandy soil.