After nearly a decade as Alberta NDP leader and four years as its first non-conservative premier, Rachel Notley has decided to hang up her political skates. The MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona will spend the next few months shepherding her party’s leadership race, finding a replacement to represent her riding and enjoying the spoils of retirement. If this is how she wants her political story to end, it’ll go down as a memorable one.
But if Notley thinks it has another chapter left, she should spend the next year or so practising her French. That’s because the federal NDP is almost certainly going to need a new leader after the next election given Jagmeet Singh’s ongoing failure to break through with voters. Notley’s demonstrated ability to win over moderates and expand the appeal and reach of the Alberta NDP might be just what a listless federal party needs to get back in the game.
Yes, yes, Notley repeatedly insisted she wasn’t interested in federal politics, which is exactly what someone in her position is supposed to say. “I am not interested in pursuing federal politics … at this time,” she told reporters at Tuesday’s news conference announcing her resignation. When pressed again, she said, “I have no intention of running federally, and I believe I’m done with elected politics for good.” In a subsequent interview with CBC’s Power & Politics, Notley had a one-word answer when asked if she saw a role for herself in federal politics: “Nope.”
But Notley would hardly be the first ex-politician to get lured back into politics after swearing to leave it behind. The late former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, after all, famously came back into federal politics 15 years after his own 1989 retirement and won the riding of Ottawa Centre in the 2004 election. Politics has a way of getting into your blood, especially if you’re a second-generation party leader like her, and no amount of time spent running (Notley’s recreational activity of choice) can truly keep its levels in check.
There’s also her fierce loyalty to the party in which she grew up. (In other words, forget about her running for the federal Liberals.) Notley is, of course, the daughter of an Alberta NDP legend. She worked for an NDP government in British Columbia in the 1990s. She led her own NDP out of the political wilderness and into government in Alberta. And there are few people in this country better suited to expanding the federal NDP’s appeal than Notley, with the possible exceptions of the premiers of British Columbia and Manitoba. But they have jobs right now — and as of Tuesday, she doesn’t.
The prospect of sticking her head back into the partisan political blender surely seems horrifying right now. But 18 months or so from now, after the next federal election is over, the landscape will look very different. We will have at least two new leaders of the three major parties, and very possibly a new government altogether. The NDP will have an opportunity to redefine itself, not just as a sidekick to the Trudeau Liberals but perhaps their replacement as Canada’s dominant progressive political party. Notley just happens to have plenty of experience in rolling up the progressive vote under an NDP banner — and achieving the heretofore impossible in the process.
“Alberta is not a one-party province, or a two-party province with two different shades of conservative,” she said in her resignation speech. “We are now a province where progressive, forward-looking diverse Albertans can see and pursue their political aspirations and their public policy goals, not with a view of having other people just hear them, but with a view to winning government and seeing those policies turned into real action by their government.”
It’s a heck of a legacy. An even bigger one would be finding a way to bring that same mindset to the federal NDP. It could help them finally realize the vision Jack Layton had for them that came into view for a split second more than a decade ago. Yes, the NDP can win elections, even in places where the idea might seem hopelessly optimistic. Just ask Rachel Notley.
The lazy man’s argument against electric vehicle mandates
Eric Reguly, the Globe and Mail’s European bureau chief, has a pretty sweet gig. From his perch in Rome, he gets to write about all manner of things, from German politics to climate policy. Best of all, he probably can’t hear people calling him out back in Canada when he gets something badly wrong.
Take his recent column on electric vehicle mandates that trades in all the debunked anti-EV arguments that have circulated in conservative circles for years now. “Putting aside waning consumer demand,” he writes, “here are four reasons why forcing manufacturers to pump out EVs is somewhere between wrong and outright loony.”
Hold on. While Reguly suggests that demand for EVs is “rising at ever-diminishing rates” (which is what inevitably happens with new technologies as they scale up), demand is very much not “waning.” Global EV sales are up 36 per cent from 2022 and they’re up 50 per cent in the United States, where all the talk about slowing demand seems to be coming from. As Bloomberg’s Colin McKerracher noted, “A slowdown could still be coming, but for now, this looks much more like a winnowing down of who is competitive in the market than a general drop-off in demand.”
Reguly’s first bit of concern-trolling is around cost: they’re still just too expensive, and where will all the raw materials for them come from anyways? Alas, he hasn’t been keeping up with the news here. As Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted in a recent report, the price of lithium-ion battery packs — the most expensive part of any electric vehicle — fell 14 per cent in 2023 to a record low of $139 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). That drop was driven by decreases in raw material and component prices and is expected to continue this year.
“Miners and metals traders surveyed expect prices for key battery metals like lithium, nickel and cobalt to ease further in 2024,” their report says. “Given this, BNEF expects average battery pack prices to drop again next year, reaching $133/kWh (in real 2023 dollars). Technological innovation and manufacturing improvement should drive further declines in battery pack prices in the coming years, to $113/kWh in 2025 and $80/kWh in 2030.” Oh, and the kicker here? All these cost reductions are happening before the full effect of the Inflation Reduction Act is felt.
Next up, there’s the “But China!” argument. Reguly worries about China’s control over key manufacturing and mining aspects of electric vehicle production, apparently forgetting that the Inflation Reduction Act and similar efforts in Canada and Europe are aimed at attracting as much of that activity as possible. Weirdly, he then complains about the low cost of made-in-China electric vehicles. “The Chinese will soon export millions of EVs as they move up the value chain and flood the low-priced segments of the EV market, where the American and European car companies pay scant attention.” So much for that concern about the high price of EVs.
Oh, but it gets sillier. Reguly trades in the positively ancient talking point that suggests EVs are only clean if they’re powered by renewable energy. “In Alberta, almost 90 per cent of the electricity comes from burning coal and natural gas. When you plug in an EV there, you are merely transferring the emissions from the car tailpipe to the smokestack.”
First of all, he’s wrong about that number. He’s using a stale-dated figure from 2019, one that preceded the huge increase in wind and solar generation and the phaseout of multiple coal-fired plants. As of July 2023, more than 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity was generated by non-emitting sources, and that figure is only going to keep rising.
“Ottawa is dreaming if it thinks Alberta’s electricity production will become as green as Quebec’s or Ontario’s within the next decade,” he writes. But apparently Reguly is dreaming, too, since that’s not a target the federal government has set for the province. Come 2035, and assuming the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations are actually in effect, Alberta can have all sorts of gas-fired electricity still on the grid, whether it’s grandfathered in (until 2043, in the case of the new 900-megawatt Cascade power project), on a full-time basis or used for peaking demand. And, of course, there are no restrictions on building abated gas-fired power (that is, facilities equipped with carbon capture and storage), much as people like Danielle Smith and her environment minister continue to pretend otherwise.
Reguly closes his half-baked argument with a whimper by pointing out that “EVs are still cars” and still have to be parked and have roads built for them. “As they gain popularity, more roads and parking lots have to be built because families may not swap their gas car for an EV; they may buy an EV for city use and keep the gas car for long-range trips.” And? Not everyone has the good fortune to live in Rome or some other highly densified European city where sprawl is a non-starter and trains and public transit are the norm. If Reguly wants to make the case for more walkable and human-scale cities, he should. But in the context of an anti-EV argument, it’s an obvious red herring.
I have no doubt that we’ll see more of these sorts of pieces as we go forward and the transition to more widespread electrification becomes more obvious and inevitable. Change is difficult for some people, after all. But know this: the best technology almost always wins the race, and this one is already over.
Another carbon tax rebate, another communications debacle
Earlier this week, millions of Canadians received their quarterly carbon tax rebates. And as I feel like I’ve already written a few times by now, a much smaller fraction of that number actually understand what the money was for. That’s because, yet again, the Trudeau government failed to convince Canada’s banks and credit unions to label the deposits clearly and consistently.
For some, like me, it read, “FED CLIM INC CAI” — not the clearest label in the world, but one that’s pretty obviously related to the carbon tax. But for others, it just read, “EFT Credit Canada” or “EFT Electronic Direct Credit CANADA.” If you didn’t know to look for it, or weren’t aware of the program, these deposits probably escaped your attention.
That’s especially true in Atlantic Canada, where the rebates are relatively new owing to the federal government’s decision to impose its tax and rebate system on the provinces last summer. That decision was informed by the absence of suitably stringent climate plans in said provinces, but the backlash was almost immediate — and it already caused the Trudeau Liberals to create a special carveout for home heating oil. As I wrote at the time, this undermined the legitimacy of the entire carbon tax architecture and invited more demands for other exemptions.
It shouldn’t be that difficult, given the control the federal government can wield over the banking system, to get these institutions to label the carbon tax rebates correctly and consistently. The fact that the Trudeau Liberals haven’t seen fit to do that says one of two things to me: they don’t think this is a serious problem or they don’t have the wherewithal to address it.
Neither bodes well for its chances of re-election — and for the carbon tax surviving into the future.
Why the climate math on the Ksi Lisims LNG project is more complicated than it looks
If there’s one issue on which I tend to dissent from most of my colleagues here at Canada’s National Observer, it’s LNG in British Columbia. Not surprisingly, then, I found a few bones I wanted to pick in Seth Klein’s predictably thorough and excellent column on the proposed Ksi Lisims LNG project. To Klein, it’s a “major carbon bomb” that also threatens the rights of Indigenous Peoples in northern British Columbia (and the province’s climate change legacy). To me, though, it’s more complicated.
As a general rule, I think economic reconciliation with Indigenous communities is a crucial part of Canada’s broader responsibility to make things right with its founding peoples. I understand that the oil and gas industry has found a way to turn that in its favour, and are using those economic interests to advance its own. As Klein writes, “While I respect the need of the Nisga’a Nation to secure new forms of employment and economic development, the Ksi Lisims LNG project cannot be the answer.”
I’m not sure we get to be the ones who decide that, though. Denying an Indigenous community the right to pursue its economic self-interest, or suggesting that only certain forms of economic opportunity ought to be pursued, is perilously close to a kind of green colonialism. I yield to the legal experts when it comes to questions of legal and territorial sovereignty, as well as what constitutes proper consultation. But whenever people living in cities down south try to tell people up north how they ought to be living their lives, I get a bit uncomfortable. Maybe that’s just the son of a father from Prince George in me.
On the climate front, it’s also more complicated than Klein is allowing. He raises the issue of fugitive methane emissions that Bill McKibben also highlighted in a piece for The New Yorker. But not all natural gas facilities are created equal, and the research on B.C. plants pretty clearly shows they’re among the best in the world — and far, far better than Alberta’s — when it comes to reducing these emissions, whether that’s through the electrification of certain operations or the implementation of new technologies. This work can and should continue.
Because of the electrification process it uses to cool the gas for shipping, the Ksi Lisims project would be one of the lowest-emitting LNG facilities on Earth. Yes, that would mean a huge increase in demand for electricity in British Columbia, an amount just slightly lower than the Site C dam’s projected annual output. And yes, that’s electricity that could otherwise go to displacing fossil fuels and powering electric vehicles. But the demand doesn’t have to be met by Site C. The LNG project could, for example, create a captive market for offshore wind in northern B.C. — one that could also benefit local Indigenous communities.
As to its Scope 3 emissions, the ones that occur when the LNG is eventually combusted for electricity in Asia or elsewhere, those are also more complicated than it’s being made to seem. It’s not as though there aren’t competing countries out there who would also meet the demand for the LNG theoretically produced by the Ksi Lisims project or that if it disappeared, the importing companies and countries would inevitably switch to renewables instead. There are still huge volumes of coal-fired electricity generation that need to be displaced in places like India and China, and while renewables are doing impressive work there right now, it will take time for them to fully scale up — and for battery technology to turn them into reliable baseload power.
Here’s the other thing: if renewables can outcompete imported LNG, they will. Power producers, be they publicly owned or privately held, won’t continue buying LNG if it’s cheaper to install and operate renewable energy. That tipping point isn’t all that far away. But until it arrives, I’m not sure we can say no to communities that have traditionally been deprived of economic opportunity. Either way, it will be a difficult decision for both the B.C. and federal governments. I’d suggest they both remember that perfect can often be the enemy of good.
The Last Word
One of the oldest arguments against wind power is that it’s bad for bird populations. We all know that things like tall buildings and house cats are actually many, many times worse, but new research shows that the threat posed by wind farms is much lower than fossil fuel operations as well. As The Economist noted in a recent issue, “New analysis of American data, published in Environmental Science & Technology, suggests the numbers are negligible, and have little impact on bird populations.” In contrast, that same research shows that new oil and gas wells can reduce bird populations by 15 to 25 per cent.
So much for that anti-wind talking point.
Over the last week I wrote about the danger Donald Trump presents to Canadian interests and how our collective willingness to defend democracy isn’t nearly as robust as we might hope. We’re not quite in the same dire position as they are just yet, but it’s not hard to see the seeds of illiberalism being planted on our side of the border.
Of course, I also had to write about the near-blackout in Alberta and the desperate attempts by conservatives to pin the crisis on anyone or anything — Notley, Trudeau, wind and solar — but themselves. The truth is that Alberta’s deregulated electricity market invited this very situation, and it’s one the NDP tried to avert years ago. Instead, the UCP doubled down on the private sector, and we ended up getting bailed out by the electricity that was sent our way by two different Crown corporations. Socialism, anyone?
And don’t worry, loyal readers: I’m not going anywhere. Yes, a silly Twitter poll had me ahead of people like Naheed Nenshi and Janice Irwin as the best choice to lead the Alberta NDP in the post-Notley era, but partisan politics isn’t for someone as impatient and chatty as me. More to the point, I enjoy writing about it too much to actually subject myself to being written about.
Send your missives my way at [email protected]. Until next week, try to stay warm.