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Rachel Notley calls Leap Manifesto 'naive' 'ill-informed' & 'tone-deaf'
April 11, 2016 - 4:10pm
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Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is repudiating the controversial Leap Manifesto, but says she doesn't feel the provincial NDP needs to split from the federal party.
The Leap Manifesto proposes Canada immediately start moving away from fossil fuels and stop building new projects like pipelines.
"These ideas will never form any part of our policy," Notley said Monday. "They are naive, they are ill-informed, and they are tone-deaf."
Despite this, she said the provincial wing of the NDP will not split from the federal party. She said provincial and federal parties often disagree.
"To be clear, this document has not been adopted. It's simply going to be discussed," Notley said. "And we will engage in that discussion and we will make darn sure that the points I made at convention are heard from Nanaimo to Cape Breton and everywhere in-between."
Notley's remarks come one day after delegates at the NDP convention in Edmonton decided to move ahead with discussion of the Leap Manifesto. The document will be discussed at riding associations across the country over the next two years.
Notley declined to comment on what effect the ongoing discussions will have on the perception of her party in Alberta.
"That is a huge hypothetical because this document was not adopted," she said. "And so I'm just not going to answer hypothetical questions.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/rachel-notley-calls-leap-manifest...
Gee. I always thought campaigning from the left and governing from the right was the prerogative of the Liberal party.
I suspect that not all of the Alberta NDP membership is opposed to at least discussing the Leap Manifesto. We do need to start moving away from fossil fuels immediately, and have needed to for decades. The longer we wait to make the transition the more difficult it will be and the less chance of success before catastrophic climate change is unavoidable (it may be unavoidable already, but if we do not act now the chances of avoiding it will continue to diminish and consequences will be even more extreme). The debate needs to be how to do it not when to do it. I appreciate Rachel's predicament, and while it may be perceived as a disaster for the Alberta NDP that the Leap Resolution was adopted yesterday, I believe it would have been a far greater disaster had the resolution not been adopted. The job of the NDP must be to reconcile physical reality with political reality, not to ignore physical reality. I hope that the political reality will change over the next few years to the point that the political space even in Alberta for major elements of the Leap Manifesto will be much greater. Let's hope the catastrophe Stephen Lewis predicts between 2030 and 2050 does not come sooner, but that the acceptance of the possibliy becomes far more widespread quickly.
I think Rachel Notley is making it clear she has no plans to run for Federal Leader.
Maybe we just need to replace the "oil patch" with the "solar patch", and promise them plenty more $100k/year jobs and massive provincial revenues. I doubt if it's specifically the smell of crude oil that they like so much.
In provinces where the NDP has become one of the two main governing parties, the NDP governs more like Liberals (and in BC, the BC Liberals govern like Conservatives).
I think it's easy enough to dismiss this as "Alberta-ness", but what if the Leap Manifesto had said:
- "let this be the last day we pull fish from our waters!" -- I think that Atlantic provinces might have a quarrel with that.
- "in 2016, the digital age, we have no more need of paper!" -- I think BC might have a quarrel with that.
- "we should move toward a gluten-free diet!" -- I think Saskatchewan might have a quarrel with that.
I'm not giving my full-throated agreement to Notley on this, but I can kind of see how this is a sticky wicket for them.
Maybe if that had been done we would have a much healthier fishing industry on the east coast.
The message got through all right so it appears Alberta remains in denial. Burning oil causes climate change. We must move off of fossil fuels. It's not a Toronto thing it's a Canada thing. We aren't going to sacrifice the planet to appease Alberta.
My bad.
Not to mention that the strongest opposition to fossil uel extraction and pipelines is among indigenous peoples, and after that BC and Quebec. Toronto is down the list lia bit.
Actually her comments were more along the lines of, "we have to keep the farm fishing industry because it creates jobs and BC coastal communities need jobs." You know shortsighted and positively in favour of planet destroying industry.
I actually agree with Notley on one point. If the Manifesto had been written just a bit later it would ALSO have put more emphasis on the boom and bust economics of petroleum and the number of ghost towns and lost hopes in its wake. If I recall the manifesto did speak of (re)conversion and not making workers bear the brunt of the exit from oil, but perhaps it could be more explicit.
And you've never heard any scathing criticism of the Saudis until you've heard it from people from other Arab countries. They look down on the Saudis as lazy, uncultured yokels laying claim both to a big gob of dead organic matter and to the Holy places of Islam. I have Palestinian and Lebanese friends who have worked there, and God, do they hate the Saudis.
We are already buying less and less oil from the Saudis. Most of our oil comes from the US, around 3/4s, and some comes from South America. I don't know what the Saudi percentage is but it is low and getting lower. We are trying to lessen our use of oil therefore current supplies are already more than we need. There is no reason for oil by rail. We need to stop that too. The reason for sending oil east is not for local consumption it's for export. The point is to reach tidewater not supply Canadians. Pipelines or rail is a false dichotomy. We can choose neither. We can choose to start weaning ourselves off of oil and soon and as quickly as possible.
On behalf of Mr. Magoo, he didn't actually write that. Walk it back, maybe?
Here's Gil McGowan's interview on Power & Politics:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2686671167
I guess the price cuts changed that direction. Even so, we need to reduce that not replace it by another source. Over the long run the eastern oil refineries will have to shut down probably starting in Quebec.
Alberta with have to be satisfied with what it is selling now rather than trying to expand the industry. It's time to start transitioning.
To implement the green energy provisions Leap Manifesto will require that we ensure there will be employment for those who are displaced by the move away from fossil fuels.
We're not going to get support from energy workers in Alberta or anywhere else, if they are threatened with losing their homes or their life's savings. Consequently, concrete job-creating proposals must be part of the plan.
Also from your link:
The primary objectors to EE are the people along its path who consider the risk of a spill too great. Complaining about the US or the Saudis will do nothing to change that. Build a refinery in the west. If not Alberta then Saskatchewan or Manitoba or just continue using current export channels.
Remember Dan Gagnier...
This is the crux of the matter when it comes to winning people over to a green economy. It has to go from the theoretical, to the practical. Having spent several decades helping workers deal with the fall-out from the FTA and NAFTA, I have some considerable sympathy for Alberta energy workers.
On the one hand, we have to move off of the fossil fuel economy over the next few decades or we're all in deep shit. On the other hand, we need to have "buy in" from the folks who are going to see their jobs disappear. And until we start developing practical proposals to green the economy, the right-wing is going to play the "jobs" game...even though we all know very well that the right-wing does not and has never ever given a shit about jobs.
One of the quickest ways to generate jobs relatively immediately, is to do environmental retrofits of existing buildings. A rather obscure former city councillor in Toronto by the name of Jack Layton pioneered this approach in the 1990's.
I don't understand why people are not thinking about the poor coal miners. Where is their advocacy group? If we need to keep digging up bitumen why do we need to give up on mining coal?
Given the fact that Calgary's oil and gas industry is one of our BC Liberal Premier's main sources of revenue and were Harpers biggest allies I am extremely pissed to hear a NDP Premier shilling for them. I mean really, WTF.
I dunno, because perhaps a socialist approach to climate change means that you treat the folks you're going to throw out of work humanely...and have a concrete plan to do so because otherwise they become your enemy.
No green plan threw the oil workers out of work. When the market throws them out of work we now should abandon our dreams of a green future? There was no national emergency when BC was stripped of its forest industry over the last twenty years because of soft wood lumber rules that see our logs exported raw and our forest licenses untied from requirements to mill locally. We need to think about workers by building the green infrastructure not building pipelines through BC to get to tidewater so that the inevitable oil spill will kill off what remains of our fishery jobs.
As it is for Rachel Notley.
Most politicians are in favour of pipelines -- that's the problem.
A few thoughts.
Apparently, one argument for allowing pipelines from Alberta is to remove a right-wing line of attack that Notley can't build a pipeline. Let's run with that, and assume that the NDP is defeated in 2019. Then that right-wing government fails to build pipelines. What then?
The second thing is that this is being framed as an east-Alberta issue. Isn't there a great deal of opposition to the pipelines in BC? Last time I looked on a map BC is west of Alberta. Hasn't Christy Clark recently started to talk tough against pipelines from Alberta? Isn't there an irony that Clark can use this club against the BC NDP to block their chances of election next year? To say nothing of any internal opposition to pipelines that might arise from within Alberta? Furthermore, why is Notley pushing these pipelines when she said she would effectively stop pushing Keystone so hard, and Albertans still elected her?
As for jobs, how are jobs created within Alberta by piping the oil out of the province? I know that the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour was very harshly critical of Notley's not changing the royalty regime for oil companies.
But who knows? Perhaps green energy is going to take off in Alberta beyond everyone's wildest expectations that people will forget all about pipelines.