Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan weighs in on Jack Layton's legacy:

It seems to me that Jack Layton’s enduring legacy is twofold. First, he set a standard of doing politics that, if followed by others, would change the entire tone of public life for the country. You could see his influence in the decorum that characterized the leadership contest to choose his successor. The media saw only tedium. The party understood it was Jack’s insistence on civility that was at work.

Jack regarded those he disagreed with as democratic opponents, not as dishonorable, even treasonous enemies to be destroyed. For him politics was not the brutal, no-holds-barred permanent war being waged against all comers by the governing party. He rarely attacked motives or personalities. He treated his opponents with respect and civility. He stuck to the issues, about which he felt passionately and which he pursued forcefully.
...
Until May 2, (2011), I saw the party’s role as being the conscience of the nation, an influencer of those with power, not a government-in-waiting. That’s how I interpreted election results from the 1930s all the way through to the 2008 elections, during which time the CCF/NDP only once polled as high as 20 per cent of the votes; often it was considerably lower. This was even true of the 3 elections Mr. Layton had fought before his last one. The message from the party’s beloved “ordinary Canadians” seemed to me self-evident.

Jack rejected this destiny as the NDP’s permanent fate, and at the last minute he was vindicated.

- Andrew Nikiforuk comments on the Cons' attempts to make Canadian democracy subordinate to the will of Enbridge and other oil interests:

To get a million barrels of bitumen a day to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Arthur, Texas, the Harper government strenuously lobbied politicians in Washington on behalf of the Keystone XL pipeline. When that project became bogged down in public protests and regulatory delays, Harper abandoned a 2008 policy that restricted bitumen shipments to China and became an outspoken cheerleader for Enbridge and Northern Gateway. Putting bitumen on supertankers bound for Asia "will require some significant infrastructure projects to go forward," Harper said recently in Bangkok. "And we’re obviously…looking at taking steps necessary to ensure we can get timely regulatory decisions."

There is nothing subtle about Harper or the "necessary steps" he has taken. His government has been characterized by the Economist as "intolerant of criticism and dissent," with a penchant for rule-breaking. Early in 2012 it branded First Nations and environmental groups opposed to Northern Gateway, including the Canadian office of the U.S.-based nonprofit ForestEthics and the David Suzuki Foundation, as foreign-funded "radicals" opposed to economic prosperity. Environmental groups with charitable status that have challenged bitumen mining have been subjected to federal investigation. And to make sure that Enbridge’s pipeline experiences none of the delays that have beset Keystone XL, the Harper government launched a concerted attack in March and April on most of Canada’s main environmental laws.

"The debate is no longer about a pipeline," says Robyn Allan, an economist and former CEO of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. "It’s about an energy strategy designed in the boardrooms of Big Oil that’s being forced on the Canadian public."

- One might hope that the Libs' fine for robocalls in Guelph would help push the Robocon investigation along. But I have to wonder whether the story featuring both full cooperation from the Libs and a political price will simply reinforce the Cons' apparent conclusion that the cost-benefit calculation favours continuing to stonewall against any attempt to figure out who's responsible for their own misleading robocalls.

- Finally, Scott Stelmaschuk and Bruce Johnstone both offer rather more generous interpretations of Brad Wall's talk of royalty revisions than my take. But I'm still inclined to be skeptical until there's some evidence to suggest a Sask Party-led review would actually serve to increase revenue, rather than operating as yet another handout to the corporate sector.

On turf wars

The Guelph Mercury reports on the NDP's environment platform rollout. But most interesting is the response from the Libs and Greens, who are apparently attempting to rewrite history in order to take credit for the NDP's policy proposals rather than working to get them implemented.

Here's the candidate response to the NDP's plan for building retrofits and efficiency incentives:

Valeriote said the NDP has borrowed liberally from policies introduced in 2005 in the Liberal's "Project Green" plan, which included a retrofitting program and numerous incentives to help industry embrace green technology.

"It's nothing new," he said. "In fact, I think they are just trying to repackage what we've already introduced years ago."

Mike Nagy said both the NDP and Liberals have stolen directly out of the Green party's playbook, claiming as their own environmental plans that were conceived by his party years ago.

"It's almost laughable to see how many of our policies they have taken and called their own," he said, adding the Greens are the only party with new and original environmental strategies.

Now, I'm probably less of a policy purist than some NDP supporters: to the extent another party wants to implement a good idea, I'd prefer to see a cooperative effort to get the policy implemented rather than an argument over who came up with it first. But with both the Libs and Greens apparently outraged over the idea that the NDP's platform might be similar to plans they've proposed, let's look at some history on retrofitting in Canada.

Naturally, the easiest place to start will be in the more recent past, where Valeriote seems to think that the concepts of retrofitting and tax incentives appeared to Stephane Dion in a vision in 2005.

Here's the problem with that claim, though: two parties made an extensive national retrofitting program part of their environmental platform in 2004. And the Libs weren't one of them.

Which means that to the extent that using another party's policy without credit could be seen as a wrong, the Libs themselves were guilty of it in 2005. And now, in trying to express outrage that the NDP would claim credit for a policy which he apparently sees the Libs as having stolen fair and square, Valeriote can only be seen as just slightly less honest and believable than Krusty the Clown - if perhaps no less laughable.

So what about the Greens? It's entirely true that they were the other national party which had shown interest in the idea of retrofitting by 2004. But can they plausibly claim original ownership of the concept - either in general, or compared to the NDP and its current leadership?

To answer that question in part, let's take a look at how long Jack Layton has been involved in the push for retrofitting:

In 1988, Toronto hosted one of the first major scientific conferences on global warming. Shaken and inspired, Jack Layton set out to build consensus on City Council to respond locally to the emerging global threat.

By 1990, Toronto had set three world precedents. First, it committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% before 2005. Second, it created a dedicated Energy Efficiency Office to coordinate the response. Third, it created the widely-emulated Toronto Atmospheric Fund (TAF) to finance innovative and effective green projects.

Launched using a $23-million endowment from a property sale, this rotating fund operates at zero cost to taxpayers—projects pay for themselves out of their energy savings. TAF initiatives have already cut 250,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, with annual savings of $2.7-million in the city’s operation costs alone. TAF’s success disproves the stale assumption that a clean environment and a thriving economy are competing priorities...

In 1993, Layton assembled a consortium of companies, unions, city agencies and energy experts to develop the world’s first plan to retrofit an entire city for energy efficiency. BBP projects have so far retrofitted 500 buildings, cut 132,000 tons of carbon emissions, supported hundreds of jobs, saved building owners $19-million in energy costs, and provided healthy returns for investors.

So at a time when the Green Party's vote count across the country wouldn't have been enough to win some ridings, Jack Layton was already putting a retrofitting and investment incentive plan into effect in Toronto. Which makes it seem at best a remote possibility that it was the Greens (rather than any other source of information) who would actually have provided the template. And that's without getting into the sheer improbability that it was the Canadian Greens that came up with the idea in the first place, such that it would be theirs to "steal".

Again, the broader issue isn't so much who actually came up with any particular idea such as retrofitting. But from the Libs' and Greens' response, it's clear that they're far more interested in picking fights with the NDP than in cooperating on policies which all three parties seem to agree on in principle. And the fact that neither can be bothered to bring any facts to that battle should offer plenty of reason for environmentally-conscious voters to pool their support behind the NDP.

(Edit: fixed link, wording.)