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Are Quebecers as 'green' as they think? |
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Saturday, 20 January 2007 |
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The Toronto Star By: Sean Gordon
The Rupert River, the last pristine, unspoiled major waterway in Quebec, carves its way through the boreal forest to the southern end of James Bay, a frothing, raging behemoth that for decades has been eyed by Hydro-Quebec engineers.
And depending on your point of view, the Rupert is either about to be harnessed for the greater good of Quebecers or pillaged beyond repair in the name of increasing the utility's prospects for selling excess capacity to the United States.
Sporadic, vocal protests from native communities and environmental activists notwithstanding, the province's announcement earlier this month that it will break ground on a massive hydroelectric project that will divert the Rupert's path has prompted little public outcry and only token political opposition.
The case of the Rupert illustrates one of the lesser-known quirks of the Quebec mindset: denizens of the province that considers itself the greenest jurisdiction in Canada are resolutely committed to the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gas productions and are fiercely resistant to "dirty" energy sources, but they are perfectly tolerant of hydroelectric megaprojects that risk upsetting fragile northern ecosystems.
"Much of the way people feel about issues like the environment here has to do with cultural factors," says Claude Villeneuve, a Universite du Quebec à Chicoutimi scientist and a climate change pioneer in the province. "It sounds a bit corny, but when you talk about the weather as much as we do here, when you don't want to talk about politics or religion, you talk about rain and sunshine."
And since the debate over the nationalization of hydroelectricity - the crowning achievement of then-Liberal energy minister Rene Levesque in the 1960s - Hydro-Quebec's dam projects have become intertwined with the province's identity.
The reliance on renewable electricity has also had the side benefit of making Quebec one of Canada's lowest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases. Quebec spews less than half as much noxious emissions as Ontario, and discharges 2 1/2- times less than Alberta. This has conferred a natural advantage in implementing the Kyoto protocol, which seeks to reduce emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels.
Quebec was also the first Canadian province to legislate a plan to meet the Kyoto objectives
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A succession of opinion polls has suggested the environment has become the principal policy preoccupation of voters nationwide, nosing out the perennial champ, health care.
But if Canadians seem to care more about the green question, Quebecers typically have even stronger feelings than their fellow citizens.
A survey last week showed that the environment is by far the most important issue in Quebecers' minds, and polls have consistently shown support for the Kyoto accord is highest in Quebec
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That hasn't stemmed Quebecers' voracious appetite for energy. Like the rest of the country, emissions are rising steadily, and there are multiple examples that green talk is not automatically followed by environmental action (Quebec's auditor general reports the province produces the most garbage in Canada and is surprisingly poor at recycling, for example).
It's difficult to boil down all the reasons behind Quebecers' highly developed green sensibilities, Villeneuve says, but it is rooted in cultural idioms, and in the factually supported belief that Quebec really is different from the rest of Canada when it comes to climate-altering pollutants.
"A large majority of Quebecers live in the St. Lawrence Valley, which is a very sensitive biological and ecological system," says Villeneuve, a best-selling author who in the 1980s helped set up the early efforts to increase awareness of environmental issues in the province's schools. "There's a lot of smog coming from elsewhere, climate-related changes are more easily noticeable. It's also easier to blame others for the pollution."
Premier Jean Charest's government learned the green lesson the hard way: a storm of public protest derailed a project to build a gas- fired electrical plant, and Charest's Liberals have been besieged for more than a year by a controversial decision to sell off a part of a provincial park.
The ascendancy of the environment in the public's eye and the particular attention the issue gets in Quebec help explain why Prime Minister Stephen Harper is so keen to change his government's policies.
Indeed, the environment is one of the few causes that can unite the artistic, scientific, political, business, urban and rural communities.
And if Harper hopes to build the foundation of an eventual majority in Quebec, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's hopes of wresting power from Harper likely rest in his home province as well.
It's a reality the Bloc Quebecois understands only too well, which is why the party has studiously positioned itself as the champion of an issue that cuts the widest possible swath across Quebec public opinion
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There's even a sovereignty vein to be mined: If Quebec were a country, there would be no angst over attaining the Kyoto targets, no debate with Ottawa over funding for the environment.
And so optimism abounds within the Bloc, although there are latent fears that the Tories and Liberals are slowly undermining their support with repeated attacks on the sovereignist party's relevance and ability to actually do anything for Quebec voters.
"This is (Bloc Leader Gilles) Duceppe's fifth election as leader, and it gets harder every time out," says a senior Bloc strategist, who added that the party's strongest argument is that it is still the political grouping that is closest to Quebecers' interests and preoccupations. "We saw it in the last election - it's going to be what they attack us on."
It's no accident, then, that the Bloc was front and centre in establishing a coalition - later joined by the provincial Liberals and others - to fight for the commitment to Kyoto.
Dion, the man nationalist Quebecers love to hate, has also draped himself in green in a bid to modify his image as a federalist crusader, and has rallied his party to the point where it believes 30 or more seats in the province are within reach.
(In the 2006 election, the Bloc won 51 seats in the Commons, the Liberals 13 and the Conservatives 10. There was also one independent MP elected.)
Quebec Tories insist they will continue to be a force within the province - even if their popular standing has slid drastically since last year's electoral breakthrough - and point to an imminent settlement of the so-called fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces.
But the concept of fiscal imbalance was hatched by a sovereignist Quebec government, and the Bloc will claim loudly that any proposed deal will represent far too little for Quebec - either that or it will be a cynical attempt to buy the province with its own money.
In addition, Bloc strategists point out, Tory support in the province is inefficient, and localized largely in the Quebec City region.
Besides which, the Bloc has always done best in elections where both the Liberals and Conservatives were competitive - federalist vote-splitting is a boon to the party - and has comparatively suffered in elections like last year's or in 2000, when either the Liberals or the Tories collapse.
This week, Duceppe was bullish about his party's chances in the next election.
"We finished first in Quebec in 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006," he told reporters in Montreal. "Without taking anything for granted, we are very confident we will do the same in the next vote."
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