David Dodge, Pembina Institute

Canadian environmental NGOs are dismayed after learning that a Calgary oil and gas company is part of the official Canadian delegation to UN climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia — a delegation the NGOs were excluded from.

Official delegations to international meetings have traditionally included NGO reps and opposition MPs. However, this year Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government chose to exclude them while including EnCana Corporation and other industry representatives. “This is not right,” says Stephen Hazell, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. “The environmental community and opposition parties have been represented on Canada’s delegation to these sorts of meetings for many, many years. So for us to be cut out and industry kept in is really most unfair.”

Alan Boras, a spokesperson for EnCana, says Environment Minister John Baird invited the company solely to give a presentation on its carbon sequestration project in Weyburn, Sask. — “the world’s largest,” says Boras. “They were just bringing our information and knowledge on the technical side of what happens there.” Boras says EnCana’s participation at the conference, which ends December 14, is limited to the presentation on the Weyburn project. (Fast Forward put in an interview request with Baird’s office, but no one was available by press time.)

Matthew Bramley, director of the Pembina Institute’s climate change program, says the Harper government has broken with a “long tradition” by excluding NGOs from the delegation. However, Bramley says the Canadian government’s positions at the conference are more important than who’s on the delegation. “We're deeply concerned that Canada is threatening to block progress… by unfairly demanding hard emissions caps for poor countries — something that they are not realistically going to accept,” says Bramley, who’s in Bali for the conference.

Numerous groups and people in Bali have accused the Canadian government of trying to derail the talks aimed at negotiating a post-2012 agreement on the climate change crisis. (The Kyoto Protocol, which Canada signed in 2002, requires that Canada cut its greenhouse gas emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. However, Harper called Kyoto a “mistake” in November, and his government has made it clear that Canada won’t meet its Kyoto obligations.)

Environmentalists have heaped scorn on Canada, even awarding the country the Fossil of the Day Award several times for its poor performance at the conference. However, sharp criticism has also come from bigwigs like Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who reportedly described Harper’s crew as “a government of skeptics” that “does not want to do anything on climate change.” The UN’s climate chief, Yvo de Boer, also ripped into Canada on December 10 for pushing for binding targets for developing countries at the same time it abandons its own commitment to cut emissions.

“When you’re asking [developing countries] to reduce their emissions, you’re actually asking them to reduce their basic survival,” says Johanne Whitmore, a climate change policy analyst for the Pembina Institute. “Our emissions come because we choose to have a lifestyle that’s extremely wasteful in terms of energy.” Whitmore says the Canadian government’s position is “counterproductive, because it’s not taking into account the equity issue between different countries.”

Early in the 12-day conference, a European NGO called Germanwatch ranked Canada 53rd of 56 countries for its overall climate change performance. Canada beat only the U.S., Australia and Saudi Arabia in the rankings. “Our international credibility is in utter shreds,” says Hazell. “We are being ridiculed over there.”

Hazell believes Alberta’s massive oilsands industry is underpinning Canada’s reluctance to commit to reducing emissions. “The tar sands industry is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in this country,” he says. While Baird talks about “stepping up [Canada’s] fight against climate change,” oilsands production is expected to increase by up to five times by the year 2030. “You cannot achieve those two things at the same time,” says Hazell, adding there should be a moratorium on new oilsands projects.

Several provincial environment ministers are also attending the Bali conference. However, while Ontario and Quebec’s environment ministers are going to spread the word that Ottawa doesn’t speak for their provinces, Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner is there to tout Alberta’s “climate change progress” and “share Alberta’s experience as the first [jurisdiction] in North America to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

Alberta’s intensity-based emissions regulations, brought in by the Stelmach government in July, allow polluters to pay into a fund if they exceed a carbon cap. “It’s quite accurate to say they have regulations on greenhouse gas emissions,” says Hazell. “It’s laughable for them to say that these regulations have had any impact whatsoever…. They get in there with lax regulations that don’t mean anything as a way of occupying the field and ensuring that the federal government doesn’t get in there.”