By Times Staff
Two Clearwater residents, Keith McNeill and Jean Nelson, recently attended Citizens Climate Lobby-Canada’s annual conference and lobbying days, which were held Oct. 21-24 in Ottawa.
“It was four days full of firsts and mosts,” said Cathy Orlando, the national director of CCL Canada. “We had the most number of face-to-face meetings: 44 in one lobbying blitz.”
There were 49 lobbying meetings in all. Fifty-one CCL volunteers lobbied in those meetings, and in total, 65 people attended the conference.
Prior to lobbying, CCL volunteers from across Canada spent two days deepening their understanding about climate change with speakers such as Erin Flanagan from the Pembina Institute, Jason Dion from Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, Catherine Abreu from Canada’s Climate Action Network, Mark Cameron from Canadians for Clean Prosperity, Jeff Parker for the Toronto Board of Trade and more.
Armed with two days of training and networking, 240 signatures from businesses and NGOs on their open letter and 652 print media hits in 2017, volunteers from across Canada presented five simple steps to improve Canada’s carbon pricing policy to MPs and Senators and help “bend the curve”.
• That the carbon price is economy-wide and is applied upstream: at the wellhead, coal mine or point of entry into the economy.
• That the national carbon price continues to rise past 2022 with the objective of Canada exceeding our Paris targets and becoming a world leader in tackling the climate crisis and in the cleantech industry.
• That border tax adjustments are included in the policy to level the playing field for domestic industries with international jurisdictions without a similar carbon price.
• That the federal government work with the provinces and territories to ensure provincial carbon pricing systems can keep up with the rising federal minimum carbon price without imposing any additional burdens on low and middle-income Canadians. For example, the federal government could propose carbon fee-and-dividend as a model policy.
• To ensure that there is a consistent policy towards combating climate change, that the federal government, as promised in the 2015 Liberal election platform, end financial subsidies to fossil fuel companies.