4 minute read
What can Tommy Douglas Teach Us About Climate Change?
- By Justin Crewson -
Director, Regulatory Affairs & Grid Infrastructure, Canadian Electricity Association
Quizzes have always been a peculiar tradition at my family’s holiday gatherings. And so, one year, my family and I found ourselves guessing who a recent CBC national survey had named “the greatest Canadian of all time”. Many of the quiz participants were in minor hockey – of course, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux figured heavily in the predictions. But it was later revealed that former Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas had topped the 2004 CBC poll.
I did not think about that quiz much more until years later while studying policy in the U.S state of Michigan. In contrast to Canadian enthusiasm for grand collective projects such as public health care, many of my classmates seemed to have a strong default preference for individualism and market forces as policy remedies to social ills. When I brought up the Canadian healthcare system, the response from my American peers tended to be one of interest, but ultimately a dismissal, that such a system was too “socialist” to work in the U.S. It was then that I suddenly understood why Premier Douglas was held in such high esteem. He represented an institution that, even more than hockey, embodied what it meant to be Canadian.
Nearly a decade later, I once again find myself thinking about Tommy Douglas. Last year, in concert with countries around the world, Canada legislated a bold target of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Indeed, with over 80% of Canada’s electricity production being emissions-free and growing, we are starting from a point of strength.
However, the investment required to merely replace our aging grid infrastructure – not to mention the cost of upgrading generation, transmission, and distribution systems to electrify and decarbonize the economy – is significant. Ongoing investment will be required to secure, maintain, and modernize these investments in perpetuity.
Recent work by Princeton University estimates that between 2020 and 2030, in a “business-as-usual” scenario, $9.4 trillion will be spent on renewing the U.S. energy system. To reach a trajectory for net-zero emissions by 2050, the country would need to invest only an additional 3% (or $300 billion). This is an important point, and it highlights the significance in making that extra investment beyond marginal cost that will provide the very non-marginal return of preventing climate change. The electricity grid in Canada also needs renewal and it would be wise to enable our electricity companies to make the additional investments over replacing like-for-like. Ultimately, this additional investment will have to come from somewhere, and given the decades-long lifespan of electricity infrastructure, we need to make the decision sooner rather than later. However, the mandates of most provincial and territorial regulatory commissions oblige them to review sector investments with a sole focus on limiting financial costs, even if these limited investments fail to address broader social objectives.
What can Tommy Douglas teach us about our response to climate change? In 1947, his party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), instituted North America’s first publicly-funded healthcare system, largely as a response to the depression era and demand for government policies that improved human welfare. Like electricity, the Canadian constitution makes healthcare a provincial responsibility, and similar to electricity systems today, for the first half of the 20th century, provincial healthcare systems evolved differently in various Canadian jurisdictions. This changed in 1957 – when inspired by the level and universality of care offered by provinces like Saskatchewan – the federal government passed the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act. It offered to reimburse half of provincial and territorial costs for specific hospital services and did so with an objective of standardizing the level of healthcare across the country. The structure of healthcare payments has evolved over the years, but in its current form, the Canada Health Act sets standards that must be met by provinces and territories to receive full monetary transfers.
While the Canadian healthcare system is not perfect, and comes with its own challenges, we should once again look to Tommy Douglas as a source of inspiration for the social ills of the day. Towards this end, in December 2016, premiers and the federal government signed the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which prioritized infrastructure funding programs. While many are being delivered by the federal government, the current model forces a “one-size-fits-all” approach that requires investments to be structured to meet federal rather than provincial needs. Current funding mechanisms also require onerous costsharing and reporting requirements; and in any case fail to address the root of the problem.
The federal government must be bolder and focus on the regulatory constructs that govern provincial and territorial electricity infrastructure investments, and this issue should be prioritized at the next Energy and Mines Ministers’ Conference (EMMC).
Discussions should concentrate on the development of principles for a shared climate funding formula to unlock the investments required for deep decarbonization and electrification of the Canadian economy. Like healthcare, this funding will need to be ubiquitous and transformative, enabling continuous investments over business-as-usual, and be fully directed by provincial and territorial governments. Like healthcare, the government should set metrics, such as emissions reductions, to incentivize the proper use of funding.
I have no doubt that Tommy Douglas would be supportive of such an approach, especially since it was his government that created the provincially-owned Saskatchewan Power Corporation, a predecessor to SaskPower. SaskPower and its provincial owners are but one of the many stakeholders across the country that would benefit from a similar costsharing scheme. Like Tommy Douglas, such bold action might also make its founder one of the greatest Canadians ever, having solved yet another global problem with domestic Canadian values.
