The pope and the need for difficult conversations
There were many noteworthy moments this past week.
From Earth Day to horrendous headlines about our economy to the upcoming election, it was long week; however, it was the passing of Pope Francis that gave me pause to reflect on the challenge of embracing difficult conversations, particularly about Indigenous people and the environment.
Francis did not rely on his cardinals or his church underlings to do the heavy political lifting — he spoke to the people directly affected by church policies and history.
As Canadians, we are now familiar with the apology for residential schools that resulted from those conversations and the role Manitobans played in moving the conversation forward. The hurt remains in many and the dialogue must continue, but no progress will be made if there are no difficult conversations initiated.
We are in challenging times, and I fear that some politicians are using this moment to take advantage and forward their personal agendas, especially when it comes to economic development and the environment.
Camp Morningstar has been attempting to have a conversation with Manitobans about resource extraction from an Indigenous perspective. The passing of the pope this week led me to reflect on our failed attempts to initiate difficult conversations with people in power.
Few probably know that camp was represented at the Vatican as part of a cohort of Indigenous land defenders from around the world. The pope was an environmentalist. Who knew?
I texted with Camp Morningstar's Lisa Raven while she was hosted in Vatican City. She shared that her plain room was in stark contrast to other rooms showcasing the vast wealth taken from Indigenous lands. It was a moment of awakening, and a little creepy, but at least it was the start of a conversation.
These land defenders who gathered at the Vatican were encouraged to share their truths with the cardinals on how remnants of the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nulls and the papal bulls still contaminate Manitoba's Environment Act and Mines and Minerals Act and of course, the Indian Act.
So if the Vatican can initiate difficult conversations, what is holding us up from having conversations about balanced legislation?
The press has a role to play in ensuring their coverage is balanced and include these historical truths.
For example, whining from the likes of Ontario Premier Doug Ford about Indigenous consultation holding up mining in the Ring of Fire and his call to get the federal government out of the way is troublesome. The imperfect adoption by Canada of UNDRIP is the one reason some Indigenous nations must resort to the courts.
In Manitoba, Canadian Premium Sand was approved within months. The six-year and counting delay in the mine start-up has nothing to do with delayed licences.
The constant myth that there is too much regulation is unfounded.
A more likely culprit is the lack of staffing in the provincial licensing offices. The Technical Advisory Committee is tasked with enforcing some sort of standard for environmental protection and they can only go so quickly. If a company submits a weak environmental application, it creates a lot of work as the government wants the mine to succeed, but liabilities are real.
No one is questioning the right to self-determination.
The question is what constitutes informed consultation?
When Camp Morningstar erected a teepee in the dead of a cold February night to protest the lack of information about a proposed mine, free speech was not a Constitutional right for First Nations on reserve.
The legal journey to include that right did not start until 2020, long after Canadian Premium Sand had received their license. Let that sink in.
Take Earth Day. It should have been a politician's handshaking delight — school children galore and people hopeful for a nod in their direction. I understand our premier was elsewhere. From the saddling of the environment minister with an extra portfolio to the lack of action on early promises to have the best environmental legislation, this government continues to dodge difficult conversations about the environment and balanced decision-making
Premier Wab Kinew gets the last laugh. My riverfront home on the stunning Manigotagan River, the generational location of my husband's Indigenous family, has been prospected by 1911 Gold.
So, in addition to the continual threat of a sand mine starting up in my front yard, I now have to think about a gold mine under my house and the river in what serves as my backyard.
Seriously, is this anyone's idea of balance? Kinew, I call uncle.
When the ice melts, you will find me out on the land that is left.
Mary Jane McCarron is a lapsed Catholic.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Toronto Star
an hour ago
- Toronto Star
Deterrence must be the priority of Canada's expanded Armed Forces spending
By Alex Wilner and Christopher Gates Contributors Alex Wilner is a professor at Carleton University and co-director of Triple Helix. He was a member of the 2025 Canadian Academic Delegation to Taiwan. LGen (ret'd) Christopher Coates is director of foreign policy, national defence and national security at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He was a participant at the 2025 Transatlantic Roundtable with NATO allies in Brussels. As Prime Minister Mark Carney tackles his pledge to raise Canada's defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035, Ottawa should frame this spending around a key goal: deterrence. Large sums of money are set to flow in order to meet this target — an estimated $150 billion a year once the goal is fully met. As spending ramps up, a focus on deterrence could guide how the government directs these investments and the way that it explains them to Canadians. This would offer a more compelling and constructive frame that meets the geopolitical realities of this moment, rather than merely spending the cash to placate our allies. Opinion articles are based on the author's interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
National Observer
an hour ago
- National Observer
Local climate activism leads to ‘remarkable' gains, report shows
This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration What do an offshore wind farm in New York, a campaign to install 275,000 heat pumps in Maine and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline have in common? They were all the result of 'community-based strategies' with involvement or leadership from local grassroots groups. Advocates say this is a powerful and relatively cheap way of driving climate action, especially as the Trump administration rolls back as much progress as it can. A new report is the first to put hard numbers to that effectiveness in the United States and Canada. The analysis quantifies how much carbon a given law, protest movement, or clean energy project will keep out of the atmosphere. It also calculates the amount spent on the local efforts advancing each campaign to determine the cost of preventing each metric ton of CO2 equivalent from being released. (CO2 equivalent is a measurement that considers other greenhouse gases like methane.) 'The numbers really did show that these had meaningful impacts and a good return on investment,' said Sam Greenberg, a director at Redstone Strategy Group and a coauthor of the report. 'The benefits are not limited just to the quantifiable carbon impact — even though that's what we were focusing on — but also understanding the full picture of all the other co-benefits we saw coming out of this.' That wind farm in New York, for instance, will keep 7.7 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere by 2030, at a philanthropic cost of just 3 cents per ton, the report notes. A solar farm on the Moapa River Indian Reservation in Nevada will avoid 4.2 million metric tons in the same period, costing 12 cents per ton. Both are slowing climate change and reducing the air pollution that usually comes out of coal or natural gas power plants. That, in turn, brings the added benefit of improving human health. The report considered the supply side of things as well. The Keystone XL pipeline would have ferried crude oil from Canada to refineries in the United States. But after 10 years of legal battles and fearsome opposition by environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and farmers along the route, the developer abandoned the project in 2021. The victory means that between 52 million and 105 million metric tons won't be released by 2030, the report finds. The local advocacy efforts cost $2.6 million, or 2 to 5 cents per ton. 'You can make a solid argument that both the supply-side efforts and the renewable energy development can both have a meaningful impact,' Greenberg said. Community activism for state policies, too, are majorly slashing emissions. In 2023, Maine blew past its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule. Now it wants to install another 175,000 by 2027. Because the devices run on electricity, the state can power them with renewable energy, avoiding 1.2 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030, according to the report. Heat pumps are a good example of climate action not necessarily being branded as such. People might want to adopt the appliances because they're more efficient, or to avoid burning toxic gas in a furnace. Advocates can also pitch renewable energy projects like wind and solar farms as job creators. 'The additional benefits of climate action, those are usually the motivating factors for people,' said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions group that wasn't involved in the report. 'Things like employment, health, less pollution — these are the things that people most fundamentally agree on, and it helps to move conversations beyond the political deadlock.' Advocates say that "community-based strategies" driven by grassroots groups are a powerful and relatively cheap way of driving climate action, especially as the Trump administration rolls back as much progress as it can. With a lack of sufficient leadership on climate even before Donald Trump took office again, it's been up to states to set their own policies. In 2019, New York passed the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act after years of organizing and campaigning by the coalition NY Renews. It commits the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. But even before that, the report notes, by 2030 the law will have canceled 58 million to 120 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. With $10 million spent on local philanthropic efforts, the cost comes to between 8 and 17 cents per ton. Cities, too, are crucibles for climate action. The report notes that in 2019, San Jose, California, became the biggest city in the U.S. to mandate that all new single-family homes, duplexes, and multifamily homes of three stories or less be built without natural gas hookups. That means occupants will be running conventional electric or induction stoves and heat pumps, all electrified with ever more renewable power on the grid. The philanthropic support for the effort cost $1 million, avoiding 887,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030. 'It's kind of remarkable how much mitigation you can get from community-based, grassroots-promoted activities,' said Rhea Suh, president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, which collaborates with donors and nonprofits. (Redstone prepared the report for them, as well as the MacArthur Foundation and Equation Campaign.) 'It is clear that policies that were created from the ground up tend to last longer than the top-down policies.' That's due to increased engagement, Suh adds. Whereas the federal government dictates broad policies across the whole country, mayors and governors are more in tune with what their people actually want. By working on a more granular level with communities, organizers and politicians can collaborate with residents, not dictate. 'The durability comes from just the equity sweat that is put into these things,' Suh said.
National Observer
an hour ago
- National Observer
Canada isn't losing the trade war — yet
Mark Carney told Canadians that he knew how to deal with Donald Trump. April's federal election results showed that voters wanted to believe him. But now, more than three months in and with the latest economic data starting to show signs of tariff-driven deterioration, Canadians are starting to wonder whether his handling of our relationship with America is going according to plan — and what that plan actually is. It's hardly surprising to see Conservative politicians, pundits and online influencers interpreting the developments coming out of Washington and Ottawa through the prism of their reflexive disdain for the Liberal government. There is an almost palpable glee in their mockery of the 'elbows up' catchphrase that helped him win the federal election in April. 'Explain to me about the elbows again,' CPC MP Michelle Rempel-Garner said on social media, citing a list of tariffs that are now higher than they were before Carney became Prime Minister in February (and before Trump officially launched his tariff war on the world on April 2). But it's not just Conservative partisans who are questioning Carney's ability to deliver. In a piece titled ' Let's Admit It: Donald Trump is Winning the Trade War with Canada,' Paul Wells argues that Carney's countermoves are so far coming up short. His efforts to remove interprovincial trade barriers are still largely symbolic, the president's love affair with tariffs continues apace and Carney's efforts to establish new or strengthened economic ties with other countries have yet to yield anything tangible. 'Replacing a lifetime of ever-closer integration with the vastly larger population next door, in favour of substantial new partnerships with distant lands, is really hard,' Wells writes. 'Actually, it's usually impossible.' That's the key word here: usually. As Carney has said, if Canada is going to survive the onslaught of economic and political idiocy coming from Trump's White House, it will have to ' do things that we haven't imagined before, at speeds we didn't think possible." That certainly helps explain the rushed passage of Bill C-5, which lays the groundwork for the acceleration of nation-building economic projects like pipelines and electricity grids. The hardest part there may still lie ahead, as Indigenous groups and local communities prepare to push back against the proposed barrage of building. But for all of his talk about the importance of moving quickly, the prime minister's approach to dealing with Trump seems to be all about doing the exact opposite. Carney, who has made no secret of his fondness for hockey, could be employing a strategy drawn directly from that sport: ragging the puck. As Rolling Stone's Guy Lawson wrote in a recent piece, 'the idea is simple: When you're ahead, don't give the other team any opportunity to win. Hold on to the puck, skate backward away from the play, making it seem like you're still playing the game when you're really playing the clock.' Carney has been criticized for not striking the sort of deals that Japan and Europe secured with Trump, ones that involve handshake agreements and loose pledges to purchase hundreds of billions worth of American exports. But it's worth remembering that these 'deals,' if you can even call them that, still create tariff structures that are higher than what Canadian exporters have to pay. That's because most of our exports still qualify for an exemption under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. As Scotiabank Chief Economist Derek Holt wrote in a recent report, 'because of the exemption that the administration verified last night and because we've long argued that most exports are already CUSMA-compliant, Canada's ETR [effective tariff rate] remains at 4.6 per cent on total goods and services exports to the world and 6.3 per cent on total goods and services exports to the US.' Those international 'deals,' meanwhile, already look like they're barely worth the napkins they must have been written on. Trump has already suggested that the promised investment coming from Europe amounted to a slush fund that he can personally direct as he pleases. 'The details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want,' he said. 'Anything. I can do anything I want with it.' Canada's Conservatives seem to want Mark Carney to rush into a deal — any deal — with Donald Trump. Why his strategy of "ragging the puck" might be about to pay dividends, and what will happen to his government (and our country) if it doesn't. Not quite. The European Union can't tell businesses where or how to invest, as European Commission trade spokesperson Olof Gill told Politico after the deal was announced. "What we have transmitted to the U.S. administration is aggregate intentions as regards energy spending and as regards investment in the U.S. economy by EU companies. Those commitments are in no way binding.' Indeed, as The Atlantic 's Rogé Karma noted, those figures were 'mostly rough numbers based on what European companies were already planning to invest and buy.' As Karma wrote, the math wasn't any better for Trump on the promised investments coming from South Korea and Japan. 'Shortly after the deal with Japan was announced, the country's top trade negotiator said that he anticipated only one or two per cent of the $550 billion fund would come in the form of direct investment; the rest would mostly consist of loans that would need to be repaid with interest. South Korean officials have made similar statements.' In other words: no Trump-controlled slush fund here either. The Japanese deal, meanwhile, has been subject to other competing interpretations of the text. As the New York Times reported, the agreed-upon 15 per cent tariff was issued in a way that it 'stacked' on top of existing ones, which meant the effective rate on things like Japanese beef went up from 26.4 per cent to 41.4 per cent. Japan's lead negotiator claims the Trump administration has agreed to correct this 'extremely regrettable' mistake, while local Japanese media is reporting that the Trump administration hasn't actually made any such concession. Some deal. In this environment, and with Canada's pre-existing protection under CUSMA, the best way to win this trade war is not to engage. That's especially true if the 'deals' being struck right now can be changed at the whim of a president who seems to have an endless supply of them. As the Globe and Mail 's European correspondent Eric Reguly noted, 'there is a lesson for Canada: Nothing short of a congressionally approved trade deal is worth the paper it is written on.' That's the prize that Carney has his eyes on right now, and it's where his efforts ought to be judged most carefully. It's why Canada sent senior ministers to Mexico recently in order to discuss deepening the economic partnership between the two countries — and, likely, some game theory for dealing with Trump. And it's why Carney continues to let Trump stick daggers into his own economy's back rather than trying to insert them himself. Here again, time might be Carney's biggest asset. The closer Trump's allies in Congress get to the midterm elections in 2026, the more his growing unpopularity (and that of his tariff war) will matter to him. The passage of time also gives Carney more room to further develop Canada's economic alternatives: new infrastructure projects and new trade deals with other partners. All of this amounts to meaningful leverage for Canada in the inevitable renegotiation of CUSMA. Mark Carney may yet lose the trade war with America and Donald Trump. There might not even be a way to win that sort of war, if Trump persists in deliberately tanking his country's economy and taking everyone else's with it. But for now, at least, Carney's strategy appears to be working. One thing is certain: his political fortunes, and maybe even those of the country he now governs, depend on it.
