Illustrations by Alisha Davidson
At 11 p.m. on July 5, 2013, a 10,290-tonne train is parked on the main track on top of a hill in Nantes, a village in the southeast corner of Quebec. The night is warm, the air still. The stars shine brightly in a cloudless sky.
Environment and sustainability
Key Findings from the Transportation Townhall meeting
Last week, the Manitoba government announced it would amend Bill 16, the “Climate and Green Plan,” to eliminate its flat $25/tonne carbon tax, leaving it essentially empty of any real action on climate change. Just a few days later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the UN body in charge of informing policy-makers about the science of climate change—issued a landmark report saying that without urgent and unprecedented action to rapidly bring down greenhouse gas emissions in the next dozen years, we will face catastrophic consequences.
With the country facing significant and unpredictable headwinds going into another federal election year, the 2019 Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) shows that Canada can boost competitiveness and encourage innovation by investing in people, not by giving corporations more tax cuts.
Last month our office released a report authored by Harvey Stevens that found the federal carbon tax will reduce more greenhouse gases than the proposed Made in Manitoba Climate and Green Plan.
First published in the Winnipeg Free Press September 8, 2018
I went to visit a friend and colleague recently – someone I hadn’t seen for awhile. Sandra Madray was in the final stages of cancer. She was dying. I was shocked and deeply saddened to see the physical changes the disease had wrought on my beautiful friend. She was so thin, and in so much pain.
First published in the Winnipeg Sun September 8, 2018
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
“If you asked me two weeks ago if this could have happened, I would have said it couldn’t.”
Imperial Metals president Brian Kynoch, spoke these words at a news conference on August 5, 2014, the day after the devastating collapse of a tailings dam at one of Imperial’s operations, the Mount Polley copper and gold mine.
At the Paris Climate Change meetings in late 2015, Canada committed to reducing green house gas (GHG) emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Applying this commitment to Manitoba means that by 2030, the GHG emissions for that year have to be 14,158 kt of CO2eq instead of the 20,225 kt they were in 2005 and the 20,935 kt they were in 2016.