Summertime. The living: Not easy

It'll be a different world when the House of Commons reconvenes

They’ll be back. Old photo: PW

This week the House of Commons will wrap up its work for the summer. It’ll be late September before they reconvene. There’ll already be a lot happening when MPs see one another again. It’ll be only days before a bunch of referendums in Alberta. Quebec will be in the middle of a volatile provincial election campaign. We’ll be on the other side of an apparently near-meaningless July 1 deadline for CUSMA renewal. And it will be only six weeks before US congressional midterm elections.

Two pieces of reading might help us think about the next half-year in our politics. One comes from today’s New York Times. There’s peace, of a sort and dearly bought, in Iran, but don’t expect a return to the status quo, the analysis by Patricia Cohen says. “The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.”

“The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.

“But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.”

Wind and solar generated more energy worldwide than gas in April for the first time, according to UK energy think tank Ember. But that doesn’t mean fossil fuels are off the table. The Hormuz bottleneck, which will probably continue even in “peace” and could return any time, means there’s also a scramble to find new suppliers. “Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and Guyana are building their oil production capacity as the world looks for alternative suppliers,” the Times says.

There’s a country missing from that list, at least potentially. During an Ottawa visit last month, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol said Canada’s quaint cultural insistence on enforceable contract law should lure investors willing to pay a premium for (always relative!) stability.

Birol made those remarks while sharing a stage with Tim Hodgson, Mark Carney’s energy minister. People in Ottawa pay close attention to what Hodgson, a political rookie with outsized clout, says. Which brings me to your second piece of assigned reading today: an op-ed that Hodgson published in the Financial Post on Monday.

It’s a national-unity pitch, in the runup to the Alberta referendum I promised not to write about for a while. Oh well. “In this time of global uncertainty, the countries that succeed will not be the ones that fight amongst themselves,” Hodgson writes. “They will be the ones that build.”

So Canada should “build,” he writes. “Let’s build major projects… partnerships between provinces and territories and with Indigenous Peoples…. And let’s build institutions strong enough to carry us forward, while others backslide.” All of that is the very definition of “easier said than done.” Including the bit about “strong institutions.” Institutions predate governments and operate without particular regard to whether a given government is in a hurry. So there’s often a tension between governments and institutions. Which makes Althia Raj’s recent string of Toronto Star columns reminding the Carney government of those necessary institutions such fascinating reading.

Meanwhile, look at what Hodgson wants to build and sell. The centrepiece of his argument, and of his recent effort, is of course the Alberta-Canada Memorandum of Understanding on oil-sands exports and electricity grid expansion. “The MOU sends a signal to Canadians, to investors, and to our allies that Canada can act like the federation it was designed to be,” Hodgson writes. Perhaps by now some people in Ottawa are starting to realize the whole project is not a tactical feint but something Hodgson and Carney actually want to deliver.

But Hodgson is talking about more than Alberta oil and gas. He mentions “vast energy resources in our western and Atlantic provinces… some of the world’s best hydro projects… nuclear assets [in] Ontario and New Brunswick,” and “mining opportunities” in the territories. “So, let’s argue less and build more.”

A couple of broad observations about this. First, Hodgson is calling for a kind of full-meal deal on energy and resources. Fossil fuels and renewables. The fossil part is a change from the Trudeau Liberals. But recognition of the growing place of renewables, if it ever came, would be a change from the Poilievre Conservatives. And it’s not as though there aren’t significant trends near the Conservative leader’s current riding. From Statistics Canada:

To a great extent, if you’re dismissing wind, solar and batteries because of something you heard a decade ago, you might want to refresh your information.

The second thing I notice in Hodgson’s speech is how he starts with national unity. (He even announces that he sees himself as a national-unity minister. I… hadn’t heard that around town?)

The country’s unity seems an odd basis for designing its external relations, but it’s not new.

I’ve written before about Louis St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture at the University of Toronto, which sketched the basis for Canada’s postwar foreign policy. A decade of blood had shown that foreign policy was crucial. The first “basic principle” of the policy St. Laurent depicted was national unity. He was careful to define this notion more broadly than the unity of French- and English-speaking Canadians, which conscription crises in two wars had tested. “No policy can be regarded as wise which divides the people whose effort and resources must put it into effect,” he said. “A disunited Canada will be a powerless one.”

On this as on everything else, the devil is in the details. And the details are big. How do you use resource development for unity? In a country with an Alberta and a British Columbia and a Quebec in it, the answer isn’t obvious. Hodgson is pushing an abundance agenda in which every corner of the country wins by doing more. Probably better than squabbling over who loses more amid general decline. Still tricky.