Thank you.
Climate change, inflation and indigenous reconciliation—these are, undoubtedly, complex policy problems. They're complex for policy wonks and outright mystical for everyone else, because addressing them causes an avalanche of unintended consequences to Canada’s entire economy, including first nations communities.
How can we solve climate change when addressing it drives up the prices of consumer goods? How are we supposed to support indigenous reconciliation if our government in power is unable to implement effective and sustainable climate change policy?
If you change your perspective, you can see different narratives that provide an opportunity to address these challenges combined. The complexity and interconnectedness of our greatest challenges can be a strength. It can lead to outside-the-box thinking with new and innovative solutions that finally move us forward in these critical areas where there has been so little progress to date.
However, to unlock this opportunity, we must move away from the short-term thinking of most politicians, who merely focus on their own political agendas. We must move away from politicizing these challenges and break with the narratives that continuously bring us the same poor results.
Many indigenous people follow the philosophy of seven-generations thinking. The main idea is that a decision you make today needs to benefit people seven generations from now. In a democracy like ours, that is much further into the future than the next election.
If we apply this idea to our most significant challenges—climate change, inflation and indigenous reconciliation—we can look beyond popular narratives and focus on the real problems. We can talk about climate change without villainizing an entire industry. We can see that further stifling the energy industry with new emissions caps has driven up the prices of consumer goods, fuelling inflation, increasing unemployment and creating unmanageable heating and electricity costs, all of which combined would result in an overall cross-societal lowering of our standard of living.
Looking at Canada’s challenges holistically and respecting their interconnectedness would allow us to find solutions that make a positive difference in all of those areas.
Almost 14,000 self-identified indigenous people work in Canada’s oil and gas industry. Their incomes benefit their families and communities across this country, allowing for significant progress in areas that address the poverty and inequality experienced by indigenous people.
With billions of dollars invested over the past decades, the same energy companies that facilitate economic independence and self-determination for all of these indigenous communities have become global leaders in producing clean energy. They have reduced greenhouse gas emissions, unlike companies in any other country, and they lead the way to innovative carbon-tech solutions that will finally make achieving Canada’s emissions targets possible.
The authors of this legislation either didn't see the relevance of their emissions cap proposal for indigenous people or don't care. Frankly, both are possible, but the latter appears more likely. They say that they did speak to some indigenous people, but ignoring the diversity of our community and following the false narrative that all indigenous people oppose energy projects.
Regardless of the reasoning, when all is said and done, 14,000 indigenous people, their families and their communities will suffer from the outcome without ever having been given the opportunity to express themselves. Instead, Ottawa will decide, and indigenous communities will face the consequences of linear thinking applied by a paternalistic government that thinks in short-term political frameworks.
Instead of applying visionary thinking that would benefit future generations of Canadians, the government is taking steps to further inhibit progress in order to appease a small demographic of voters with a greenwashing policy solution on climate change that will hurt indigenous and non-indigenous alike today, tomorrow and seven generations from now.
Thank you.