Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100 .5 FM in the Lower Mainland. In today's episode, Lorraine Chisholm speaks with Bruce Campbell about a bill brought by Senator Rosa Galvez to end the widespread backing of fossil fuels by Canadian financial institutions.
Speaker: With COP 27 underway, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said the recent intergovernmental panel on climate change report revealed a litany of broken climate promises by governments and corporations. Guterres says it is a file of shame cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.
Speaker: Bruce Campbell from the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University says Canada is high on the list of empty pledges. From inadequate carbon targets to support and even the purchase of fossil fuel projects, Canada is not walking the talk. Think Trans Mountain Pipeline, Bades in All, and the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline.
Speaker: Campbell points to some promising oppositional moves in this country. In March of this year, going against the current, Quebec Senator Rosa Galvez tabled Bill S243, the Climate -Aligned Finance Act. Her bill aims at holding governments and financial institutions to account for their actions and to halt the widespread financial backing of fossil fuels.
Speaker: To talk about what this could mean, I'm joined by Bruce Campbell. Bruce Campbell is Senior Fellow at the Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Free Expression, and he was Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives from 1994 to 2015. Hello, Bruce. Good morning. Nice to meet you on the radio. And it's nice to talk to you. Where do banks come into the picture on influencing what happens with fossil fuels?
Speaker: Well, banks, you know, through loans and investments are, you know, a major impetus to fossil fuel investments, investments in fossil fuel production. You know, the big five Canadian banks invested almost a billion dollars from 2016 to 2021. So that's when just in the wake of the Paris Agreement.
Speaker: insurance companies are also major investors. And besides investing in Canada, they're also investing worldwide. For example, major investments, the Canadian banks, are occurring in Africa, something like $2 billion. So yeah, so they play a huge role.
Speaker: You remember at COP26, Mark Carney, who was our former Bank of Canada governor, was tasked by the UN to gather together financial institutions to pledge what was called a financial alliance for net zero. And so pledges for sustainable finance. And what we've seen recently, and we're seeing evidence of it again at COP27,
Speaker: It's an exercise to a large extent to greenwashing, where they say they're doing it, but they're not really doing it. And in fact,
Speaker: They're doing the opposite. So you have financial institutions who are making these pledges and at the same time lobbying governments to roll back carbon reduction regulation. And they haven't committed to phasing out fossil fuels. There's been no commitment by the financial sector to phase out fossil fuels just to reduce the carbon intensity.
Speaker: but they can still produce. And you have that situation in the oil sands where the intensity is reducing to doubling production in the last number of years. And what was imposed upon them was a requirement to be more transparent and specific rules and criteria. And they're not very happy about those transparency rules. So that's kind of the contradictions that exist in the financial sector.
Speaker: Now, Bruce, who is independent Quebec Senator Rosa Galvez and what's been her stance on climate destruction leading up to her introduction of this bill?
Speaker: I've known Senator Galvez actually for quite a while, because when I wrote my book on the lachmugantic disaster, she coincidentally happened to be there on the night of the disaster. We had an exchange, and for 25 years, she was a professor of environmental engineering at Laval University in Quebec.
Speaker: and, you know, a real leading expert on things like pollution control. So in the wake of Lac Megantic, she did a number of independent examinations of harm to the environment in the air and so forth. So that's how I started. And then through my involvement, an organization called the Group of 78,
Speaker: We invited her to be a keynote speaker at our recent conference in September, and I was asked to moderate the session, so I renewed my relationship with her. Environmental issues have been just central to her work, and she was appointed to the Senate as an independent senator from Quebec in 2016, so she's
Speaker: been there for, I don't know, six, seven years now. And she's on the Environment Committee, she's on the Finance Committee, so she can advocate from both of those perspectives. She's introduced other pieces of legislation. And so she's the head or the chair of a Pan -American, so North America and South America group on climate. So she's very much involved. And what she did in preparation
Speaker: for the introduction of the bills. She held a set of hearings. She interviewed people, her and her staff, which is a very good staff, and they produced a report. And then out of the report came the legislation or the proposed legislation.
Speaker: Let's talk about that then. Senator Galvez's bill is called an act to enact the Climate -Aligned Finance Act. What's she proposing there? I encourage your readers to go to her site and you can get a lot of the details. Very briefly, it's a bill that would change
Speaker: the way the financial system operates to encourage sustainable activities. And it would do it through regulations and legislations. It would hold both governments and financial institutions accountable for their actions and inactions.
Speaker: And it's not only the risk that financial institutions pose to climate, but also to shield them from systemic risk, the risk to themselves. So if they're only looking at short term, you know, if they're investing in stranded assets, they're going to be in great financial trouble.
Speaker: So what it would do, it would hold CEOs, directors, officers accountable for meeting the climate commitments, and it would amend existing laws for a number of government organizations, notably the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which regulates banks and its supervisory role. So it would amend the legislation
Speaker: they would have to include climate as one of their criteria in their oversight of financial institutions. So it would mandate corporate climate action plans with annual progress reports,
Speaker: It would ensure that boards have climate expertise. One of the problems that exists now is that you have boards of directors, fossil fuels representatives on bank boards, and vice versa. It's an interwoven network, and so what this would do would kind of
Speaker: prevent those kinds of conflicts of interest from happening it would ensure that the boards have climate expertise and it would also enable a just transition with respect to the rights of indigenous peoples and other
Speaker: vulnerable groups. But it would amend laws for the Export Development Corporation because they are Export Development Corporation, you know, finances, climate investment, and our pension systems do as well. And they haven't, at least the Canadian one, hasn't committed to phasing out its climate investment. The Quebec pension plan has
Speaker: but the Canadian one has not. So, you know, those are some of kind of the main elements of her bill. And she needs to get it into committee so that she can bring outside groups, experts, academics and organizations, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, for example, and many others. So that movement has to happen.
Speaker: She's had a lot of support for this proposed legislation, but it hasn't kind of translated into real movement through the Senate. And that has to happen. Where has she gotten opposition or pushback? Yeah, well, I mean, it's within government, they've been very they've been very silent. I think it was the Bank of Canada said we will respond in due course.
Speaker: And I think others have too within the government. And it's just kind of a, yeah, well, it's interesting and we'll have to discuss it and we'll wait till it comes. And it's just a kind of a delay game. You know, I, it's hard to talk specifics about the resistance by the financial institutions themselves, but we know they're lobbying like crazy. And we know they're also lobbying at COP 27. There's, it's happening in,
Speaker: in all forum. So that's kind of where it's at now. And I think it brings hope. I think it was you mentioned that the outset, the UN director
Speaker: And he has some amazing ways of describing the nature of the crisis that we're in. And I think he referred to it as the highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator. So all to say is the window is closing. And her piece of legislation is a ray of hope. I mean, there's others as well, but it will take
Speaker: A widespread push to overcome the resistance and the delay that we've seen both from the government and from the corporations. I've written, I just have a book in edited volume.
Speaker: It's called Corporate Rules, the Real World of Business Regulation in Canada. It came out in May, and it was sort of a sequel to the Lackabagantic book. One of the main themes is corporate regulatory capture and government complicity.
Speaker: I mean, to overcome those. I think there are ways to overcome it, but these are powerful forces that stand in the way of the kind of movement that's necessary at this existential moment for the planet. What would it take to get this legislation through? Well,
Speaker: And, you know, as I said, it has to get to committee in the Senate that will bring in the witnesses that will give additional exposure. Exposure is a big thing. Media coverage is a big thing. And then then it will get passed in the Senate and then it has to go to the House of Commons and it has to go through the same process all over again, because that's ultimately where, you know, where this legislation will get passed and then get royal assent.
Speaker: And at all levels, at municipal levels, municipal politicians, federal politicians, provincial politicians, we know that there are some provincial governments that kind of are on the border of climate denial. Sometimes they say they're not, but there is that sense of, you know, we have all the time in the world that we don't have to, we're not in a critical moment
Speaker: You know, we can get rid of all our reserves and so forth. And the planet really isn't heating that much. So anyways, just to say that there are supporters of this and advocates at all levels of government. And that has to be, you know, one of the driving forces. Well, it's been good to talk to you this morning, Bruce, and it's great to get this on our radar. Well, thank you for having me, Lorraine. And good morning to all your
Speaker: listeners. Thank you so much. I've been speaking with Bruce Campbell. He is Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. And he was the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1994 to 2015. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio. You can support us by supporting Co -op Radio.
Speaker: go to coopradio .org and click on the donate button. Independent media relies on the support of people like you.
