Poor Nola-Kate Seymoar from Vancouver says she feels “betrayed” by a northern leadership that isn’t doing cartwheels over proposed increased energy costs in the Arctic as a result of Dion’s proposed carbon tax - in other words Seymoar is ignorant of the difference between Vancouver philosophy and Arctic reality.
Some participants at a climate change symposium in Iqaluit this week say leaders in Canada’s North are being hypocritical by rejecting a proposed carbon tax, given that northerners have called on the rest of the world to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
Delegates at the symposium Monday said that if anyone should be supporting federal Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion’s proposal for a national carbon tax, it should be Inuit and other northerners who are worried about a warming Arctic climate.
But last month, the premiers of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon said Dion’s carbon tax would unfairly add to the already high costs of energy in the North.
“I’m puzzled by your stand on carbon taxes. It makes no sense to me, and as somebody from the south, I feel betrayed,” Nola-Kate Seymoar, executive director of the International Centre for Sustainable Cities in Vancouver, said Monday at the symposium.
In fact, what is hypocritical is asking people who are already paying the highest energy costs in the country to pay even more so environmentalists in warm, sunny, Vancouver, which doesn’t get as much snow in 5 years as most northern communities get in an average winter month can feel that ‘they’re doing something‘.
What is hypocritical is people living in a place where the coldest month on record (January 1950) averaged a whole -9.7 deg C, want people who live in a climate where the average daily high doesn’t get quite that good until April or May to pay extra for their heat, their light, their water, and everything they buy in a store to put on their tables…… so that they can feel that ‘they’re doing something‘.
I would suggest that the poor, betrayed, Nola-Kate Seymoar from Vancouver, spend a winter paying for heat and hydro in Aujuittuq (Grise Fiord, Nunavut) which means “place that never thaws” where the temperature stays well below zero Celsius for more than eight months of the year and where the sun goes down (and stays down) for a couple of months in the winter.
– and then come back and tell northerners what does, and does not, make sense.
I totally agree. I have travelled quite a bit up north in winter and in summer, from Churchill to Diavik to Atlin. When Gas was 70¢/l in Vancouver, it was $1.10/l in Churchill. When the temperature was 1°C in Vancouver, it was -40°C in Diavik. I know how dark and how cold it is in the winter. Just to survive you have to have the furnace running quite often and at least one light must always be on.
I live in Vancouver and do enjoy the very mild weather (I grew up in Penticton, which has even better weather), but I would never expect that people in the North pay as little as I do to heat and cool my home (I have 3 fans running 24/7 to cool off in the summer, no A/C). And I would certainly not expect them to swallow another tax just for the “privilege” of living up there.
If anyone should feel betrayed, it’s the northern leaders and people.
Message for Nola-Kate Seymoar: You don’t know what you’re talking about.