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Brian Emmett is a principal at the Ottawa-based consulting firm Sussex Circle. He served as Canada’s first commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, and was an assistant deputy minister (policy) at Environment Canada, a vice-president (policy) at the Canadian International Development Agency and an assistant deputy minister (Canadian Forest Service) at Natural Resources Canada.
The way policy-makers and Canadians think about natural resources (fossil fuels, minerals and forest resources) is fundamentally important to the Canadian economy. How we perceive and evaluate our natural resource endowment shapes policy frameworks, which, in turn, can have profound effects on the way we live and the way we earn our living.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper touched on this during the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena last month, saying: “Resource development has vast power to change the way a nation lives. … It is also something which is tremendously responsive to actions of government.”
Unfortunately, current policy frameworks in Canada are based on entrenched views about natural resources and provide little room for critical thinking about how to turn resources into wealth in a sustainable way. In many respects, Canadian natural resource policy has been hurt by an excessively narrow conception of our resource endowment and its value – what might be called resource determinism – leading to policies that are often poorly conceived and divisive.
Almost without fail, when talking about resources and the economy, Canadian politicians and business people emphasize the size of the gifts that nature has bestowed on us (we have 10 per cent of the world’s forests, for example). Our endowments are large, so Canada must be wealthy – as if natural resources were gifts one can simply take to the bank and exchange for cash.
As a consequence, natural resource policy in Canada has tended to focus on narrow aspects of the resource itself, not on the broader sets of conditions necessary to turn resources into sustainable value. Both levels of government maintain large departments devoting significant resources to determining how big our resource base is, what qualities it has and how its health can be improved. Resource policies focus on how quickly resources should be extracted or harvested, under what conditions, and who http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/how-to-sustainably-turn-canadas-resources-into-wealth/article2423425/should get the economic benefits. This is what resource owners do.
But, in Canada, both levels of government do not share ownership of natural resources – it resides clearly with the provinces. The result is that natural resource policy becomes a protracted form of federal-provincial dispute, leading to overlap, duplication, wastefulness, divisiveness and missed opportunities for sustainable development.
In the midst of this fog of policy confusion, Canada runs the risk of losing sight of a key reality: Our resources are large, but other countries are well-endowed, too, and many of our resources are either in remote areas or difficult and costly to extract.
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