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By Alys Granados

Following negotiations at a United Nations climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent announced Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 United Nations treaty requiring member nations to stabilize their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions below 1990 levels. The goal was to curb the effects of climate change and while the Liberal government ratified the treaty in 2002, it was clear that GHG reduction targets would not be met by the original 2012 deadline. Canada is now among the few developed nations not signed on to Protocol.

Media Release
October 20, 2011

Ottawa (20 Oct. 2011) - The Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN) received notice last week that it would not receive $547,000 in core funding that the government had previously said it intended to provide.

The RCEN has existed for more than three decades and includes more than 600 member organizations from across Canada. It provides valuable networking opportunities for grassroots organizations to share knowledge and strategies across this vast country.

Olivier Kolmel, the chairman of the organization's board of directors, said Ottawa did not give any warning that it would cut off its funding next year.

RCEN helps groups move their issues forward and to the attention of lawmakers at all levels of government.

For Immediate Release, May 5, 2011

VICTORIA / OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper is seriously out of step with the vast majority of British Columbians on the issue of oil tanker traffic through the Great Bear Rainforest, the Sierra Club said today.

“Prime Minister Harper is dead wrong in his assessment that the people of B.C. do not support calls by other political parties for a ban on crude oil tankers along Canada’s west coast,” said Sierra Club BC spokesperson Caitlyn Vernon. “Opposition to the proposed Northern Gateway project is strong, united and rapidly growing.”

A report by an advisory board to the government of Canada estimates that the effects of global warming will cost the country’s economy 5 billion Canadian dollars a year by 2020 and that those costs will rise substantially afterward.

Unlike earlier studies, the report does not examine the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions; it looked at the economic consequences of global warming.

“The costs we could incur from climate change are the costs of continuously adjusting to changing conditions,” the advisory board, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, said. “Although harder to calculate and less immediately apparent, they are real and significant and bear understanding.”