Jobs exports: a proposal

Here's a recent headline from the business pages of the Globe and Mail: Syncrude to boost oil sands production; upgrader plan ends.

If you're worried about where our economy and environment are headed, that about sums it up. Syncrude, assuming it gets its way, makes out like bandits, padding the bottom line at our expense. The US refineries get the bitumen, in other words the oil, the byproducts, the associated industries, the investments, and, of course, the jobs.

We get a whole lot more Fort McMurray, an even bigger ecological disaster featuring one of the world's truly huge holes, uncharted masses of pollution, and even more dead ducks, plus we get to feed an international reputation as climate-change villains.

Albertans get just enough in royalties so that they don't have to pay sales tax.

Here's another example, this time from Vancouver Island: in Campbell River the major sawmill is long gone. The pulp mill has shut down, and won't be reopening anytime soon; lack of fibre (previously supplied by the sawmill) is given as a reason. As a direct result, some 1200 mill jobs have vanished, and thousands more spinoff jobs have been lost. Unemployment is headed for 10%, Employment Insurance is running out, and a lot of us are getting more than a little desperate.

Only, the logs keep moving. They're headed offshore these days, many to China and Japan but most to the mills of Oregon and Washington Blair Redlin (check out his article on Campbell River) puts his finger on the issue:

The provincial policy context has been anything but helpful. The elimination of requirements to mill locally in exchange for public timber, combined with the expansion of raw log exports and the removal of private land from tree farm licenses has added to the grim situation already facing BC forestry workers. The Softwood Lumber Agreement, in particular, has provided new incentives to export logs in unprocessed form, since the Agreement places export taxes on most softwood lumber products, but exempts softwood logs from such taxes. As a result, approximately four million cubic metres of raw logs are exported from BC every year. These exports and large amounts of unprocessed wood waste are estimated to cost the BC economy some 5,800 direct jobs per year.

Those are only two examples of Canadian economic policies that don't appear to work for the benefit of Canadians. What do we have to do to make sure our resources are exploited for our benefit? Will the Alberta government stand in the path of Syncrude's self-interest? Will the BC government finally grow a backbone over the export of raw logs?

We all know the answer: not a chance.

So we may have to look to the federal government to take the initiative. Not this present lot, of course; those guys are a significant part of the problem. But maybe a future one, a federal government looking for an economic and environmental plan...

For that government I have two small suggestions (I'm quite sure this is not an original idea, so the government that implements the policy can take all the credit): one to provide some credibility on climate change, and one to suggest an untapped revenue stream.

All that is required is an export tax on carbon, so that every barrel of bitumen, every barrel of oil, every gigajoule of natural gas, every tonne of coal, every raw log is assessed at the border for its carbon content, and a tax is charged on a sliding scale that depends on the amount of manufacturing or processing that has gone into the product in Canada. The less the processing, the higher the tax, on the grounds that, in a rapidly-heating world somebody has to pay the price, and the receiving country is unlikely, and cannot be counted on, to pay it.

Of course the targeted corporations and their ideological brethern can be expected to complain vigorously, but I think most of us would appreciate the investment and the jobs such a policy would eventually encourage, once the furor had died down.

And I suspect the federal government, now busy creating the most historically-significant pool of red ink ever in Canadian history, might find a use for the revenues generated!