adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Economy

Electrification is key to jumpstarting Canada's slumping economy – Corporate Knights Magazine

Published

 on


Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin, president and CEO of WaterPower Canada

Elisa Obermann, executive director of Marine Renewables Canada

Francis Bradley, president and CEO of the Canadian Electricity Association 

300x250x1

John Gorman, president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association

Michelle Branigan, CEO of Electricity Human Resources Canada

Robert Hornung, president and CEO of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association

In the depths of the Great Depression in the last century, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched an effort that revolutionized farm life in the United States. The New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act not only put thousands of jobless people to work, it improved quality of life for struggling rural families and greatly increased productivity in agriculture.

As leaders of the organizations that represent the breadth of Canada’s electricity sector, we believe that this country can seize a similar opportunity as it seeks to recover from the steep economic slump precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Backed by analysis from the International Monetary Fund, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) recently urged governments around the world to ensure that their economic recovery efforts are used to modernize their energy systems. In August, incoming federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland signalled that the restart of Canada’s economy “needs to be green” and that decarbonization “has to be part of it.”

Our country starts with a clear advantage. We are already blessed with a clean electricity system; more than 80% of our power supply comes from non-emitting hydroelectric, nuclear and wind, solar, and marine renewable generation. Our remaining coal-fired power plants are being phased out.

Still, Canada faces huge hurdles in meeting its target of reducing greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 30% by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, as pledged by the Liberal government. Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan has said those goals will be achieved in significant part through electrification. Currently, electricity supplies only 20% of Canada’s final energy use. We can expand that by electrifying areas of the economy that now rely on fossil fuels, including transportation, industry and buildings. 

In its June report, the IEA urged governments to take a number of strategic steps, including accelerating the growth of wind and solar, boosting investments in storage and small modular reactors, and maintaining the bedrock roles for hydroelectric and nuclear.

New technologies will allow us to produce power in more distributed locations, eliminate waste in the system, store electricity for when we need it, and enhance the grid to better serve the needs of digitally sophisticated businesses and residential customers. Governments can support the expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) by offering incentives, investing in charging infrastructure and even mandating that EVs make up a regulated percentage of automakers’ sales. We can use clean electricity to produce hydrogen, in a way that produces no emissions, to fuel industrial processes and large transport trucks and trains.

With a focus on energy efficiency, and as the cost of innovative technology continues to fall, we can ensure that the low-carbon transition is affordable and doesn’t impose a burden on Canadians who may struggle to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic.

In an open letter published June 29, nearly 50 corporate leaders called for “bold federal investment in a green recovery.” They noted that Canada produces more renewable power than any country other than China and can expand that production to boost exports and lead in innovative technology such as emissions-free hydrogen. Given Canada’s leadership in non-emitting generation, we have an opportunity to grow the role of diverse electricity sources and pursue novel and innovative technologies as we increase the use of electricity in our energy mix.

In approving clean-energy stimulus, the federal government should follow some basic principles: 

  • target projects that can start quickly or be accelerated; 
  • reflect Canada’s diverse electricity markets;
  • encourage partnerships with Indigenous and other local communities; and
  • streamline its own regulatory processes while working with provinces to ensure there are not regulatory barriers to innovation.

However, government must also ensure the financial health of the industry when making these future-proofing investments. The economic battering has left many businesses and residential customers unable to pay their bills. Government can help by offsetting COVID-related costs for industry and continuing to support our customers as they navigate an uncertain economy.

In pursuing an electrification strategy, Ottawa will have to work with provinces that regulate and, in many cases, own the power generation and transmission assets. Projects such as inter-provincial transmission lines that would provide a regional market for clean power clearly need enhanced collaboration between governments. Provincial governments, municipalities, and schools, colleges and universities are obvious candidates for investments in energy efficiency and distributed energy projects that will pay dividends for many years. Efforts need to be coordinated.

All these changes require workers with different skill sets that call for updated training to manage them. Industry actors will need to ensure that there is a plan to recruit and retain that next generation of employees to innovate and manage the grid of the 21st century.

As governments turn to stimulus spending to revitalize Canada’s economy, this country’s long-term decarbonization goals can receive a significant boost if we make clean electricity the country’s single largest energy source. Done right, it will yield an energy system that is affordable, resilient, and ready for the net-zero economy of tomorrow. 

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Economy

Britain's economy went into recession last year, official figures confirm – The Globe and Mail

Published

 on


Open this photo in gallery:

People walk over London Bridge, in London, on Oct. 25, 2023.SUSANNAH IRELAND/Reuters

Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession last year, official figures confirmed on Thursday, leaving Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a challenge to reassure voters that the economy is safe with him before an election expected later this year.

Gross domestic product shrank by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter and by 0.3 per cent in the fourth, unchanged from preliminary estimates, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.

The figures will be disappointing for Mr. Sunak, who has been accused by the opposition Labour Party – far ahead in opinion polls – of overseeing “Rishi’s recession.”

300x250x1

“The weak starting point for GDP this year means calendar-year growth in 2024 is likely to be limited to less than 1 per cent,” said Martin Beck, chief economic adviser at EY ITEM Club.

“However, an acceleration in momentum this year remains on the cards.”

Britain’s economy has shown signs of starting 2024 on a stronger footing, with monthly GDP growth of 0.2 per cent in January, and unofficial surveys suggesting growth continued in February and March.

Tax cuts announced by finance minister Jeremy Hunt and expectations of interest-rate cuts are likely to help the economy in 2024.

However, Britain remains one of the slowest countries to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of last year, its economy was just 1 per cent bigger than in late 2019, with only Germany faring worse among Group of Seven nations.

The economy grew just 0.1 per cent in all of 2023, its weakest performance since 2009, excluding the peak-pandemic year of 2020.

GDP per person, which has not grown since early 2022, fell by 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter and 0.7 per cent across 2023.

Sterling was little changed against the dollar and the euro after the data release.

The Bank of England (BOE) has said inflation is moving toward the point where it can start cutting rates. It expects the economy to grow by just 0.25 per cent this year, although official budget forecasters expect a 0.8-per-cent expansion.

BOE policy maker Jonathan Haskel said in an interview reported in Thursday’s Financial Times that rate cuts were “a long way off,” despite dropping his advocacy of a rise at last week’s meeting.

Thursday’s figures from the ONS also showed 0.7 per cent growth in households’ real disposable income, flat in the previous quarter.

Thomas Pugh, an economist at consulting firm RSM, said the increase could prompt consumers to increase their spending and support the economy.

“Consumer confidence has been improving gradually over the last year … as the impact of rising real wages filters through into people’s pockets, even though consumers remain cautious overall,” Mr. Pugh said.

Britain’s current account deficit totalled £21.18-billion ($36.21-billion) in the fourth quarter, slightly narrower than a forecast of £21.4-billion ($36.6-billion) shortfall in a Reuters poll of economists, and equivalent to 3.1 per cent of GDP, up from 2.7 per cent in the third quarter.

The underlying current account deficit, which strips out volatile trade in precious metals, expanded to 3.9 per cent of GDP.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Economy

How will a shrinking population affect the global economy? – Al Jazeera English

Published

 on


Falling fertility rates could bring about a transformational demographic shift over the next 25 years.

It has been described as a demographic catastrophe.

The Lancet medical journal warns that a majority of countries do not have a high enough fertility rate to sustain their population size by the end of the century.

300x250x1

The rate of the decline is uneven, with some developing nations seeing a baby boom.

The shift could have far-reaching social and economic impacts.

Enormous population growth since the industrial revolution has put enormous pressure on the planet’s limited resources.

So, how does the drop in births affect the economy?

And regulators in the United States and the European Union crack down on tech monopolies.

The gender gap in tech narrows.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Economy

John Ivison: Canada's economy desperately needs shock treatment after this Liberal government – National Post

Published

 on


Lack of business investment is the main culprit. Canadians are digging holes with shovels while our competitors are buying excavators

Get the latest from John Ivison straight to your inbox

Article content

It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that the Bank of Canada is not so much taking the gloves off as slipping lead into them.

Senior deputy governor, Carolyn Rogers, came as close to wading into the political arena as any senior deputy governor of the central bank probably should in her speech in Halifax this week.

Article content

But she was right to sound the alarm about a subject — Canada’s waning productivity — on which the federal government’s performance has been lacklustre at best.

Advertisement 2

Article content

Productivity has fallen in six consecutive quarters and is now on a par with where it was seven years ago.

Lack of business investment is the main culprit.

In essence, Canadians are digging holes with shovels while many of our competitors are buying excavators.

“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘in emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” Rogers said.

She was explicit that government policy is partly to blame, pointing out that businesses need more certainty to invest with confidence. Government incentives and regulatory approaches that change year to year do not inspire confidence, she said.

Recommended from Editorial

  1. Carolyn Rogers, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, holds a press conference at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 6, 2024.

    Canada’s lagging productivity at crisis level, BoC official says

  2. Homes for sale at the Juniper condo development in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022.

    Expected BoC rate cuts luring buyers back into housing market

The government’s most recent contribution to the competitiveness file — Bill C-56, which made a number of competition-related changes — is a case in point. It was aimed at cracking down on “abusive practices” in the grocery industry that no one, including the bank in its own study, has been able to substantiate. Rather than encouraging investment, it added a political actor — the minister of industry — to the market review process. The Business Council of Canada called the move “capricious,” which was Rogers’s point.

Article content

Advertisement 3

Article content

While blatant price-fixing is rare, the lack of investment is a product of the paucity of competition in many sectors, where Canadian companies protected from foreign competition are sitting on fat profit margins and don’t feel compelled to invest to make their operations more efficient. “Competition can make the whole economy more productive,” said Rogers.

The Conservatives now look set to make this an election issue. Ontario MP Ryan Williams has just released a slick 13-minute video that makes clear his party intends to act in this area.

Using the Monopoly board game as a prop, Williams, the party’s critic for pan-Canadian trade and competition, claims that in every sector, monopolies and oligopolies reign supreme, resulting in lower investment, lower productivity, higher prices, worse service, lower wages and more wealth inequality.

(As an aside, it was a marked improvement on last year’s “Justinflation” rap video.)

Williams said that Canadians pay among the highest cell phone prices in the world and that Rogers, Telus and Bell are the priciest carriers, bar none. The claim has some foundation: in a recent Cable.co.uk global league table that compared the average price of one gigabyte, Canada was ranked 216th of 237 countries at US$5.37 (noticeably, the U.S. was ranked even more expensive at US$6).

Advertisement 4

Article content

Williams noted that two airlines control 80 per cent of the market, even though Air Canada was ranked dead last of all North American airlines for timeliness.

He pointed out that six banks control 87 per cent of Canada’s mortgage market, while five grocery stores — Sobeys, Metro, Loblaw, Walmart and Costco — command a similar dominance of the grocery market.

“Competition is dying in Canada,” Williams said. “The federal government has made things worse by over-regulating airlines, banks and telecoms to actually protect monopolies and keep new players out.”

So far, so good.

The Conservatives will “bring back home a capitalist economy” — a market that does not protect monopolies and creates more competition, in the form of Canadian companies that will provide new supply and better prices.

That sounds great. But at the same time, the Conservative formula for fixing things appears to involve more government intervention, not less.

Williams pointed out the Conservatives opposed RBC buying HSBC’s Canadian operations, WestJet buying Sunwing and Rogers buying Shaw. The party would oppose monopolies from buying up the competition, he said.

Advertisement 5

Article content

The real solution is to let the market do its work to bring prices down. But that is a more complicated process than Williams lets on.

Back in 2007, when Research in Motion was Canada’s most valuable company, the Harper government appointed a panel of experts, led by former Nortel chair Lynton “Red” Wilson, to address concerns that the corporate sector was being “hollowed out” by foreign takeovers, following the sale of giants Alcan, Dofasco and Inco.

The “Compete to Win” report that came out in June 2008 found that the number of foreign-owned firms had remained relatively unchanged, but recommended 65 changes to make Canada more competitive.

The Harper government acted on the least-contentious suggestions: lowering corporate taxes, harmonizing sales taxes with a number of provinces and making immigration more responsive to labour markets.

But it did not end up liberalizing the banking, broadcasting, aviation or telecom markets, as the report suggested (ironically, it was a Liberal transport minister, Marc Garneau, who raised foreign ownership levels of air carriers to 49 per cent from 25 per cent in 2018).

Advertisement 6

Article content

The point is, Canada has a competition problem but solving it requires taking on vested interests. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has indicated he is willing to do that, calling corporate lobbyists “utterly useless” and saying he will focus on Canadian workers, not corporate interests.

“My daily obsession will be about what is good for the working-class people in this country,” he said in Vancouver earlier this month.

Even opening up sectors to foreign competition is no guarantee that investors will come. There are no foreign ownership restrictions in the grocery market (in addition to the five supermarkets listed above, there is Amazon-owned Whole Foods). When the Competition Bureau concluded last year that there was a “modest but meaningful” increase in food prices, it recommended Ottawa encourage a foreign-owned player to enter the Canadian market. It was a recommendation adopted by Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, to no avail thus far.

But it is clear from the Bank’s warning that the Canadian economy requires some shock treatment.

Robert Scrivener, the chairman of Bell and Northern Telecom in the 1970s, called Canada a nation of overprotected underachievers. That is even more true now than it was back then.

It’s time to break the glass.

jivison@criffel.ca

Get even more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Article content

Get the latest from John Ivison straight to your inbox

Comments

Join the Conversation

This Week in Flyers

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending