Legislation in the form of Bill C-4 to implement the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement (CUSMA) was tabled in Parliament last month, has been given second reading in the House, and is now being examined by the Commons Trade Committee.
Once cleared through the committee and ultimately passed into law, it will allow the federal government to ratify CUSMA (Donald Trump may call it “USMCA” but there’s no reason we have to). The U.S. and Mexico have already ratified the agreement. Ninety days after we do, too, it will enter into force. All three countries will then be under legal obligations to comply with its trade-liberalizing provisions. That will be a great benefit to Canada, stabilizing what has been a very stressful…
When Canada’s federal government makes its call on Teck’s Frontier oil sands project, it will show whether it actually subscribes to the economics of carbon pricing – or whether it intends to reduce greenhouse gases by central planning and government fiat.
The federal cabinet has until the end of February to decide on whether to approve or prohibit the Frontier oil sands mining project. An assessment by a joint review panel has found that the project would likely cause significant adverse environmental effects but recommended that it would be in the public interest. Still, the project faces opponents who argue that approving Frontier goes against the federal government’s commitments to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
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Regulations alone won’t fix Alberta’s potential oil-and-gas well crisis - Globe and Mail Op-Ed
Old or spent oil and gas wells have accrued across Alberta in the thousands. The environmental risk in the province is high and rising, and the financial liabilities are, too: Analysis by the C.D. Howe Institute in 2017 showed that the public cost could be in the billions of dollars if companies designated as “financially fragile” by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) simply abandoned their wells for taxpayers to clean up – an extreme scenario that is not beyond contemplation.
So amid reports about budget cuts, layoffs and alleged mismanagement on the part of the AER’s former CEO, the regulator has faced increasing pressure to change its one-size-fits-all rules, which use the valuations of operators…
