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David Suzuki, Peter Mansbridge, and other prominent ex-broadcasters are calling out CBC. Here’s why

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Here’s what David Suzuki says needs to be done to address an escalating crisis that affects us all. 

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Five eminent CBC alumni are making public their letter urging the CBC to deepen its climate coverage. Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star

Five eminent CBC alumni are urging the public broadcaster to deepen its coverage of the climate crisis in the face of an escalating “civilizational threat.”

Kevin-Jiang

This article was written by Kevin Jiang and was published in the Toronto Star on October 5, 2024.


“While CBC is ramping up more climate programs, it’s just not enough. It’s not proportional to the degree of the threat that we now confront with climate,” David Suzuki told the Star in a recent interview.

“As journalists, members of the CBC family and as Canadians concerned about our future, we ask that the CBC treat the climate breakdown as the existential crisis and civilizational threat that it is,” reads a copy of the letter obtained by the Star.

Drafted by former broadcasters David Suzuki, Peter Mansbridge, Adrienne Clarkson, Paul Kennedy and Linden MacIntyre, the call to action was delivered to Brodie Fenlon, head of CBC news, on May 1, 2023. Attached were a raft of recommendations, including a “daily climate emergency report” for the broadcaster’s flagship news and current affairs shows.

While the authors say they received a respectful response at the time, their request to meet was declined. Now, two scorching summers of extreme weather events later, the CBC’s climate coverage remains inadequate, they say.

“Things are getting more and more urgent,” Suzuki, longtime host of The Nature of Things, said in an interview with the Star. The ex-broadcasters’ full letter has been made public and is available on this website.

In a statement to the Star, a spokesperson for CBC noted the broadcaster recently “redoubled our focus on climate journalism,” citing a blog post by Fenlon in 2021.

In an update earlier this year, Fenlon provided an update on the broadcaster’s climate initiatives, including a new special project called “overheated,” establishing a national climate unit, launching the CBC’s News Climate Dashboard and creating a dedicated space on its website and news app for climate coverage.

“While CBC is ramping up more climate programs, it’s just not enough. It’s not proportional to the degree of the threat that we now confront with climate,” Suzuki said.

The climate crisis infuses all aspects of our lives and societies, he said, “whether it’s business, whether it’s sports, whether it’s celebrity.” He believes it should be represented as such — not limited to one topic page, but suffused into all aspects of reporting.

“It’s the interconnectivity of everything. Issues of hunger and poverty are every bit as relevant as the fossil fuel industry, because people who are struggling to survive, they can’t pay attention to these other environmental issues which are not as immediate as putting food on the table,” Suzuki said. “We’ve got to link the fact that these issues are absolutely vital to dealing with climate and species extinction.”

Kennedy, the long-time host of CBC radio’s Ideas, added that it’s not enough to just report on the symptoms of the climate crisis, but its causes: “That the overuse of carbon energy and oil, these fluids that run economies around the globe, are killing us.”

Despite the CBC’s recent investments in climate coverage, the 2023 letter notes: “We need more. Much more.

“Decades of under-reporting on the climate and ecological crisis by all Canadian media have left the Canadian public poorly informed about the causes of, solutions to, and urgency to act on the climate crisis.”

“Canadians need to understand the severity of the crisis, but also hear about credible solutions to confront it to stave off climate fatalism, as well as an interrogation of unproven solutions that could delay climate mitigation,” the letter reads.

To this end, the letter outlined six recommendations:

■ Develop a daily climate emergency report to be embedded in CBC’s flagship local, national and current affairs shows, including all local morning radio programs and national shows.

■ Develop and implement climate and environment-specific standards and language to be enshrined within CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, similar to recent actions taken by the Guardian.

■ Provide training on basic climate science, policy and best practices for climate communication to every journalist across beats.

■ Join Covering Climate Now, an international consortium of reputable media outlets committed to rigorous climate reporting.

■ Provide more international coverage of global efforts to mitigate climate change and how the climate crisis disproportionately impacts the Global South and Indigenous and marginalized communities everywhere.

■ Report annually about CBC’s climate reporting, to demonstrate it is following through on its commitments.

In their letter, the authors write: “We know the CBC is under attack. We know that public broadcasting is significantly underfunded in Canada to fulfil this critical purpose. But we also know that Canadians who depend on the CBC, including ourselves, will defend it — especially if you give people what they need and continue to adapt to our changing planet.”

Here is the press release.

Here is the letter to the CBC Editor-in-Chief, Brodie Fenlon.

Federal panel wants Canada’s emissions cut in half by 2035

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This article was written by Adam Radwanski and was published in the Globe & Mail on September 26, 2024.

A federal panel is calling for Ottawa to commit to cutting Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions between 50 and 55 per cent from 2005 levels by 2035, as the government prepares to announce new national climate targets for that time frame by the end of this year.

The recommendation, made by the government-appointed Net Zero Advisory Body in a report being released Thursday morning, is accompanied by a proposal that the country begin adopting carbon budgets. That approach would set limits for cumulative emissions, rather than focusing only on benchmark years, and could steer decisions around purchases of carbon credits or other ways of offsetting excess emissions.

And the NZAB is also suggesting ways that Canada can get on track to meet its existing target of a 40-per-cent emissions reduction by 2030, in a separate report also being released Thursday – such as strengthening the country’s industrial carbon-pricing system and methane regulations.

But it’s the 2035 guidance that particularly adds to the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.

The 2035 guidance attempts to balance the government’s ambitions to meet international climate responsibilities with domestic realities – including economic and affordability concerns, skepticism about the ability to achieve current emissions targets let alone loftier ones, and polls showing a big lead for an opposition Conservative Party promising to scrap climate measures currently in place.

The government is required under the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act to set emissions-reduction commitments for five-year intervals, on the path to net-zero emissions by 2050; the next of those, for 2035, is due by the end of 2024. A similar demand is set by the international Paris Agreement, under which Canada needs to announce a strengthened target by 2025.

Ottawa is not required to follow the recommendations of the NZAB, which was established in 2021 through the same accountability legislation, and which has since struggled to build a profile amid heavy turnover of its members.

However, the government officially sought the body’s input on a 2035 target, through a request submitted by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault last year.

In a statement, Mr. Guilbeault thanked the NZAB for its work, but was non-committal about its recommendations, saying he wants to ensure the 2035 goal is achievable.

Speaking to reporters in advance of the recommendations’ release, NZAB co-chair Simon Donner – a prominent climate scientist at the University of British Columbia – said the advisory group tried to balance “being ambitious and being technically feasible” in proposing the target. He pointed out that it would still be more modest, on a percentage basis, than emissions-reduction commitments already made by the European Union, Britain and the United States.

Prof. Donner said the NZAB opted against going higher than 50 to 55 per cent, which some members wanted, because it would place too much strain on some regions of the country.

A similar calculus was provided by the Canadian Climate Institute, a government-funded think tank with greater independent research capacity, which provided the NZAB with analysis to inform its recommendations.

Anna Kanduth, who heads the Climate Institute’s emissionstracking process, said in an interview that her organization’s modelling showed that emissions reductions beyond 52 per cent, by 2035, would be too difficult in terms of both policy implementation and costs. However, she said that if Canada is able to reach its 40-per-cent target for 2030, at least 49 per cent by 2035 should be doable.

As of 2023, according to the Climate Institute’s most recent estimates, the country had achieved an 8-per-cent reduction from 2005 levels, largely through decarbonization measures for electricity generation, and to a lesser extent, heavy industry and waste management. Meanwhile, emissions from the oil-and-gas and agricultural sectors have significantly risen.

Ms. Kanduth nevertheless expressed optimism about a 40per-cent reduction by decade’s end still being in reach, noting that drops have accelerated in recent years and that policies – which at the federal level range from carbon pricing to new environmental regulations to tax credits and subsidies – take a while to bite.

To get the rest of the way there, both the NZAB (in the second report released Thursday) and the Climate Institute are calling for Ottawa to finalize promised policies such as an oiland-gas emissions cap, clean electricity regulations and regulations for commercial vehicles; to strengthen existing measures such as industrial carbon pricing and methane caps; and to explore a small number of new measures such as heating and cooling regulations for commercial buildings.

Prof. Donner noted that even if Canada sets and achieves the NZAB’s 2035 recommendation – which, he stressed, would require greater ambition from the provinces and the private sector in addition to Ottawa – the country would still be responsible for more than its fair share of global emissions if planetary warming is to be contained to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, which are international targets to minimize climate-related disaster.

That’s part of the rationale for the NZAB’s additional recommendation of adopting carbon budgets, to account for cumulative emissions. In addition to other benefits such as avoiding over-focusing on milestone years in which there could be statistical noise, the panel contends that the approach could help determine the extent to which Canada is exceeding the emissions needed to achieve global goals, and inform compensatory measures such as investments in carbon removal and internationally traded carbon credits.

At the same time, the NZAB acknowledges that those sorts of offsets might also be needed just to achieve the 2035 target it is suggesting – which, Prof. Donner allowed, is something of a stretch goal based on the trajectory to date.