Peru, Northern Ontario share commonalities.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: Economically Speaking

If you get an invitation to visit a foreign country and give policy advice, you are an international expert. I am in fact a certifiable international expert. Unfortunately, according to the dictionary, "certifiable" means "officially recognized as needing treatment for a mental disorder." Giving advice in a country you barely know is definitely a sign of a mental disorder of some sort.

I am just back from Peru, where I gave talks on carbon pricing, how to take advantage of climate change, saving the Amazon forests and mining innovation. I was flattered to be invited, of course, even though it was hard to see why they would ask for advice from me. It might have been because Canada is making some real progress on carbon pricing, or because Sudbury has been so successful in its regreening and mining supply sector, or because I've given a few talks for the Citizens' Climate Lobby on carbon taxes and border tax adjustments.

In any case, the flattery was enough to get me to spend two days flying or waiting around in airports and three days rushing from meeting to meeting in Lima during the worst heat wave in years. That is probably more evidence of a mental disorder.

People in Peru may not have learned anything useful from me, but I learned how much we have in common, and even managed to learn some things about Northern Ontario.

Peru and Northern Ontario are about the same size and both have huge, thinly populated forest ecosystems. We have nothing like the massive illegal logging in the Peruvian Amazon that threatens the global climate system. We also have nothing like the huge illegal gold-mining industry that's ripping apart rivers and valleys the way they once did in the Yukon's Dawson City. Nor are our mining companies leaking large amounts of mercury and cyanide into our rivers anymore. Even so, I found that in many ways Northern Ontario is more like underdeveloped Peru than it is like overdeveloped southern Ontario.

Peru is facing climate change just as we are, although Peru's problems are a bit more dramatic than ours. In Peru, communities in the coastal desert depend on Andean glaciers that will be gone in less than 40 years. In Canada, only Alberta is a quasi-desert that depends on the rapidly disappearing Rocky Mountain glaciers for summer irrigation. The United...