Dan Lett

There’s simply no way to get around it: Canadians are energy-consuming hogs.

This past April, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a non-governmental environmental advocacy organization, issued its annual international energy efficiency scorecard. Analyzing the 25 “most energy-consuming” countries, the ACEEE scorecard highlights those countries that are making a real effort to reduce energy consumption to help slow climate change, and exposes those that only talk a good game.

This year, Canada ranked 13th of 25 countries with an overall energy efficiency score of 49.5 out of a possible 100 points. That is well below first-place France (74.5) and only slightly above the global average of 48.5. That is a remarkably poor score given our relative wealth but it looks even more unflattering when you consider other metrics.

Canada actually rates seventh on policy, with robust targets and a myriad of government programs promoting energy efficiency. However, we rank 23rd when it comes to performance. In other words, Canadians are energy hogs.

After a week of carefully crafted apologies for the Roman Catholic church’s role in residential schools, Pope Francis decided to save his most intriguing comments to last.

On a July 30 flight from Iqaluit to Rome following a six-day tour of Canada, Francis finally conceded the residential schools system amounted to “genocide.” Although he apologized repeatedly for the Church’s role in that system, to that point he had not uttered the term genocide.

In an exchange with reporters on the plane, Francis noted he had used words like “assimilation” and “colonization” and “cultural destruction,” all of which the pontiff argued amounted to the same assessment.

“It’s true that I did not use the word because I didn’t think of it. Yes, genocide is a technical word, but I did not use it because I did not think of it. But … yes, it was a genocide, yes, yes, clearly. You can say that I said it was a genocide.”