OTTAWA CLIMATE CHANGE TARGETS MAY NOT ALIGN WITH ALBERTA’S
Notley, Trudeau heading to Paris as friends but may not return that way
Premier Rachel Notley heads off to Paris in three weeks for international climate change meetings. So will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his relevant ministers, Notley’s new best friends.
Now we’ll find out if they stay that way.
There’s no doubting the early goodwill between two leaders who actually believe in climate change, gender parity, and other matters that are entirely new in the seats of Alberta and Ottawa power.
Trudeau’s open invitation to Rideau Hall for the swearingin was much like Notley’s own installation at the legislature on May 24; a spontaneous public celebration of new directions and hope.
That’s great. Inspiring, too. Every society needs uplifting symbols and ceremonies.
It would be even better, though, if hope created jobs.
But it doesn’t, and now the premier faces the hard work of forging a climate change policy that aligns both with Alberta’s oil and gas economy, and whatever Ottawa proposes for climate change.
Very soon, we’ll hear about the premier’s plans.
“We hope to be able to reveal some substantive parts of the direction we’re heading in the week before I leave for Paris — the week of Nov. 23 or 24,” she said Wednesday.
“That’s what we’re shooting for. There is a remarkable amount of work going on. There is late night after late night after late night of incredibly talented people coming together to work on different streams of this.
“I’m feeling fairly optimistic that we’ll be able to come up with a fair amount of detail. It won’t all be wrapped up in a bow and be ready to be implemented the next day ( but) it will set us on a very progressive and balanced path forward.”
The province has been crunching this for five months. The feds have about two weeks.
Climate change work obviously goes on in the federal bureaucracy, but nobody knew who’d be giving the orders until Oct. 19 — the day of the federal election — and Trudeau couldn’t give any until Wednesday afternoon.
On the federal front at least, it’s a recipe for a slapdash performance to rival anything Ottawa took to Kyoto in 1997.
One obvious concern is that Ottawa will try to dazzle the world with standards which Alberta, even under the NDP, will find too stringent to accept.
In that light, the new regional imbalance is troubling.
Alberta has two cabinet ministers. Combined, Saskatchewan, B. C. and Alberta have six.
Ontario alone boasts 11 ministers, including seven from the Greater Toronto Area, and Quebec has six.
The new federal minister of environment and climate change is Catherine McKenna, a skyrocket newcomer who wasn’t even expected to win Ottawa Centre, which had long been an NDP stronghold.
She’ll be dealing with surprise Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion, who handled much of the Kyoto implementation as environment minister in the 1990s.
He chairs what looks like a crucial cabinet committee on environment, climate change and energy.
It’s mildly encouraging that Infrastructure Minister Amerjeet Sohi, from Edmonton, is a committee member.
Asked how co- operation with Ottawa can work, and if she thinks policy alignment is possible, Notley said: “The prime minister has talked about giving different provinces the capacity to come up with their own plans.
“We’ll see how close we come to the targets we’re looking at, we’ll see how the targets are framed.”
She said federal and provincial targets might not be the same, “but we will do a good deal. I’m confident that, at least at the outset, we will be able to establish a pretty effective partnership.”
“We’re going to do what we think we can to improve our record in a way that not only supports Albertans, but supports generations of Albertans to come. But we’re going to do this in a balanced way that allows the industry to still be healthy and prosperous.
“Not only does our economy depend on this, but quite frankly so does the whole country.”
Does Trudeau’s environmentally ardent new cabinet agree with that? Paris may force the answer before Canadian negotiators are even ready for the question.