Canada missed climate change chance

With bad choices, Canada squandered chance to lead

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has a plan to address climate change, and it isn’t the same as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s. While Trudeau wants the provinces to implement carbon pricing, Wall thinks that would be economically disastrous and wants the federal government to spend more money on technological innovation.

The whole debate feels a bit theoretical, doesn’t it? Who’s to say which of them knows how to solve this problem, and who actually has any confidence our politicians are trying in good faith to solve it? In Canada, reducing greenhouse gas emissions feels like science fiction, not a thing we can actually do.

It may be tempting to shrug, and pick a side based on partisanship, on which of them we like more, on which approach seems to make the most common sense or take fewest risks.

But we don’t have to go with shrugs and gut feelings. We can’t see the future, but we can look to the past, here and elsewhere.

In 1997, Canada promised the world that by 2012, it would decrease emissions to six per cent of 1990 levels. By 2012, our emissions had, instead, risen by about 17 per cent over 1990 levels. They would have been even higher, were it not for the closing of coal-fired power plants in Ontario and the effects of the global economic downturn from 2008 to 2011.

That’s the backstory that we just can’t shake in this country, the persistent feeling that all of this is posturing anyway. A feeling that the way things are here is the way they must be. That we are a big, cold, industrialized country, and if we failed to reduce emissions over the last quartercentury there must be a reason for that.

But history is never inevitable. If Canada had simply made different choices, we might have ended up like some other cold, industrialized country. Say, Sweden.

Let’s go back to October 1990, exactly 26 years ago. In that month, the nations of the world sent representatives to the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva. It was the beginning of a quarter-century of international political bloviation about climate change (the First World Climate Conference, in 1979, had been more scientific in focus.)

Canada was well positioned to lead on climate change in 1990, not only by persuasion but by example.

Three years earlier, the Montreal Protocol began the global effort to repair the ozone layer, a promise that Canada swiftly translated into action, drastically reducing the use of ozonedepleting substances through a combination of regulations and emissions trading.

Two years earlier, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney had spoken at the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere.

An outside observer, in 1990, might have expected that if any country would lead on climate change, it would be Canada.

Nope. Canada squandered the 1990s under both Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments, and then spent much of the 2000s having conversations at the intellectual level of Oily the Splot.

In Sweden, the 1990s were the beginning of something quite different. In 1991 — 25 years ago — Sweden introduced a carbon tax.

The context was different, of course. Sweden had long been trying to reduce its dependence on oil imports, while Canada is an oil producer. In the early 1990s, Sweden was also at the beginning of an economic crisis.

But the crisis ended, the carbon tax remained and evolved, and from the mid-1990s onward, Sweden has managed an unusual feat: Its emissions drop while its economy grows. Between 1990 and 2013, it cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 22 per cent while its GDP climbed by 58 per cent.

Carbon pricing wasn’t the only thing Sweden did. Tax credits, regulations, investment in green technology, sustainable urban planning: they’re all in the mix.

Sweden is not Canada, for many reasons, some of them simple geography. But it offers some lessons, if we can look past our own noses long enough.

We now have a quarter-century of success and failure in climate policy to show us that choices do matter.