‘Ambitious’ Liberal climate plan has yet to take shape
For the first time, federal Liberals can no longer use the strategy they have used on climate issues for years: blame the guys who were in power in the previous term.
During four years as environment minister, Catherine McKenna repeatedly said Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up because it takes time to turn around years of Conservative inaction.
She continued during the campaign. She hammered at Conservative inaction when she awarded $100,000 to a local group called EnviroCentre and again when she promoted funding for OC Transpo’s electric buses and when she announced the Liberals’ climate platform.
But the Conservatives are no longer the previous government. And Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions have continued steadily upward.
And this year, despite a lack of evidence that anyone in Canada is actually able to reduce our emissions, the Liberals have promised the most drastic action of all.
They’re going to eliminate emissions completely.
They promise to do this on a “net-zero” basis, meaning that for each new tonne of carbon dioxide we emit by burning fuel, we will take an equal amount out of the atmosphere, resulting in no net change. We will reach net zero in 30 years, the party has promised. And McKenna promised to have legally binding targets at five-year intervals along the way. (What “legally binding” means is still undetermined.)
The challenge: How do we end the practice of emitting 716 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year? And will people who say they want climate action agree to drive all-electric cars (and trucks) and give up common comforts?
So far, McKenna is depending partly on technology that does not yet exist. But she asks people to think of cellphones, saying we have technology we could never have imagined 20 years ago.
“I’m not going to stand here and say what our exact plan is until 2050 because we need to make that plan with experts,” she told reporters during the campaign.
“Do we have all the details? No. But let’s be clear. We are saying we need to be net zero by 2050, we’re saying we need experts to help show us the path to get there.”
She called it “ambitious and pragmatic.”
Outside experts were already leery of Canada’s existing commitments, made in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015.
A report last year by Canada’s provincial, territorial and federal auditors general said governments don’t even know what climate action would look like, let alone how to do it.
“For the most part, auditors found that governments’ plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consisted of high-level goals with little guidance on how to implement actions,” their report said.
The auditors found that methods are haphazard and unplanned: “Audits at federal, provincial, and territorial levels found that there was limited co-ordination within governments around climate change action. For instance, departments that were assigned leadership roles on climate change often did not provide sufficient information, guidance, and training to the rest of the government.”
Still, the Liberal plan gets support from one climate expert: Gordon McBean, a climatologist at Western University and former assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada.
“It will be difficult, but I’m very pleased that these kinds of things are happening because if you don’t set such objectives, then you don’t, of course, meet them,” he said Tuesday. tspears@postmedia.com twitter.com/TomSpears1