Canada will meet climate targets despite emissions gap: McKenna

EDMONTON — Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says Canada is committed to meeting its climate change targets despite a growing gap between promises and emissions projections.

“We’re absolutely committed to meeting our target,” McKenna, who was in Edmonton this week for an international conference on cities and climate change, told The Canadian Press. “We’re all in.”

In 2015, Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions were 722 megatonnes annually of carbon dioxide equivalent. The Paris climate accord commits the country to reducing that total to 517 megatonnes by 2030.

In December, the government delivered a report to the United Nations outlining progress on reaching that target. The report acknowledged that both current and planned policies are likely to leave the country 66 megatonnes short of its target.

That figure is 50 per cent higher than a similar report made to the UN 18 months ago.

“It’s a good-news, bad-news story,” said McKenna.

“Our economy is growing and our projections are based on our economic growth. It just means that we need to be doing more. There’s huge opportunities that we haven’t built into our target.”

McKenna said Canada has plenty of time to catch up to where it’s supposed to be.

“It’s a 2030 target,” she said. “We’ve said this is a transition and you don’t transition overnight.”

Billions of dollars marked for public transportation in the last federal budgets will help, she said.

New technologies for carbonheavy industries are expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions and aren’t yet figured into the projection. The federal government is also counting on reforestation to reduce Canada’s carbon footprint because growing trees pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in forests.