An unlikely leader emerges in climate fight
On a week when the rising number of COVID-19 cases again stole the headlines, two of the country’s governments took time out to unveil major pieces of climate policy.
On Parliament Hill, the ruling Liberals unveiled the environmental version of an accountability act — a bill designed to enshrine in law Canada’s bid to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
In Quebec, Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec’s government presented a climate plan that would see — among other measures — the sale of new fossil-fuel-powered cars banned in the province as of 2035.
Neither plan offers a comprehensive road map to arrive at either government’s emissions reduction destination.
Even as it commits Canada to net-zero emissions by 2050, the federal bill provides few insights as to how Ottawa means to get to that goal.
The first hard deadline set out in the legislation is 2030.
A decade from now, it is not a stretch to assume that Justin Trudeau will have already been consigned to history as the country’s 23rd prime minister. His successor will most likely have to account for Canada’s success or failure to meet its first legally mandated target.
The Quebec plan, for its part, is only the beginning of a work in progress. The measures announced this week would only get the province slightly less than half of the way to its target.
But a glass half full is still better than an empty one.
This week’s developments — even as they fall short of a comprehensive policy prescription to end Canada and Quebec’s unbroken string of missed targets — assuage, at least in part, widespread fears that the climate issue is doomed to be swept under the pandemic rug.
That’s what happened at the time of the last big global crisis in 2008.
In its aftermath, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were the beneficiaries of a crisisinduced shift in voters’ priorities.
Looking at the next federal campaign, more than a few Conservative strategists believe the fiscal and economic fallout of the pandemic could similarly provide the party with a lot of cover on the environmental front and dispense with the need to really raise its climate change game.
But there is an alternative scenario, one that could see this week’s dual announcements pave the way to a shift in tone and a more constructive Canadian political conversation about how to effectively address climate change.
Canada has not been well served by the adversarial nature of the climate debate at the national level.
At some point, the Conservatives and Leader Erin O’Toole will have to decide whether it really serves the party well to continue to use Trudeau’s climate policy as a wedge issue.
In last year’s election, the Conservative war on the carbon tax and other related Liberal policies brought Andrew Scheer diminishing returns outside of the Prairies.
Back then, the federal party could at least count on the vocal support of a handful of popular Conservative premiers. But the anti-carbon pricing provincial coalition of last year’s federal campaign is at best a shadow of its former self.
A year ago, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney — fresh from bringing a reunited party back to victory in Edmonton — was very much the driving force behind the conservative mobilization against the federal climate framework.
But Kenney’s national influence — along with his popularity in Alberta — has waned over the course of the pandemic.
In Ontario, Trudeau’s second election victory prompted Premier Doug Ford to start to take his distance from his Alberta ally. The pandemic has accelerated that movement. It has set the stage for a rapprochement between Queen’s Park and Ottawa but also between Ford and his Quebec counterpart Legault.
Could the shift in provincial dynamics also bring about a shift to a more consensual approach to climate change politics? This is where this week’s other climate-related development — the one that took place in Quebec — could come in.
Two years ago, Legault came to power without even a fig leaf of a plan to fight climate change. The issue was simply not on his party’s radar.
With the CAQ riding high in voting intentions and in light of the pandemic, a case could be made that the premier could have stuck to paying minimal lip service to the environmental issue and still sailed on to a second majority term.
Instead, the policy his government put forward — for all of its missing parts — is more ambitious than those of his predecessors, not to mention those of his counterparts (with the possible exception of B.C.).
That puts Legault in the unexpected position of leading the provincial pack by example, an unlikely but potentially game-changing role for a premier with conservative credentials.