After Mulroney, being a 'green' PM got a lot tougher
When Brian Mulroney was given the title of Canada's "greenest prime minister" in 2006 - awarded by an ex‐ pert panel convened by Corporate Knights magaz‐ ine - it might have seemed like faint praise. In fact, one of the people on the panel - Jim Fulton, execu‐ tive director of the David Suzuki Foundation at the time and a former NDP MP - said none of the nation's prime ministers to that point deserved the honour.
Mulroney won five of the 12 votes cast. Pierre Trudeau won three votes and four other prime ministers (R.B. Bennett, Jean Chretien, Wild‐ frid Laurier and John A. Mac‐ donald) received a single vote each.
Still, the environmental accomplishments of Mul‐ roney's government are un‐ deniable. It's only unfortu‐ nate that his time in office didn't offer a sharper turning point in Canadian policy.
Mulroney did not singlehandedly end the scourge of acid rain. He did successfully negotiate the Canada-United States Air Quality Agreement - better known as the Acid Rain Treaty - that went a long way toward solving the prob‐ lem, at least in North Amer‐ ica. He did not patch the hole in Earth's ozone layer - but his government hosted and ratified the Montreal Proto‐ col, through which dozens of countries pledged to reduce the use of chlorofluorocar‐ bons.
Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government al‐ so enacted the Canadian En‐ vironmental Protection Act to manage toxic substances in the environment, and the Canadian Environmental As‐ sessment Act to review the environmental impacts of major projects.
It established the Interna‐ tional Institute for Sustain‐ able Development - still a leading voice on global envi‐ ronmental policy - and launched the National Roundtable on the Economy and the Environment (NRTEE), an expert advisory body that published analysis until Stephen Harper's Con‐ servative government abol‐ ished it in 2013.
Mulroney appointed a string of prominent environ‐ ment ministers, including Tom McMillan (who em‐ ployed a young Elizabeth May as a policy analyst), Lu‐ cien Bouchard and Jean Charest. And while the 1980s was a time of increasing envi‐ ronmental awareness, the government's achievements are perhaps even more im‐ pressive because, in the words of Rick Smith of the Climate Institute, "environ‐ mental policy was not nearly as mainstream a concern as it is now."
Mulroney's interest in Canada-U.S. relations and in‐ ternational diplomacy may have driven some of his gov‐ ernment's action. Under Mul‐ roney, Canada ratified the UN conventions on biodiversity and climate change and in 1988 hosted the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, one of the first major international gather‐ ings to discuss climate change.
"For him, international is‐ sues, engagement on that was always big," said David McLaughlin, who was briefly Mulroney's chief of staff and later served as president of the NRTEE.
The Green Plan that might have been
In 1990, the federal govern‐ ment released "Canada's Green Plan," a 174-page statement of intent to deal with a host of environmental problems, including global warming. That plan set a lofty goal of stabilizing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000 - the first of several targets Canada would announce and fail to pursue seriously between 1990 and 2015.
In theory, the Green Plan's goal would have meant hold‐ ing emissions to 589 mega‐ tonnes in 2000. In reality, Canada's total emissions that year were 719 Mt. Seven years later, Canada's emis‐ sions had hit 748 Mt.
In more ways than one, 1990 seems like a long time ago. Total emissions from the oil and gas sector that year were 101 Mt, accounting for 17 per cent of national emis‐ sions. Over the next twenty years, aided by an economic boom in the oil sands, the sector's emissions doubled; it now accounts for 28 per cent of Canada's total.
The challenges of acid rain and ozone depletion were not easy to resolve, but it's fair to say climate change involves a significantly greater degree of difficulty. Until recently, the threat was less tangible. The solutions are also harder to implement - and can take years to show results.
"The problem is the cli‐ mate cycle is never aligned
with the political or the elec‐ toral cycle," McLaughlin said.
Internationally, it has been hard to get major emit‐ ters aligned. But basic politics has proved to be a major impediment in Cana‐ da.
The Green Plan touted the possibility of pursuing an emissions "trading" program - what we would now call a cap-and-trade system, one of two primary methods for es‐ tablishing a price on harmful emissions.
"There is evidence that a market-based approach to the problem can be quicker, more efficient and more ef‐ fective in reducing emissions and the costs of achieving these reductions," the PC government wrote.
Political leadership can tackle big problems
The proposed program was framed as one way to battle smog by reducing nitrous ox‐ ide and volatile organic com‐ pounds.
It would be another 29 years before the federal gov‐ ernment finally applied a "market-based" approach to carbon emissions, through the current government's carbon tax. But now the fu‐ ture of that policy is very much in doubt - Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, Mul‐ roney's political heir, has loudly and repeatedly vowed that a government led by him will "axe the tax."
Canada's emissions are now finally trending down‐ wards and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can fairly claim to have pushed envi‐ ronmental policy further than anyone since at Mul‐ roney. Ironically, Trudeau's carbon tax now rivals Mul‐ roney's GST as an object of political scorn.
It's obviously impossible to know whether Mulroney would have made more progress than his successors if he'd somehow remained in office past 1993. But it's at least intriguing to think about how Canadian politics and policy might be different if a Progressive Conservative government had somehow gotten further down the track toward reducing Canada's emissions.
But as much as the politi‐ cal battles of Mulroney's time might seem different from the one being waged now, it's still possible to take heart from the fact that the fights against acid rain and ozone depletion were won.
Neither win was particu‐ larly quick or easy. Nearly three decades elapsed be‐ tween the scientific discovery of lake acidification and the passage of the Clean Air Act in the United States in 1990. The work to phase out CFCs continued long after the Montreal Protocol was signed.
But acid rain and damage to the ozone layer are no longer going concerns younger generations may not even know that they were once major problems. If nothing else, that shows big, global problems can be fixed. And history shows political leadership can help make that happen.