PROVINCES CAN LEAD
It is a convenient shorthand to talk about “Canada’s policy” when we mean “the federal government’s policy” and vice versa. But when it comes to climate policy, Canada’s policies have less and less to do with its federal government. Our provincial patchwork of ideas and initiatives is starting to look more like a quilt: a diverse set of policies that could work together in a coherent way.
These policies have been introduced or supported by governments of every stripe. Quebec’s cap-and-trade regime was born under Quebec Liberal (and erstwhile federal Progressive Conservative) Jean Charest, in concert with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. In British Columbia, the $30/tonne carbon tax is a creature of the Liberal party. Ontario’s Liberals have announced this province will implement a cap and trade regime linked to Quebec’s.
Alberta’s carbon levy on large industrial emitters was introduced by a Tory government. The new NDP premier has announced a plan to bump it up from $15/tonne to $30, and her government is also considering other measures.
Given that Alberta’s oilsands are among the first things mentioned in any international discussion of Canada’s climate policy, what Premier Rachel Notley is doing matters to the whole country. We Canadians can and should berate the federal Conservatives for their intransigence on climate policy, but we can’t use them as an excuse for inaction. The country can implement a market-based approach to emission reduction with or without the cooperation of the federal government, although of course it would be easier to stitch that quilt together with federal leadership.
These policies all work in very different ways, with different bureaucracies and rules. And while it’s no mere coincidence that the stringency of Alberta’s carbon levy is rising to match the price across the border in B.C., the price of carbon — and more broadly, the cost of these policies to industry — is not uniform across the country.
Still, the overall effect has been to create a national culture — and a national business climate — in which it is normal to pay a price for greenhouse-gas emissions. Although we are not yet even close to where we need to be from an emissions-reduction standpoint, these experiments have shown that carbon pricing doesn’t kill the economy. After the 2008 federal election and Stéphane Dion’s ill-fated Green Shift, that issue died in federal politics, but it did not die in Canadian politics.
On this week when we celebrate our Confederation, it is not such a bad thing to acknowledge that our strength and our innovation comes from our provinces. The government can choose to largely ignore an urgent global crisis, but that doesn’t mean the country must.