CLIMATE PLAN WILL TAKE TIME: McKENNA

• The federal and Ontario environment ministers say a meeting next month between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers isn’t likely to conclude in a new climate plan for the country.

Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said Wednesday a pan-Canadian climate strategy will take time and next month’s meeting is designed to lay the foundation for that plan.

Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister for environment and climate change, said in a recent interview that the work will “take many months; that’s not going to happen in a week or two.”

Trudeau’s promise to convene a first ministers meeting to work out a climate plan within 90 days of December’s Paris climate conference set high expectations.

“Central to this would be the creation of national emissions-reduction targets,” the Liberal election platform said.

But Murray said a meeting two weeks ago of the provincial and territorial environment ministers and McKenna directed officials to spend six months establishing a common framework of key elements that all parties agree upon, as well as a list of issues that still need to be resolved.

Those unresolved issues, he said, include matters such as trade and capital outflows resulting from climatechange policies and how common carbon pricing can be approached, given the models already established by provinces including British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.

“I don’t think the pan-Canadian framework will be ready by March. I don’t think anyone imagined that,” Murray said.

“The previous government in 10 years couldn’t produce a paragraph, never mind a framework, so there’s a lot of work going on.”

The Prime Minister’s Office’s has confirmed Trudeau will attend a clean-tech business conference March 2-4 in Vancouver, setting the stage for the first ministers to meet in the city that week.

McKenna told the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in a speech Wednesday that next month’s meeting will “build the foundation of a pan-Canadian plan.”

She said the government wasn’t going to throw out an emissions target without a plan to meet it. The Liberal government attracted criticism for going to the Paris climate summit with national carbon-reduction targets set by the previous Conservative government. Depending on who you ask, the 2030 target of cutting emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels is either wildly ambitious or woefully inadequate.

McKenna has conceded the country is not anywhere close to being on track to meet the existing national emissions target.