Climate plan to balance economy with emissions

A much-anticipated climate plan update to be released Friday by the B.C. Liberal government will not fully implement all the sweeping recommendations from its own committee, which called for an aggressive increase in the carbon tax.

Instead, the B.C. Liberal government wants to balance actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with affordability for families and competitiveness to protect and grow jobs, including so-called green jobs, according to a government source familiar with the plan.

This lens of affordability and competitiveness is being brought to the 32 recommendations released by the government-appointed leadership team in October 2015, said the government source.

Almost all recommendations are being addressed in the updated plan, but don’t expect the province to announce an increase in the carbon tax on Friday — or make a final decision on what will be done.

The Christy Clark-led government is characterizing the plan as realistic and ambitious, but it will likely be a disappointment to environmentalists and some First Nations who have called on the government not to delay implementing all 32 committee recommendations.

The government is sticking to a long-range carbon reduction target of 80 per cent by 2050 over 2007 levels. It is already known the B.C. government will not meet its legislated target of one-third reduction by 2020, set under then-Liberal premier Gordon Campbell.

The government-appointed committee had recommended increasing the carbon tax starting in 2018 by $10 each year. That would double the carbon tax by 2020, frozen at $30 per tonne of carbon emission since 2012, and push it to $160 per tonne by 2030, far outstripping the current level in other jurisdictions in North America.

Even though the committee recommended an offsetting one per cent reduction in the provincial sales tax to six per cent, and elimination of some smaller business taxes, the carbon tax increase was of particular concern to industry, and brought a lone dissenting vote on the committee from a representative from the B.C. LNG Alliance (which includes companies such as Shell, Chevron and Malaysian state-controlled Petronas).

B.C. Environment Minister Mary Polak already said in June that a decision on carbon pricing was not likely to be made until after the federal government has made its own decision on pricing, possibly late this year.