Premiers work toward climate of change

QUEBEC CITY— Listening to a group of premiers debate global warming can be like watching a glacier melt: The pace can be painfully slow and predictable.

But for the UN’s top climate change official, it was like a sneak peek behind the Canadian “kimono.” And Christiana Figueres liked what she saw:

Disparate premiers — with different constituencies, geographies, economies and ideologies — coming together for the first time to compare notes and thrash out differences on global warming.

“It’s not often that I get to peek under the domestic kimono,” Figueres told the premiers with disarming candour after witnessing their polite but pointed interprovincial dialogue.

She had listened on the sidelines as Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne challenged Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall to go further, while their Quebec host, Philippe Couillard, tried to keep everyone from bashing Ottawa in absentia.

Figueres, who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, normally travels the world knocking heads among rival national governments. On Tuesday, she flew here to watch Canada’s subnational leaders, the premiers, cobbling together their own plans from the ground up.

Canada’s premiers can be a microcosm for world leaders with their “bottom-up” approach, offering hope for fractured UN negotiations, Figueres mused. But with a decisive meeting on global warming looming in Paris later this year under her leadership, she warned that Prime Minister Stephen Harper must also play a national leadership role.

“Canada can’t honestly excuse itself from responsibility,” warned Figueres, who will be visiting Wynne in Toronto Wednesday.

The kimono-microcosm imagery resonated with the premiers Tuesday as they took turns boasting of past achievements — and toasting Ontario’s latest cap-and-trade plan, unveiled here on the eve of the summit.

“Canada can be seen as a microcosm because we’ve got the same kinds of tensions, differences among our regions,” Wynne said.

It was also a counterpoint to the partisan criticism she will face upon her return to Toronto from the opposition Progressive Conservatives, who are calling her cap-andtrade plan an undisguised “carbon tax.” At the Quebec City summit, Ontario’s plan was welcomed by provincial governments of all political stripes.

While the premiers were on their best behaviour Tuesday, the elephant in the room — or more precisely, missing from the room — continued to be the federal government. After the UN official’s public chiding of Harper, the premiers couldn’t help chiming in.

“I want all of us to think in the context of the country,” Wynne said in an interview. “Now we need the federal government to engage with us. I need to talk with the federal government now about how to get from here to Paris.”

Even Couillard, after first underlining the pre-eminence of the provinces, is now beating the drum for a federal framework.

While “there shouldn’t be a wallto-wall, one-size-fits-all approach” to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, going local will only take you so far. For any Quebec premier — always jealously guarding the province’s jurisdiction against federal incursions — to call for federal action is almost unprecedented.

But by day’s end, Couillard, too, was exhorting Ottawa to come its senses — and come to the table.

“We call upon the federal government right now to start working with us,” he told a closing news conference. “There’s no way it can be done in isolation.

After holding back for most of the day, Wynne also pushed back against Ottawa.

“Honestly, I don’t know where the federal government is coming from — I don’t know what they’re thinking in terms of Paris,” she said.

The emerging importance of socalled sub-nationals was a recurring theme of the Quebec summit, and will be on display again in Toronto next July when Wynne hosts a sub-national Summit of the Americas on climate change. Figueres also announced to the premiers Tuesday that she has arranged for a designated day of discussion among sub-national governments at the Paris summit on climate change. And a series of reports by Canadian experts this month have stressed that provincial governments have the legislative authority to act expeditiously — especially with Ottawa behaving so hesitantly.

More proof that in a world where small is beautiful, sub-national is looking better than ever in the fight against global warming.