Climate change efforts need Ottawa to work
The politics of climate change in Canada can be summed up by two recent comments from members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet.
The first came in a letter Friday from federal Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq to all of her provincial counterparts.
In it she chided the provinces for being too slow in coming up with measures to deal with climate change. The clock, she said, is ticking. The second was federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver’s reaction three days later to Ontario’s announcement that, yes, it will do something about climate change.
Oliver trashed Ontario’s cap-andtrade plan to reduce carbon emissions, calling it economically harmful. “We oppose it,” he said.
So there you have the Harper stalemate. The federal government acknowledges that something should be done quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But it opposes any concrete measures that might have a chance of working.
Indeed, it saves its praise only for Alberta’s singularly ineffective $15 per tonne emissions tax (economists calculate that this levy ends up costing industry just 77 cents for every tonne of carbon produced).
It’s no wonder that other provinces are trying to tackle climate change on their own.
But can they? An inter-provincial conference this week on global warming produced little that was concrete.
True, Ontario has finally agreed to join a Quebec-California cap-andtrade system, probably later this year.
But the details released by Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government to date are so sketchy as to be meaningless.
We don’t know what the emission reduction target is. Nor do we know which industries will be exempted (Quebec exempts aluminum and oil refineries as well as cement manufacturers).
In cap-and-trade, the government auctions off tradable permits that allow firms to emit a certain amount of carbon. As the price of these permits rises, so does the incentive to reduce greenhouse gases.
That is the theory, and in some cases — most notably in the battle against acid rain – it has worked. But whether the price of these permits rises or falls depends on how many the government chooses to sell. In Ontario’s case, we don’t know that either.
Indeed, governments have a powerful incentive to sell as many emission permits as possible. They are proven money-makers. California has netted $2.27 billion over three years and used some of the proceeds to pay down its deficit.
In short, Ontario’s new system may be a bold step forward in the fight against climate change. Or it may be a scam. We don’t yet know which.
One of the reasons we don’t know is that the federal government is not involved.
A better system would see Ottawa establishing targets that apply to all provinces equitably. Then the provinces would be charged with coming up with ways to meet those targets.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has suggested something along these lines.
But his plans, too, lack crucial detail.
Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats haven’t released their latest ideas. In the 2011 campaign, the NDP called for a national cap-and-trade system.
Oddly enough, so did the Harper Conservatives in 2008.
The Conservatives have reversed their position since then and are now ardent foes of cap-and-trade.
This is not because they are uniquely evil. It is because the politics of climate change are impossibly difficult.
Most Canadians agree something must be done to salvage the climate. But few want to pay the cost.
British Columbia’s controversial carbon tax has worked politically in part because it has been offset by cuts in other taxes.
More to the point, climate change measures must be seen as fair.
Ontarians may swallow a rise in gasoline prices as part of effort to save the planet. But they will balk if Albertans refuse to make similar sacrifices.
That’s why the federal government is needed. Even Quebec’s Premier Philippe Couillard says Ottawa has to be involved.
It must set the national goals. It must enforce them.
That Ontario and Quebec have joined forces to fight carbon emissions may turn out to be good news.
But without the weight of the federal government — whether Conservative or otherwise — even Canada’s two biggest provinces cannot do enough.