Do better on climate action
Aminority Parliament creates both problems and opportunities. And right now there’s an opportunity to do better on climate change.
The Trudeau government put forward a plan last week to get Canada closer to meeting its international targets for reducing greenhouse gases. But in a minority Parliament it will need other parties to turn that into law, and therein lies the opportunity.
The government’s plan, set out in the “Canadian Net Zero Emissions Accountability Act” introduced by Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, falls considerably short of what’s needed. So in return for supporting it, the New Democrats and Greens should push the Liberals to do more.
The plan’s goal is laudable: require the government to set targets toward meeting the goal of net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. It sends, said Wilkinson, “a signal of the depth of our resolve to be a serious competitor in the clean global market place that is emerging today.”
Judging by the details of the plan, though, the government’s resolve doesn’t seem all that deep after all. To start with, it requires that the first emissions target, along with a strategy to achieve it, be set for 2030 — a full decade away.
The Liberals campaigned last year on a promise to set “legally binding” targets for reducing GHG emissions every five years. But its plan simply skips over 2025 and jumps ahead to 2030, so the Trudeau government itself will be off the hook for meeting any specific goal. That will be up to some future government two or three elections down the road.
The prime minister himself seems to realize the absurdity of proposing an “accountability act” that doesn’t hold his own government accountable. Asked directly three times about this, he didn’t even attempt to square the circle. He just ignored the question entirely and kept talking about 2030.
There are also no penalties in the act for a government that misses the targets to be set for 2030, 2035 and every five years after that. The only penalty, as Trudeau acknowledged, will be political. If a government falls short, he noted, voters will punish them at the polls: “The consequences will be far greater than anything you could write into legislation.”
That, of course, is just another way of saying that in a democracy we get the government and the climate policy that we vote for, or at least that a plurality of us vote for. It’s not the same as “legally binding” targets that would require governments to follow a long-term plan toward zero emissions despite ups and downs in public opinion.
The Liberal plan does propose some new ways to make sure governments move in that direction and can be held accountable. It would set up a new panel of experts to advise the environment minister on how to reduce emissions, and require the federal environment commissioner to report regularly on how Canada is doing on meeting its climate targets.
Those arrangements seem relatively weak, and the opposition parties could well lean on the government to toughen them up. The expert panel, for example, could be given a higher profile role and the environment commissioner’s powers could be strengthened.
All that would help, but all this is really about process, not the substance of what this and future governments will do to reduce carbon emissions and put in place the offsets needed to achieve the goal of “net zero.”
Environmentalists are fond of pointing out that the record is not good. They note that Canada has failed to meet every one of its international climate goals going back to the Rio summit in 1992. And the government’s own data show it’s on track right now to miss its current target of reducing emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2030.
Changing that will take political will now, backed by voters who truly want action on the climate, and consistent effort over the next three decades by future governments. The Liberals’ plan, as it stands, comes up short but there’s a chance in this Parliament to do better. MPs should seize it.