When it comes to climate change, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has no international credibility. But if we’re going to be honest, the Liberal Party under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin also did very little to prepare Canada for the challenges we now face. (Also see our first entry in this series).
Still, we didn’t know then what he know now. Some time around 2004, the evidence supporting climate change became overwhelming, and it transitioned from a generally-accepted scientific theory into a scientific fact. But that’s not all: The pace of climate change has accelerated, so even the worst-case scenarios entertained in the IPCC Fourth Assessment have been shown to be woefully optimistic. That’s why Environment Canada scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the press because the science — and their comments — would profoundly embarrass the Prime Minister.
You see, climate scientists know that climate change is accelerating beyond all expectations. Events that were expected to take 60 or 70 years are happening right before our eyes. Greenland is melting. Tundra that has been frozen for millennia is rapidly thawing. Sea levels are rising. Huge glaciers placed by the last ice age are calving prodigiously, leaving behind a barren and diminished landscape.
Over the last few years, climate change has morphed into the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, greater than the Cold War, greater than Hitler’s rise to power. People describe such sentiments as alarmist, but the simple truth is that we are balancing on a precipice, and the actions we take in the next three or four years will either enrich, or impoverish, the lives of all those who follow.
Stephen Harper became Prime Minister during this era of a new understanding. His Liberal predecessors might not have done much to combat climate change, but they did provide him with the healthiest economy among G8 nations, with a recurring annual surplus of $12 – $14 billion. What an incredible opportunity we have wasted! Instead of using that money to launch a green revolution, as developed countries throughout the world are doing, Harper cut the GST by 2 points, and offered tax breaks to the wealthiest Canadians. As a result, Canada has been running a deficit throughout 2008, and we will add greatly to our accumulated debt over the next three years as we attempt to correct Harper’s mistakes.
I believe that Canadians must face a moral imperative. We didn’t inherit our country from our parents, we’re borrowing it from our children. We have been unthinking caretakers and we have created a horrible mess. It’s time to take responsibility.
I have to believe that we are a better country than we have been for the last decade. At a time when all 27 member states in the European Union are within striking distance of their Kyoto obligations, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 28 percent since 1990. That is the most shameful record among developed nations.
We are the worst of the worst, an unrepentant villain. As a country, we should be profoundly and utterly embarrassed. And with the Alberta Oil Sands — Planet Earth’s most toxic environmental disaster — set to expand by leaps and bounds once to price of oil rises, we will assume the dubious mantel of being the world’s most selfish developed nation, and that’s saying something. People point fingers at countries like China and India, but the simple truth is that the average Chinese emits about one-fifth as many greenhouse gases as the average Haligonian. The average Indian has but one twentieth the carbon footprint of the average Calgarian.
NOT Turning the Corner: Canada’s CO2 emissions WILL rise
All four opposition parties — the Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party — believe that we must protect the environment. While the Conservative Party has bamboozled the country into believing that it’s working to cut emissions, Harper is quietly trying to lock us into a fossil fuel economy for a generation — or more. The Conservative proposal, called Turning the Corner, is better described as business as usual. While it does take a few tentative steps toward energy efficiency, most respected analysts are predicting that Canada’s greenhouse emissions will rise dramatically in the next decade, especially as Oil Sand development escalates. The Conservatives may argue that we’ve turned the corner but, in reality, they’re leading us down a dead-end street.
Consider this analysis, compiled by the David Suzuki Foundation just before the 2007 international climate summit in Bali, where former Environment Minister John Baird did everything he could to stifle progress (and where the Canadian and US delegations were booed).*
The current federal government has consistently made clear that it will not attempt to meet Canada’s Kyoto phase 1 target. It has ruled out any public funding for emission-reduction projects in developing countries that would count towards Canada’s target (through Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism). The government has also failed to make any commitment to accept Kyoto’s penalties for non-compliance with targets.
As the only nation to have agreed to be legally bound by a Kyoto target and then reneged on it, Canada enters the negotiations in Bali with severely weakened credibility. Any effort to persuade other major emitters to take on new commitments will surely be hampered by the government’s rejection of its own existing obligations.
Canada will also arrive in Bali with an emission-reduction plan that every independent reviewer has found will fall short of even the targets that the government has substituted for Kyoto’s. After performing a modelling analysis for the C.D. Howe Institute, economist Mark Jaccard concluded that the government’s plan would allow Canada’s emissions remain indefinitely above current levels.
The Deutsche Bank’s analysis of the plan reached a similar conclusion:
“…because the Turning the Corner plan allows for the offsetting of emissions at what we think is too low a price to incentivize investment in new low-carbon technologies, we think that even these much less ambitious targets will probably not be achieved. In short, under current policies we would expect Canada’s industrial GHG emissions to continue rising over 2006–20.”
The Pembina Institute’s analysis uncovered numerous loopholes and gaps that undermine the credibility of the government’s target for 2020, and concluded that the government’s proposed policies have little chance of meeting its near-term target of stopping the growth in Canada’s GHG pollution by 2010–12, or even by 2020.
A key factor in these conclusions is the government’s decision to rely on “intensity” targets (targets for emissions per unit of production) instead of absolute emission targets for industry. Intensity targets allow emissions to continue to rise when industrial production is increasing rapidly.
Finally, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) scrutinized each element of the government’s emission-reduction plan. Of the 23 measures in the plan, the NRTEE concluded that the government had “likely overestimated” the emission reductions from six of seven of the measures (including all three regulatory measures), and that there was “insufficient information to reach a conclusion” on the ability of 15 of the measures to reach their targets.
End Game
Writing in The National Post [November 2007, former] Minister Baird stated that “Canada is well placed to be a bridge between those nations that are signatory to Kyoto and those that aren’t.”
The U.S. is the best-known Kyoto outlier and one of the world’s top two emitters, so it was almost certainly one of the nations that Minister Baird had in mind. However, a comparison of Canada’s position with that of the U.S. and the EU finds Canada aligned much more closely with the [Bush administration's war-on-science polemics] than the more climate-friendly policies of the EU. Clearly, Canada’s credibility as a bridge is in doubt.
In addition to being a bridge between nations, the Government of Canada is seeking recognition as a “leader” in the global effort to combat climate change. In a recent speech, Prime Minister Harper stated: “We want to be a world leader in the fight against global warming and the development of clean energy. We want to lead, not by lecturing, but by example.”
[Former] Minister Baird has gone even further and claimed that Canada is already a leader, writing that “Canada has taken a leadership role on the international front as an important player in the effort against climate change.”
The Prime Minister’s desire to lead others is seriously undermined by Canada’s track record on Kyoto phase 1, the weakness of its current targets for post-2012, and the failing grade that the government’s plan has received from four independent analyses. The Government of Canada to [needs to bring] its climate policies in line with its rhetoric.
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* Canada was booed at the 2007 climate summit in Bali; in 2008, we were named the Collosal Fossil for doing more to stifle progress than any other nation on earth.