Competing Visions from Provinces on Climate Change

Published by the David Suzuki Foundation:

Something’s gotta give. This week’s premiers’ meeting — the Council of the Federation — in Regina will once again expose the yawning gap between those provinces who are moving forward with global warming action and those who are doing nothing.

British Columbia has emerged as a leader on this file, with its carbon tax, plans for a hard cap on greenhouse gas pollution for industry, tough vehicle efficiency standards, and a promise to go carbon neutral by 2012. Other leading provinces include Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba, all of which will be joining B.C. and a number of U.S. states in a cap-and-trade system under the Western Climate Initiative. The four provinces, representing almost 80% of the Canadian population, have developed full climate change plans, adopted reasonably ambitious emission reduction targets, and implemented a number of other policies to curb emissions.

Then there are those provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, whose “vision” for climate change means doing next to nothing. Both provinces’ emissions are up…way up. They both have emissions per capita that are the highest in the world. And neither has a plan to reduce them anytime soon. Alberta’s emissions are the highest in the country and Premier Stemlach’s official plan is to continue to increase them until at least 2020.

Earlier this year, Saskatchewan’s Premier Wall threw out the emission reduction target he ran on in the last election. Instead, he proposed intensity-based targets, joining Alberta and the Canadian federal government as the only three jurisdictions in the developed world that pretend that this approach will solve global warming.

The reason this split is even discussed is because of Ottawa’s continued inaction on global warming. Successive federal governments have put out plan after plan without doing anything with them. We are waiting…again…for another climate change plan, which Pipelines Minister Jim Prentice promises will be out before the end of the year.

How can it be that in 2009, a few months before a historic meeting in Copenhagen will determine the next global regime on climate change, that Canada does not even have its own plan? The reason is primarily Alberta. Any plan to reduce global warming pollution will elicit screams from Alberta, because a disproportionate amount of the emission reductions will come from there, because a disproportionate amount of the emissions are from there.

On a per capita basis, Alberta and Saskatchewan has six times the emissions of Quebec, five times the emissions of Ontario and B.C., and four times the emissions of Manitoba. You can’t eliminate emissions where they don’t exist, so many of the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing emissions are found in high-emitting provinces.

The federal government can’t reach its own weak greenhouse gas targets without Alberta changing course. If both Canada and Alberta were to reach their 2050 greenhouse gas targets, all other provinces would have to have negative emissions. Canada’s 2020 targets are
equally impossible without Alberta reducing emissions, especially from the tar sands and coal-fired power plants.

So the premiers will again discuss global warming. The chasm between the leaders and laggards will be obvious to everyone. And the federal government will continue to fiddle while our home burns.

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Read the original post by Dale Marshall, Policy Analyst, Climate Action Team, David Suzuki Foundation at:

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blog/DSF1_08050901.asp

Download David Suzuki Foundation’s media backgrounder to the Council of the Federation meeting of August 6-7, 2009:

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/files/DSF_Provinces_and_Climate_Change_2009.pdf