The next election will be a climate change election — because they all are now
CBC
Pressed by reporters on Monday to explain what a Conservative government would do to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, Pierre Poilievre again demurred.
"Our election platform will deal with all these issues," he said.
Thing is, Poilievre already seems rather eager for an election. The Conservative leader asked the prime minister to deem Monday's vote on a Conservative motion to be a matter of confidence. And he is now declaring that the next election will be a "carbon tax election."
Actually, we've already had a few of those. In fact, every federal campaign since 2008 has featured carbon-pricing proposals from multiple parties — including the Conservative Party in both 2008 and 2021. In the last two elections, the party that won the most seats — the Liberals — was the one that actually had implemented a national carbon tax.
That the Liberal government's carbon tax — and the latest outbreak of consternation over that policy — will feature in the next election, whenever it happens, is a safe prediction. But it would be more accurate to say the next election will be a climate change election.
Every election is a climate change election now, whether campaigning politicians want to acknowledge it or not.
But there's also no reason (beyond partisan political considerations) for waiting to have a real debate on Canada's response to climate change until the writs are dropped.
The environment commissioner's latest report on the Liberal government's climate agenda, released Tuesday, is a decent starting point for that debate. Indeed, the mere existence of the commissioner's review is due to the reporting mechanisms built into the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act passed in 2021 — government legislation the Conservatives voted against.
In noting that the government is not on track to achieve the promised 40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, the commissioner was merely repeating what the government itself acknowledged last December. But the larger story behind that simple fact is where the climate policy debate gets much more interesting.
By the government's reckoning, Canada should be able to achieve a 34 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. That would be no small thing. In fact, it would be enough to meet Canada's original 2030 target, first set by Stephen Harper's Conservative government in 2015.
But the Liberal government decided to adopt a more ambitious target two years ago. It's that target Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers are now chasing.
It's still possible to see significant progress. A government projection prepared in 2016, less than a year after the Trudeau government came to office, estimated that without additional policies, Canada's emissions in 2030 would total 815 megatonnes — equivalent to a nine-per cent increase above 2005 levels. The government's latest projection is that emissions could be as low as 491 Mt in 2030.
When a long-time environmentalist — Catherine Abreu, who is also a member of the government's net-zero advisory body — remarked at a conference in Ottawa this week that climate policy in Canada has gone through a "revolution" in the last seven years, she had solid grounds for saying so.
But the precise measure of that revolution, and Canada's chances of getting to within sight of that 2030 target, now depend a lot on the actual implementation of policies that have so far only been promised or proposed.