Last week, Ottawa agreed to allow Ontario Premier Doug Ford to move ahead with his woefully inadequate carbon pricing program plan, rather than enforce the federal output-based pricing system.
Announced the day before a Supreme Court of Canada hearing on whether the federal government has jurisdiction to price carbon, the deal was widely seen as a reluctant concession on the Liberal government’s part.
The Ontario Emissions Performance Standards program is undeniably less effective than the federal backstop. In fact, federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson called it “significantly weaker.”
On the ground, this will mean more harmful emissions and a faster track to climate catastrophe. In other words: higher temperatures, more frequent forest fires, and direct harm to the health and well-being of people in Canada and around the world.
Given the stakes at hand, you may wonder why the Liberal government, which made climate action a central part of its 2019 platform, would have signed off on such a deal – not to mention a similar compromise with New Brunswick.
The answer? Canada’s climate laws aren’t strong enough.
Under the federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act, provinces can substitute their own industrial carbon pricing for the federal system as long as they meet nationally determined benchmarks.
This is a good idea on paper, but provinces have found loopholes that allow them to meet the benchmarks without cutting the same amount of emissions. The federal government should take steps to make up the difference, but it doesn’t have to. There are no consequences for failing to meet national climate goals – and the targets themselves are moving goal posts, vulnerable to shifting political winds.
Without binding climate targets and a law to hold governments to meeting them, provinces can easily undermine national climate efforts – just as Premier Doug Ford did last week. If that happens, Canada will continue its track record of missing every climate target it has ever set.
Something needs to change.