GOLDSTEIN: Canada’s climate targets were always a fantasy

Prime Minister Mark Carney has correctly admitted that the federal government will not achieve its 2030 and 2035 industrial greenhouse gas emission targets under the climate strategy of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

“We have too much regulation, not enough action,” Carney told CBC in a year-end interview commenting on Trudeau’s plan.

Costing federal taxpayers more than $200 billion and funding 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments, that plan was expected to achieve, at best, half of its promised emission cuts.

In light of that, Carney should demand that federal government departments – particularly the environment ministry – start putting out realistic assessments of Canada’s progress toward the government’s eventual goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This as opposed to the nonsensical, politically-motivated claims they’ve been making for years, contradicted by the findings of their own experts.

A brief history lesson tells the story.

On Nov. 7, 2023, federal environment commissioner Jerry V. DeMarco reported that the government’s first emissions reduction plan released in March 2022 would fail to achieve its 2030 target of reducing Canada’s emissions 40% to 45% below 2005 levels.

He said it didn’t include targets or expected emission reductions for 95% of the measures in it and that less than half had an implementation deadline or were expected to lower emissions.

Key mitigation measures had been delayed and those most critical for reducing emissions had not been identified or prioritized.

DeMarco also found the government’s emission and economic models were overly optimistic, unreliable and lacked transparency.

When the government updated its March 2022 report in December 2022, he noted, it actually moved further away from achieving the 2030 target, down to 34% compared to 2005 levels from 36.4%.

Despite these findings, the federal environment department, presided over by then-environment minister Steven Guilbault, bizarrely reported one month later on Dec. 7, 2023, in a mandated update of its emission plan that, “Canada remains firmly on track to meet our ambitious but achievable 2030 target” and “Canada is now projected to exceed Canada’s interim objective of 20% below 2005 levels by 2026.”

Those claims were absurd.

To meet the 2026 interim target based on the latest available government data, for example, Canada would have to shut down the equivalent of all annual emissions from Canada’s buildings sector by the end of this year.

A year later to the day, on Nov. 7, 2024, DeMarco again evaluated the Trudeau government’s progress on its 2030 emissions plan, noting it was still falling far short of its target of reducing emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030.

This time, DeMarco reported that when his audit examined 20 of the government’s 149 measures to reduce emissions administered by seven federal departments, only nine were on track to achieve their goals, nine were experiencing challenges and two faced significant barriers, including delays in meeting milestones.

Of 32 additional measures the government claimed would help to achieve the 2030 target, only seven were new, 22 were existing measures and three were enhancements to existing measures.

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This audit also found many government measures overlapped one another, with some funding the same projects or targeting the same emission reductions, leading to the possible double-counting of emission cuts.

DeMarco reported the computer modelling used to estimate emission cuts hadn’t been updated and some of the calculations were overly optimistic.

In addition, “recent decreases to projected 2030 emissions were not due to climate actions taken by governments, but were instead because of revisions to the data or methods used in modelling.”

(Indeed, the federal government reports Canada’s annual emissions two years after the fact and retroactively revises historic emissions in each new report. The government claims this is due to improved methods of calculating emissions but the effect is to make it even harder to ascertain where Canada truly stands on cutting emissions.)

This time Guilbault responded to DeMarco’s report on the same day, thanking him for it without addressing the substance of his findings and, again, absurdly claimed, “Canada remains on track to meet our 2026 goal under the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act.”

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A year later, on Dec. 12, 2024, Guilbault announced Canada’s emission target for 2035 would “aim to reduce emissions by 45% to 50% below 2005 levels … setting a responsible and ambitious target that maintains our path to a strong, net zero economy” by building on “Canada’s existing 2030 target, which aims to reduce emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels.”

Once again, this claim bore no resemblance to reality according to the government’s own data, which currently puts Canada’s emissions at a mere 8.5% below 2005 levels.

That was borne out by Environment Canada’s latest report on emissions released last month that says Canada is now moving further away from its 2030 target based on recent decisions by the Carney government.

Carney would be doing a service to Canadians by telling the environment ministry and all other government departments to start telling the truth about Canada’s emission levels, as opposed to the fantasy world in which they’ve existed up to now.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com