Trudeau halts climate change deal

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared outright victory Dec. 9 in his campaign to gain backing for a national “framework” agreement on climate change.

But getting there needed an 11th-hour concession from British Columbia and, despite Trudeau’s persistent claim that all participants endorsed the need for action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the summit of 10 provincial and three territorial premiers wrapped up with Saskatchewan and Manitoba - two Prairie provinces which relay almost exclusively on resource development to underpin their spending programs - refusing to sign on.

The plan sets a national price on carbon, starting at C$10 per metric ton in 2018, rising by C$10 a year to C$50 in 2022 that Trudeau said will be imposed on those governments that do not implement a matching carbon pricing regime.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has been the one unflinching holdout over the past year, which culminated in a brittle exchange between him and Trudeau.

“If there is a prime facie case for jobs to potentially be threatened in trade-exposed industries - and that’s what we have, in carbon-intense industries - then I am going to defend the interests of my province,” he said.

“We will be participants in the battle on climate change ... no one ought to mistake this for a lack of interest or despite to impact this issue. But, if it’s a carbon tax and it’s imposed federally, we’re not signing on.”

Trudeau: Concessions asked from all

“What animated all of us today - every single one of us on this stage - is a desire to do the right thing ... for future generations and have a protected environment,” Trudeau said.

But Wall scoffed at Trudeau’s plan to collect carbon taxes and return them to the provinces and territories to be spent on any programs, including advancing green energies.

He argued that would be too late for Saskatchewan’s oil, natural gas, potash and agriculture sectors, which would have lost their ability to attract investors and compete against their global rivals in the United States, Australia and Russia.

Wall noted that not only is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump opposed to carbon taxes, he wants to accelerate production of the United States’ oil resources that would undermine the competiveness of oil from Saskatchewan, which shares the Bakken formation with North Dakota and Montana.

Wall said the Trudeau government has failed to provide a detailed account of how Canada will meet its international 2030 commitment starting with a reduction of 9 million metric tons a year in 2022, despite Trudeau’s pledge of a year ago to have a greenhouse gas “target and a plan to achieve that target.”

He also brandished a federal Finance Department memo that said a carbon tax would “cascade through the economy and prices would increase most for goods that make intensive use of carbon-based energy.”

Wall said his government’s justice officials are formulating a legal challenge to any federally imposed carbon tax.

East-west fault line

She said some way must be found to achieve an equivalency, noting that the cap-and-trade systems in Ontario and Quebec range from C$12 to C$16 per metric ton, compared with British Columbia’s current C$30.

Clark said she signed on to the agreement only after the Canadian government committed to an independent assessment in 2020 to measure whether all provinces were being treated fairly.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Gwyn Morgan, the former chief executive officer of Encana, said that even if Canada’s 1.6 percent share of global emissions was eliminated it “would not save the planet from predicted global warming Armageddon.”

In the meantime, he said, Trudeau’s national carbon tax and provincial subsidy programs for green-power producers “impose a dead weight on an already struggling economy,” which Trump’s vow to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement would only compound.

For Canada to act independently of the U.S. in pricing carbon “would be a triumph of ideology over reason,” Morgan said.

- GARY PARK