The Canadian Press
Bruce Cheadle
OTTAWA—Canada’s premiers huddled by teleconference call yesterday and agreed that everyone not facing an election campaign will attend December’s climate change summit in Paris with prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau, The Canadian Press has learned.
Monday’s surprising Liberal majority has cleared the path for an invigorated Canadian presence at the United Nations climate conference, known as COP21, that begins Nov. 30.
Trudeau, who was not part of the premiers’ conference call, promised to invite the provincial leaders to Paris if elected, recognizing the leading role provinces have taken on the climate policy front over the past decade.
The Liberal leader also said he would consult his provincial counterparts before the summit, but it was not clear yesterday that a full first ministers’ meeting is feasible—or even necessary—in the 40 days remaining.
The international community is struggling to negotiate post 2020 targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, following the last major summit that resulted in 2009’s Copenhagen Accord.
In his first post-election press conference Tuesday, Trudeau said he’d already “spoken with a number of premiers and talked about our interest and engagement in regards to attending Paris together.”
“I will be engaging with the premiers in the coming weeks to establish a strong position for Canada so that people know that Canada’s years of being a less-than-enthusiastic actor on the climate change file are behind us,” he vowed.
The defeated Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been criticized internationally for years as a climate policy laggard, but did put forward an aggressive target in May for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
However, Canada currently is not close to meeting its previous Copenhagen commitment of slashing emissions 17 percent by 2020.
And most of the reductions that have occurred came about either as a result of provincial measures or the global economic downturn of 2008-09.
“The Harper 2020 target is gone,” environmental economist Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University said in an interview.
“He did nothing, it’s too expensive to achieve. Trudeau can easily say that,” Jaccard noted.
“He can start talking about 2030.”
The Liberal election platform committed to supporting provincial measures, “including their own carbon pricing policies,” but did not provide longer-term targets.
It also promised to hold a full first ministers’ meeting within 90 days of the Paris summit to develop “a framework to combat climate change.”
The Harper government attacked any talk of carbon pricing for years as a job-killing tax on everything, but it leaves office amid what appears to be a global movement toward putting a price on carbon pollution.
But there clearly are some reservations remaining among Canada’s premiers.
“We want to make sure that whatever Canada is committing to doesn’t kneecap our economy in the West,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said this week.
“We think what we’ve seen so far from Mr. Trudeau, there are not a lot of details, but so far his commitment that each province would be able to reach the national [emissions] targets on their own, using their own sort of equivalency, that’s positive,” he remarked.
“But I think the details are important—we want to protect Saskatchewan’s interests,” Wall stressed.
Quebec already has an active cap-and-trade market with California that Ontario recently agreed to join, and B.C. has had a provincial carbon tax for years.
