Twenty Years of Failure? The History of Canada’s Climate Change Policy
Why Canada has failed to meet its past climate targets, and why there’s still hope
On December 11, 2020, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government released its plan to meet or exceed Canada’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target - a 30% reduction to 2005 emission levels.
The plan includes $15 billion in new climate spending over 10 years and a gradual increase in the federal carbon tax - currently in effect in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, provinces without their own carbon tax - from $30 per ton to $170 per ton by 2030.
The new strategy comes just weeks after the government introduced the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, a plan - or rather a plan to make a climate change plan - that would force the federal government to set five-year binding emissions targets from 2030-2050, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
The bill and last week’s strategy are reminders that Canada has failed to meet every climate change target it has set.
As this chart from the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy shows, between 1988 and 2010, the Canadian government set and failed to meet eight emissions reduction targets.
While Canada’s first target was set in 1988, climate change policy really came to prominence in the national conversation with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government ratified the agreement in 2002 and set a national target of a 6% reduction to 1990 emissions by 2012, but failed to bring in the necessary policy to meet the target.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which came to power in 2006, was ideologically opposed to the agreement and argued that, since major emitters like the United States and China were not part of the protocol, Canada would only damage its economy by meeting the targets. The Conservative government formally pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2011.
The current 30% reduction by 2030 target was set by Harper in May 2015. It was widely criticized as not enough by Justin Trudeau during the 2015 election, but he has yet, after five years in government, to set a new target. With Trudeau’s new strategy, the government forecasts that Canada will reduce emissions by 32% of 2005 levels by 2030.
As the government moves ahead, it’s worth considering why Canada has continuously failed to meet its past emissions targets.
The first thing to note is that transitioning to a low-carbon economy isn’t the first large scale restructuring of the Canadian economy and society in our nation’s history.
One of the founding goals of Canadian confederation in 1867 was John A. Macdonald’s national policy - a plan to transform individual provincial and territorial economies into a national economy by protecting central Canadian industry with high tariffs, building a transcontinental railway, and settling western Canada.
The national policy was a long-term endeavor. Although it wasn’t formally introduced until 1878, measures to develop a national economy began right after confederation. Canada purchased Rupert’s Land in 1869, bringing much of the northwest into the nation, signed treaties with Indigenous nations in the west, and the Macdonald government tried to build a transcontinental railway, before the Pacific Scandal ended Macdonald’s first term as prime minister in 1873.
Following Macdonald’s return to power in 1878, the Canadian Pacific Railway was built between 1878 and 1885. Large scale western settlement would wait until the early 1900s, and the nation didn’t see sustained economic growth before the Wilfrid Laurier government (1896-1911).
Another large-scale restructuring of Canadian society and economy was the introduction of the welfare state during and after the Second World War. After enduring ten years of suffering during the Great Depression and another six years of war, Canadians readily adopted the idea that the government should maintain a basic standard of living for all Canadians.
The first welfare state policies were introduced by the Mackenzie King government during the war, unemployment insurance in 1940 and a family allowance program in 1944. Other programs would have to wait until the 1960s, the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and national universal healthcare in 1968.
Like climate change, the national policy and the welfare state raised questions for federal/provincial relations. The national policy has been criticized for creating regional divisions between industrial Ontario and Quebec and hinterlands in western and eastern Canada - a factor in the current climate change debate.
The welfare state required a restructuring of federal/provincial relations because of the high costs of healthcare, education, and welfare programs. The Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, or the Rowell-Sirois Commission, was organized in 1937 to review the financial relationship between the provincial and federal governments.
The commission’s 1940 report recommended that the federal government take over the collection of all income taxes in exchange for transfer payments to the provinces to pay for social programs. The major recommendations of the report were never implemented, except for the federal government taking over the unemployment insurance system, but the commission was the beginning of today’s equalization payment system. Provincial governments maintained control of healthcare, education, and, importantly for climate change, energy and resource management.
The modern roots of the fight between the federal government and the provinces on climate policy lay in the 1980-1985 National Energy Program (NEP).
The NEP was a plan introduced by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1980 to essentially Canadianize the oil industry. The government argued that all Canadians should benefit from Canada’s oil industry, and so proposed to create a “made-in-Canada” oil price that would be lower than the world price, increase taxes on oil and gas company profits, and see that 50% of oil and gas companies working in Canada be Canadian owned by 1990.
While the plan was initially popular, oil producing provinces like Alberta were outraged. They argued that the NEP amounted to a government takeover of the oil industry and an unfair wealth transfer from the West to Central Canada, as western oil producers would be forced to sell their product below world prices and pay higher taxes to Ottawa.
In 1984, the newly elected Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney canceled the NEP, but the damage was already done. Suspicions that the federal government’s energy and climate change policies are aimed at the interests of central Canadian elites, and against western interests, remains a powerful barrier to developing national climate change policy.
Also important to the roots of climate change policy in Canada and internationally was the efforts to protect the ozone layer in the 1980s. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, signed in 1985, and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, signed in 1987, established an international protocol to reduce the production of ozone depleting substances.
The agreements have been described as among the most successful international treaties ever signed, with all 197 United Nations members signatories and significant progress on restoring the ozone layer made. The Montreal Protocol served as a model for the Kyoto Protocol and international climate change action, but unlike modern climate change policies, it set no legally binding reduction targets to ozone depleting substances, making the issue less politically contentious.
Closer to home, a second model for international climate change action is the issue of acid rain. In 1991, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President George H.W. Bush signed the United States-Canada Air Quality Agreement, also known as the Acid Rain Treaty, which pledged to reduce the production of emissions that cause acid rain on both sides of the border. Like the ozone layer agreements, the treaty has been largely successful at reducing the environmental damage done by acid rain.
Addressing climate change is a much larger issue and potentially more economically costly than ozone depleting substances or acid rain, but both issues continue to be presented as evidence that international emissions reduction policies can work.
So why has Canada failed to meet its past emissions targets? Because transforming Canadian society to a low-carbon economy is a complex, long term issue.
Past policies - the national policy and the introduction of the welfare state - took decades. The roots of the national policy were laid at confederation in 1867, but the Canadian economy didn’t full see the results until the early 1900s. The origins of the welfare state go back at least to the Great Depression, weren’t fully realized until the 1960s, and continue even today with the pharmacare debate. They created regional divides that needed to be overcome. New Technologies had to be developed. Canadian society needed time to adjust to dramatic change.
Twenty years since the Kyoto Protocol may seem like a long time, then, but history tells us it’s not.
While Canada has failed to meet its emissions reduction targets, substantial progress has been made. Many provinces and the federal government have developed carbon tax schemes. New green technologies continued to be developed. And, importantly, polls show that Canadian public opinion is increasingly behind fighting climate change.
A poll shortly after the 2019 federal election showed that 67% of Canadians wanted the re-elected Liberal government to fulfill or exceed its climate change promises. A December 11, 2020 poll by Clean Energy Canada and Abacus Data showed that 83% of respondents wanted Canada to be see as a country “determined to help combat climate change.”
The history of fundamental change in Canada, and the sporadic efforts to develop meaningful climate change policy, demonstrate that we don’t necessarily need a long-term plan, carried out exactly from start to finish. As long as governments have wide public buy-in and long-term commitment, it is possible to restructure the Canadian economy and Canadian society.
This is good news for those Canadians who want Canada’s climate policies to succeed.
Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to see more and follow me on Twitter for updates on the newsletter.