Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hearing difficulty hurting Canada’s environment
The waiting game
When he was younger, Max Fawcett wanted to make a mint in the markets. Now as the managing editor of Alberta Venture he gets to write about them. Close enough, right? He can be reached at mfawcett@albertaventure.com
by Max Fawcett
Even at the best of times Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems to have a hard time heeding the advice of experts. In fact, judging by the way his government handled the elimination of the mandatory long form portion of the census last fall, one wonders if he hasn’t developed some sort of allergy to informed opinion. But with the country in the throes of electoral foreplay, the likelihood of him yielding to the recommendations of an unelected body of non-partisan experts is even smaller.
That’s a shame, given the content of the report released today by the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy. The roundtable, an independent federal agency that advises the government on sustainable development and whose board members and chief executive officer were appointed by the Harper government, advises that Canada should stop waiting for the United States to act on emissions reduction and instead go it alone.
This would represent a significant departure for the Harper government, which has thus far defended its lethargic approach to tackling climate change by arguing that it makes economic sense to harmonize Canada’s climate change policy with that adopted by the United States. To do otherwise, he has argued, would unfairly punish and penalize large sectors of the Canadian economy, and harm Canada’s long-term economic prospects.
But the National Roundtable’s report indicates that waiting might be even more dangerous. “It will be more costly for Canada to reduce emissions than the United States, in part because the American industrial infrastructure and coal-fired power plants are older and will need replacing sooner.” In other words, Canada will need a head start if it wants to avoid falling hopelessly behind once the United States finally starts to move on climate change.
If it doesn’t, the report suggests, Canadian producers will end up paying the price. The report says that matching U.S. goals for emission reduction would require a higher carbon price in Canada, while matching a U.S. price would guarantee that Canada will fall short of the target to which both countries have committed, 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. In either case, waiting for the United States to settle on a policy framework will spell trouble for Canada.
The National Roundtable isn’t arguing that Canada should impose any draconian measures. Instead, it recommends a phased-in cap-and-trade system, one that would allow companies to buy credits on an international carbon market. This approach, it believes, would establish a ‘price collar’ that would limit the carbon price differentials between Canada and the United States. The cost? Just 0.1 per cent of annual GDP growth. “No single climate policy is risk free; realistically, each entails some cost,” the report says. “But if Canada desires to achieve its stated environmental goals of GHG emission reductions within a certain period, we will need to consider additional steps now, independent of U.S. actions and policy uncertainty.”
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