The politics of climate change policy in Canada

Convincing Canadians of the need to make significant sacrifices in order to slow global warming was never going to be easy.

The obvious reason is given in this picture I took of my 2 oldest boys in front of our house in February of 2000:

This is no doubt why Stéphane Dion - the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and who grew up here in Quebec City - makes it a point to refer to the phenomenon as  'climate change', and not 'global warming.' It's hard to get us to worry about the possibility of being less cold in January, but climate change is something else altogether. Canadians don't like change.

The political problem is two-fold:

• Insofar as there are benefits to global warming, Canada will receive a disproportionally higher share of them than most countries: milder winters, longer growing seasons, etc.
• Insofar as there are costs to slowing global warming, Canada will likely pay a disproportionately higher share of them that most countries. Canada is big, cold, thinly-populated, and an important producer of petroleum: we're one of the worst offenders, along with the US and Australia.

So when the Kyoto protocol was being negociated, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government was faced with a tricky problem. In 1998, greenhouse gas emissions were already 27% above the Kyoto target, and had been growing by 1.7% a year since 1990: reversing that trend would have involved burning up significant amounts of political capital. On the other hand, it was very mindful of Canada's reputation for taking part in multinational agreements: there also would be a political cost to pay for not joining the international consensus. The Americans and the Australians faced similar choices, and they both decided not to sign the protocol. In those countries, the pro-Kyoto forces were too weak and/or not part of the ruling party's support base.

But the federal Liberals didn't have that luxury. They needed the political support of the pro-Kyoto constituency, but they weren't in a position to pay the political costs of complying with the protocol. Their solution to this dilemma was breathtaking in its effectiveness and its simplicity:

• Sign the treaty.
• Make no effort to comply with the protocols set out in the treaty.

The reasoning was no doubt very simple: the people running the government in 1998 were confident that they would not still be around to take responsibility for their actions when they missed the Kyoto deadlines in 2008-12. In the meantime, they could indulge themselves in bragging about their commitment to the environment, and scolding the Americans for their selfishness. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions were rising faster than they were in either the US or Australia, but since we'd signed the Kyoto treaty and they hadn't, we could still claim to be the good guys.

In his recent book Right Side Up, Paul Wells tells the story of the January 2006 election, and rips into the hypocrisy of this stance on page 186:

In Montreal, [Paul Martin] gave a blandly hortatory speech to the climate-change meeting, whose goal was to begin designing a sequel to the Kyoto accord on greenhouse gas emissions. He saved his punch for his opening statement at the news conference that followed. "To the reticent nations, including the United States, I'd say this: there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it."

It was a striking choice of words. A "conscience" is normally understood as a sense of one's own responsibilities. But Canada, which had signed and ratified Kyoto, had increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 24 per cent since 1990. The United States, which never ratified Kyoto, had increased its emissions by only 13 per cent. If the United States had been as profligate over the same period as Canada, it would have spat an extra 662 million tonnes of carbon products into the air in 2005. That's more than Britain's total emissions in 2003. The gap between Martin's remarks and the truth is as big as Britain. Usually when a politician utters a whopper, you can't actually give the whopper a name. But you can name this one. You can call it Britain. Say hello to Britain, the whopper.

But the brilliance of this plan cannot be overstated. The Liberals are no longer in power, and now they can amuse themselves by blaming the Conservatives for not defusing the time bomb they had set.

For their part, the Conservatives have their own reasons for actually doing something:

• They need the support of only one party to survive, and a climate change package would be a key part of a deal with any of the other three parties.
• The environment is also an issue for CPC voters; the Green Party is the second choice for one Conservative voter in three.

The Conservatives are unlikely to win an election on environmental issues, but they could lose one. They're going to want to get something done, if only so that it's still not an open issue in the next election.

Update: See the follow-up post "We can't get to Kyoto from here, and there's no point in pretending that we can."

Comments

[pangloss]

I've had one problem with comparisons of our performance relative to the USs under, the one Wells characterizes as a whopper, which I've been too lazy to completely validate. As part of Kyoto countries had to provide mountains of data to indicate how they maybe doing relative to their commitment to the treaty. At the time of the Montreal meeting we had except for a couple of years been increasing emissions, on average about 1.7% annually whereas the US was increasing at about 1.2% per annum. My problem is that a quick look at the data the 2 countries presented indicates that our increase came mainly from Alberta and Ontario and in these provinces, as best I can tell without pouring through all the details, from oil & gas production and making things. Both these categories seem to get exported lots and to our major trading partner the US. So when you have a look at the US summary data their increase seems to come from sectors other than what they categorize as industrial. To my simple mind what could have happened over the 14 year period from 1990 to 2004 was that we produced emissions for the US. It seems to me that Wells like lots of the other MSM (I haven't read his book) haven't made any real attempt to explain the problem to Canadians, independent of ones political allegiances. Since we seem to be a price taker if new standards are required by some level of gov't which imposes an additional cost on production of oil & gas or any manufacturing or other products we sell to our major trading partner who picks up the cost? Does it fall on the owner of the capital or is it labour? We'll see what Harper and Layton concoct, it could be pretty funny. The general simplistic reports in the MSM and Harper - they didn't do anything now we are stuck - are just dumb. However nothing I've seen yet from any of our glorious parties, the greens included, lay out the potential problems for a small trading economy like ours for the population nor take a look around at what maybe be being done in similar economies too ours. I suspect it will come down to us moaning as usual that once we know the choices they aren't necessarily too great.

[Bob Brown]

Well said.

I concur with this article.... specifically the parts about Liberal waffling and the conservatives getting it done. It is also interesting to note that "1 in 3 conservatives consider the green party to be their second choice". I would agree with this statement in so much that it illustrates that conservatives aren't just capitalists out to make a buck, they also have a social conscience.

[embutler]

too true... the US imports 1.8 trillion and exports 1 trillion...and all those co2 emissions are charged to other countries ,including canada..
show the US,you are made of a superior moral fiber and stop exporting..that'll teach the US..