OTTAWA—Buoyed by a new partnership to co-ordinate climate action with the United States, Canada’s environment minister says the two countries will push others to follow their lead and commit to slashing greenhouse gas emissions deeper and faster.
On the list of targets is China, the world’s largest emitter, as well as coal-heavy India and allies and trading partners such as Japan, Australia and Mexico, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Wednesday.
Wilkinson was speaking to reporters after an hour-long, virtual meeting with John Kerry, the former U.S. secretary of state who now serves as President Joe Biden’s international climate envoy.
The conversation followed Tuesday’s summit between Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with more than a dozen top cabinet members, which resulted in a new “partnership road map” outlining policies Canada and the U.S. pledged to work on together.
Climate action featured prominently on the list. The countries pledged to co-ordinate action to reduce emissions from vehicles, target methane leaks from oil and gas operations, and transmit clean electricity across the border.
They also pledged to hammer out more aggressive emissions targets and unveil them before Biden hosts a “climate leaders’
summit” on April 22.
That plan for stronger targets was the “primary” focus of his talk with Kerry, which provided a “welcome dose of climate optimism” after working with the Donald Trump administration, Wilkinson said. “The primary focus for Canada and the United States is, first of all, to enhance our own level of ambition, such that we can actually engage the international community on enhancing its level of ambition,” he said.
“We’re trying to work productively and constructively with countries to bring them into that conversation.”
Canada’s current target under the international Paris Agreement, set when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were in power, is to cut emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
But as the United Nations has found in reports on the perils of climate change, Wilkinson acknowledged that the sum of the world’s pledges under the Paris deal fall short of what’s required
to fulfil the agreement’s goal of restraining global warming to 1.5 C this century.
That makes stronger action all the more important, Wilkinson said, describing how the new alliance on climate measures with the U.S. will help Canada adopt more aggressive policies. He pointed to the possibility of stronger joint emissions standards for vehicles, which Trump watered down when he was president, as well as stricter methane regulations, better incentives for zero-emission vehicles, and the possibility of selling Canadian renewable electricity to the U.S.
All these actions and more — including the result of talks about climate action with provinces and territories — will inform emissions cuts that Canada can realistically make, Wilkinson said, suggesting that the new national target will fall in the range of 31per cent to 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
That’s the range of possibility outlined in the Liberal government’s updated climate plan that was released in December, a $15-billion blueprint centred on a steady increase in the federal carbon price from $40 per tonne of emissions later this year to $170 per tonne over the next nine years.
Environment Canada now projects that measures included in that plan will get Canada to 31 per cent below 2005 levels in 2030.
“We will be coming forward with a target that essentially fully examines all of those issues, and is as ambitious as we possibly can be, while being realistic with Canadians that it is achievable,” Wilkinson said.
Dan Woynillowicz, a climate policy consultant with Polaris Strategy in Vancouver, said the partnership with the U.S. could open the door for stronger actions to reduce emissions in Canada. He said it would be difficult for Canada to implement strict regulations for cleaner vehicles without co-operating with the U.S., given how Canada is a small market and has historically aligned rules on the sector with its neighbour.
“Economically, alignment will diminish the argument that climate action puts Canadian companies at a disadvantage with their American competitors,” Woynillowicz said by email Wednesday.
With renewed U.S. commitment to climate action, that argument has now been “flipped on its head,” said Isabelle Turcotte, director of federal policy at the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think tank.
“It is now an economic risk to your competitiveness to not take ambitious climate action,” she said.