Guilbeault: there’s no reason Saskatchewan should be able to continue using coal past 2020
Natasha Bulowski
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Canada’s National Observer
Former environment minister Steven Guilbeault says Ottawa needs to start enforcing federal law when provinces are out of line on climate change.
Guilbeault’s comment comes after a government report confirmed Canada is falling far short of its 2030 climate targets — and will only fall further behind thanks to a recently inked deal with Alberta.
To make progress on the targets, the federal government should keep federal regulations to clean up Canada’s electricity grid, make good on repeated (and so far unfulfilled) promises to strengthen industrial carbon pricing and start enforcing federal laws to ensure compliance, instead of making exceptions as it has with the aforementioned regulations, and revoke Alberta’s extension on regulations to curb methane emissions, Guilbeault said.
“We have a federal backstop that we should be willing to enforce if provinces aren’t willing to do what they’re supposed to,” Guilbeault said in a phone interview with Canada’s National Observer.
Guilbeault resigned from his cabinet post late last month after Alberta and Ottawa signed a deal to bring a pipeline to the coast, giving the oil industry a basket of wins in exchange for the province adopting an industrial carbon price — something courts have found Ottawa has the constitutional authority to impose.
To date, the federal government has been unwilling to step in when provinces fall out of step with its regulations, including when Saskatchewan paused its industrial carbon price in April.
“There’s no reason why we can’t do that. It’s in federal law. I don’t understand why we’re not doing it,” Guilbeault said.
At a recent committee meeting, Environment, Climate Change and Nature Minister Julie Dabrusin said she would “rather find solutions with the provinces” to have their own equivalent system, instead of imposing the federal backstop. Guilbeault disagrees with this approach and said the federal government should also be enforcing the Clean Electricity Regulations, which require all coal-fired power plants (except those outfitted with carbon capture technology) be shut down by 2030.
“There’s no reason that a province like Saskatchewan should say, ‘We want to continue using coal past 2030.’ We have a law that says that provinces and territories won’t be able to do that,” Guilbeault said. But Saskatchewan recently budgeted $900 million over four years to refurbish its coal plants for that purpose.
“We have to tell those who want to do that that, ‘actually, you can’t break the law,’ just like you can’t break criminal laws,” Guilbeault said.
“We have to be willing to enforce our environmental laws, just like we would enforce any other laws of the federal government.”
Canada and Saskatchewan signed an equivalency agreement last winter that exempts Saskatchewan from coal plant emissions regulations until the end of 2026, said Gregory Frame, a spokesperson for Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson, in an email to Canada’s National Observer.
The Ottawa-Alberta MOU promises to suspend the Clean Electricity Regulations in Alberta as long as the province includes electricity sector emissions in its provincial carbon pricing scheme, which is also being negotiated as part of the MOU.
Climate progress report slammed by opposition MPs
All the opposition parties — except for the Conservative Party of Canada, which did not respond to a request for comment — were scathing in their criticism of the federal government following the release of the progress report.
“The data from Canada’s GHG Emissions Reduction Plan is unequivocal and shows that, when it comes to fighting climate change, Canada has gone from being a poor student to a dropout, by abandoning almost all of its flagship measures,” Bloc Québécois environment and climate change critic Patrick Bonin said in a French press release responding to the report.
“Even though the oil and gas sector is still Canada’s most polluting industry, Mark Carney’s Liberals are developing it at full speed and approving new hydrocarbon projects. They are promising a new pipeline capable of transporting one million barrels per day and continue to pour billions of dollars a year into fossil fuel subsidies,” Bonin wrote. Steven Guilbeault’s resignation — on the same day the MOU was signed — confirms there is “no longer a shred of climate ambition” left in the federal government, Bonin said.
“This report is just another demonstration that this Liberal government is not serious about the climate crisis,” NDP MP and environment critic Alexandre Boulerice said in an emailed statement to Canada’s National Observer.
“We all know they will miss their targets for 2030 and 2035, but the way they announced it — late in the evening on a web site and with no press release — shows that even they are ashamed. The Carney government doesn’t give a damn about climate disasters and the impacts on future generations,” Boulerice said.
A lot is riding on the federal government’s negotiations with Alberta to hammer out an agreement on industrial carbon pricing, with a deadline of April 1, 2026.
“I don’t think that anything that Alberta pledged in the MOU is going to be delivered,” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview.
“What we’ve got right now is public relations blather and no plan. It’s very critical that we come up with an industrial strategy for the country to protect our economy that uncouples growth in the oil sands from our economic health.”
The fact the federal government is allowing Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia to continue using coal and Alberta to increase gas-fired generation is “suicidal,” she said.
Ottawa got promises of ‘things that may not happen’ from Alberta
Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute, worries giving Alberta these exemptions from climate policy will lead to “copycat demands” from other provinces, particularly on the Clean Electricity Regulations.
Guilbeault shares this concern: “If there’s a carve-out for Alberta, then there’ll be a carve-out for everyone else,” he said. That is precisely what happened when Atlantic provinces demanded — and got — a carve-out for heating oil from the federal consumer carbon tax. The tax was scrapped nationally within 18 months of that deal.
The MOU is concerning because it seems like the federal government gave up policies that were going quite well “in exchange for things that may not happen,” Smith said in a video interview with Canada’s National Observer.
“We’ve actually decreased emissions in the electricity system by 60 per cent [since 2000]. It’s just a huge success story [and] from our point of view, it doesn’t make any sense to monkey around with that,” Smith said.
Shortly after the MOU was signed, Alberta took “some huge steps backwards” and weakened its industrial pricing system by weakening the trading price of its carbon credits, he pointed out. This works against the federal government’s goal of strengthening industrial pricing to make up for the cancellation of other policies, like the consumer carbon price.
Phasing out coal-fired power generation by 2030 was actually an idea cooked up by the Harper government, Smith said, adding that it’s a “bad idea all around” — economics, human health and emissions — to spend $900 million refurbishing Saskatchewan’s coal plants.
The MOU also stated that Alberta will have until 2035 to meet Canada’s methane targets instead of the original 2030 timeline. Guilbeault said “there’s no reason” Alberta should need an extra five years to achieve the methane reduction targets. Modelling by the Pembina Institute shows this carve-out could result in an additional 53 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — or the same as the annual pollution from roughly half the cars on Canada’s roads — being released into the atmosphere.
“I was environment minister for four years — we looked at everything, there’s no measures we can put out there that will enable us to reduce 50 million tonnes …. unless we’re willing to put tens of billions of dollars on the table to compensate, which we’re not,” Guilbeault said.
There are examples across the country of federal, provincial and municipal governments reversing course on climate policy and it’s important that we start solving these problems right away, Smith said.
Guilbeault and May point out that Canada isn’t even on track to meet climate targets set by the last Conservative federal government.
“With the new approach I was afraid that we wouldn’t even be able to meet Harper’s targets — I guess my fears are being confirmed,” Guilbeault said. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper set an emissions target of 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Justin Trudeau then upped the ambition to a 40 to 45 per cent reduction. The federal government’s progress report, published late Wednesday, found Canada will only reduce emissions by 21 per cent under the current policy scenario by the end of the decade. Even when Environment and Climate Change Canada includes measures that have been announced but not yet implemented, the modelling only yields a 28 per cent reduction by 2030.
“Right now, we’re below the Harper targets, I think the logical thing to do would be to say, ‘Let’s keep all of the elements that were working from the previous plan and see where we can do more,’” Guilbeault said.
“And that can certainly include collaboration with provinces and MOUs, but not to do less, but to do more. Right now, it doesn’t appear that that’s what they’re doing.”
