Big polluter compromise a two-edged sword

Call it a modest step toward more collaborative governance between Ottawa and Queen’s Park.

Over the weekend, the federal government “reluctantly” agreed to allow Ontario to use its own carbon-pricing for big industrial polluters. It is significant in that this could signal a greater degree of co-operation between the province and Ottawa on environmental standards, an area that has been the subject of considerable partisan friction between the Ford and Trudeau governments.

Ottawa’s decision is a de-escalation in the jurisdictional fight over the Liberal government’s national carbon pricing law. If it leads to a more collaborative approach, that will be a good thing. But it’s important to understand what it is, and what it is not.

It does not mean that the legal jurisdictional challenge being pursued by Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan is going away. That challenge arrives in Canada’s Supreme Court Tuesday, to be heard over two days with a decision to follow. The decision will determine whether the federal government has the jurisdictional power to levy a carbon tax. Two lower courts have already ruled Ottawa has that right, with one ruling it does not.

This is about another aspect of environmental policy. Ottawa doesn’t like Ontario’s plan for polluting heavy industry, mostly because it is to be phased in while Ottawa’s version of the plan would come into play as soon as implemented. But rather than let good be the enemy of perfect, Ottawa wisely decided to support Ontario’s plan, which should make the province more congenial in future discussions.

However, while this is positive from a political perspective, it’s less so from a hard environmental one. Because it is phased in, the provincial plan won’t reduce carbon emissions at the same rate or amount as the federal version would have. That is not good.

Environmentalists and everyone else who wants to see measurable action to fight climate change might wonder why the government is being politically expedient over environmentally assertive. But it’s worth noting that federal sources say Ontario’s plan does meet the legal standard even if it’s not as aggressive as the federal preference, so had Ontario said no we could have been facing another legal fight with all that entails. So, on balance, this seems a reasonable compromise.

But what does it signal, if anything, about Ottawa’s overall strategy on climate change? It now looks as if the government’s Throne speech this week will not include a green vision to the extent originally planned. With the pandemic getting worse by the day, the government instead is expected to focus on fighting COVID-19, funding economic recovery, some sort of national child-care strategy and steps toward some sort of pharmacare plan.

The belief among public policy mandarins, apparently, is that Canadians are so preoccupied with the pandemic at this point they don’t have the bandwidth for a broad new environmental strategy that is bound to have an impact on consumers. Perhaps.

But it is also true that Canadians don’t live in a vacuum. We see the impact of climate change all around us, whether in historically destructive wildfires, flooding, drought or the death toll among elephants dying by the hundreds in Botswana after consuming toxic green algae, which is becoming more pervasive due to climate change.

And seeing all this, more and more Canadians want a more aggressive approach to fighting climate change. While this does not equal Ottawa going soft on that commitment, it wouldn’t be good if it is the start of a softening trend.

Canada has failed on every single emission target reduction to date. That must change, and soon.