Begin with charity, end with disappointment.
A national climate-change strategy for Canada will always be difficult to conceive. Provinces control natural resources. The country is, and always will be, a huge energy consumer and a big producer. Distances are large. The climate is extreme.
No government, Liberal or Conservative, has successfully developed a national strategy. The result is that Canada is a climate-change laggard. Federal governments since Jean Chrétien's have set greenhouse gas emission targets and failed to meet them.
Setting targets is easy; meeting them is tough. It will always be so.
Now, along comes Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau with a plan for curbing emissions through another national strategy. Well, sort of national. On paper, the policy will be hard to implement (the charity), and it will likely be doomed to fail (the disappointment).
At first blush, the policy sounds good. We need a medicare approach to fight climate change, Mr. Trudeau recently told the Petroleum Club in Calgary – and don't all Canadians love their medicare? The federal government and the provinces should work together.
Mr. Trudeau said Ottawa would establish "emission reduction targets," a "national standard" in partnership with provinces and territories. A price will be placed on carbon emissions. And Ottawa will provide "targeted federal funding" for the provinces to achieve their goals. Provinces can do their own thing to meet the targets. Just like medicare.
Except that medicare is not a national program. There are 10 provincial health-care systems. The Canada Health Act, to which Mr. Trudeau referred, should not be conflated with medicare. It sets out principles but has no enforcement mechanisms, except for penalties against extra billing. Medicare is a national icon without Ottawa having much to do with health-care delivery or standards enforcement.
As for providing "targeted federal funding," Ottawa doesn't do that either. It sends a yearly cheque of about $32-billion to provinces and they, not Ottawa, decide how it is spent. No strings attached. No federal requirements.
If Mr. Trudeau wants to use the medicare metaphor to explain how Ottawa would produce a national greenhouse-gas reduction strategy stitched together from very different provincial plans, he should study medicare again – not as an icon, but how it works (or doesn't) in practice.
For business, the Trudeau plan would be nightmarishly complicated. Every province doing its own thing would mean different regimes and rules in every province. A per-tonne tax here; a regulation there; a cap-and-trade somewhere else; an intensity-based tax over there. And while Mr. Trudeau wants to slow down GHGs, he asserts that "getting our resources to market is a priority for Canada."
Mr. Trudeau wants each province to have a target so that Canada will have a cumulative target. To take one example, though, Alberta already has a provincial GHG reduction target. Alas, as Alberta's Auditor-General has shown, the target will be missed by something like 90 per cent.
So Mr. Trudeau has yet to explain how he would compel provinces to meet their targets, assuming that he could negotiate deals with each of them. Since Mr. Trudeau isn't proposing to give them any money, except for "targeted" federal funding to meet their goals, what would he do if they failed? Withdraw all or some of the funds?
Mr. Trudeau's idea represents a kind of lowest-common-denominator federalism, a national goal reached through one-off deals with each province, not backed up by credible federal power or money. Remember, the provinces control natural resources and they guard that jurisdiction jealously. Moreover, their control is constitutionally enshrined.
If they act on this plan the way they do on medicare, they will say to Mr. Trudeau: Just give us the cash and we'll do the rest. To which he might reply: But the money has to be targeted. And the premiers will say, perhaps politely: Get lost.
Mr. Trudeau is desperate to avoid using the words or promoting the idea of a "carbon tax," remembering what Prime Minister Stephen Harper's attack machine did to a previous Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion, who proposed one.
Instead, Mr. Trudeau speaks of a "carbon price" that would be different across the country, according to his policy. Which isn't exactly national leadership.