Greenhouse-gas emissions from Alberta's oil sands would be allowed to rise dramatically under a draft version of the government's long-anticipated climate-change plan obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The internal documents appear to underestimate significantly future oil-sands development as a way of producing more positive figures, said two environmentalists who analyzed the documents for The Globe.
The draft plan has many similarities with what was proposed in 2005 by the Liberal government and is clearly meant to show an improvement over that plan. While the rules for industry would take effect in 2010 -- two years later than the Liberal plan -- the specific reduction targets for each sector are deeper for most industrial sectors under the draft Conservative plan.
Environment Minister John Baird has promised to unveil regulations before the end of March that will force every sector of Canadian industry to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Mike Van Soelen, the director of communications for Mr. Baird, would not comment in detail on the documents. He noted, however, that the minister is still consulting with industry and that no final decisions have been made.
"A lot of work is going into this," he said. "I do note that the documents are dated Dec. 20 and a lot of work has been done [since then]. We have a new minister in place and we're working toward final decisions."
The Conservative government was criticized harshly last fall when it announced that its targets for at least the next 13 years would not require companies to reduce their overall emissions, but rather reduce their intensity. That means greenhouse-gas emissions from the production of each barrel of oil would decrease, but if a company is selling more barrels of oil each year -- as is widespread in the oil sands -- overall emissions would keep going up.
The leaked government documents, marked secret and dated Dec. 20, 2006, show that the government was still pursuing a plan at that time based on intensity targets until at least 2020.
Former environment commissioner Johanne Gelinas expressed doubt last year the Liberals' plan to regulate greenhouse gases would lead to total reductions, because it too was based on reducing the intensity of emissions by 15 per cent over four years ending in 2012.
The government has been guarding closely its plans for industry and the documents provide a first glimpse as to where they may be headed.
The plan contained in the documents is similar to what a Suncor official described last week as his understanding of the government plan.
They include charts and targets for each sector and compare the draft Conservative plan to the one proposed by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion in 2005 when he was environment minister.
The leaked government documents were analyzed for The Globe by two environmentalists: Louise Comeau of the Sage Foundation, who provided policy advice to the Liberal government for Mr. Dion's 2005 plan, and Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute, who recently released a proposal that would see oil sands companies comply with Kyoto by adding about $1 to the production cost of each barrel of oil.
"The federal government's proposal for industry regulation on greenhouse gases is a fraud," Ms. Comeau said. "Fabricating numbers so the current government's intensity approach looks better than the last government's intensity approach is no more acceptable today than it was two years ago. Intensity targets are dishonest. The time to regulate real reductions is now."
Rather than intensity-based targets, environmentalists want rules for industry to force their total levels of emissions to go down. Preferably, they would prefer the rules to use the standard of 1990 emission levels, which are used by all Kyoto signatories. Canada, for instance, agreed to reduce its emissions levels to 6 per cent below 1990 levels, but emissions are more than 30 per cent above that target.
