The Conservatives won't dismiss a newly passed law requiring Canada to respect its emissions-cutting commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, but they're not about to put forward a new plan to tackle climate change either, Environment Minister John Baird said Monday.
The federal government will follow through with the "technical letter" of the Kyoto compliance bill, but the time for developing new plans is over, he said in an interview.
"We're not going to simply take another 180 days to come up with a new plan," Mr. Baird said following the launch of a multimillion-dollar project to transform a large swath of downtown industrial land into a park.
"We're implementing a plan today."
The Kyoto compliance law is a "weak piece of legislation" that doesn't give the government any new regulatory or spending powers, he said.
"We'll respect and won't be dismissive of an act that Parliament passed, we'll file the papers accordingly, but we've got a very significant plan that's part of a growing international consensus on reducing greenhouse gases."
The private member's bill, introduced by Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez, gives the government 60 days to prepare a climate plan with measures to ensure that Canada meets its obligation under the Kyoto treaty and 180 days to bring in regulations. Those obligations include a six per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012.
The government has taken measures to cut greenhouse emissions, but not by enough to meet the Kyoto target.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently touted his government's climate plan to G8 leaders, saying it will curb greenhouse gases by 20 per cent by 2020. But a number of studies have debunked the plan since Baird released it in April, saying it will fail to meet its own targets.
Following the bill's passage in the Senate last week, Mr. Harper said it would be constitutionally impossible for the government to comply with the Kyoto compliance law because it wasn't a money bill, yet would involve large expenditures.
It's comparable to being dispatched to the grocery store with a five-page shopping list and no money, Mr. Baird said Monday.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken, has ruled that the bill doesn't force the government to spend money, and Kyoto advocates say the Tories could meet the treaty's targets without spending federal money by introducing tough regulations or imposing a carbon tax.
It's unclear how Mr. Baird plans to follow through with the new law without altering the government's current plan, but one expert says it isn't possible.
"There's nothing in this so-called green plan that comes close to meeting the Kyoto targets," Errol Mendes, professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa, said in an interview from London, England.
For example, the Tories' plan calculates targets using a baseline of 2006 levels, instead of the Kyoto-mandated 1990 levels.
"So right off the bat, the very foundations of this so-called 'technical' response to the law is fundamentally in violation of that law," Mr. Mendes said.
If the government fails to produce a Kyoto plan within the prescribed 60-day period, they will be in violation of the law and could trigger a court challenge, he added.
Mr. Baird is "waving a red flag" in front of groups who will pursue the matter in court, said Liberal environment critic David McGuinty.
"That plays exactly into what they want here," he added from Ottawa. "They want an 'us and them.' They want a dividing line. They want a fault line called Kyoto."
As for the Liberals, they will examine all their options, he said.
