Environment Canada overestimated by 10 times the amount of emissions reductions that result from government measures when it reported last year on its efforts to meet this country’s obligations under the Kyoto protocol.
What is more, although Ottawa started handing over the first installments of a five-year $1.5-billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust fund to the provinces in 2008, the federal government cannot monitor them or verify whether they are being spent for the intended purpose.
Those findings are in the fourth instalment of an annual report on the Kyoto Protocol that Environment Canada completed last month.
“When you compare this year’s plan and last year’s plan, you see, as recently as last year, the government was exaggerating tenfold the emissions reductions that would be achieved by its policies in 2010,” Matthew Bramley, the director of climate change for the Pembina Institute, said in an interview on Thursday.
“It really is an admission on the part of the federal government that it is neither implementing nor currently planning to implement any policies to substantially reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas pollution.”
The report called the Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act is a requirement of a Liberal private-member’s bill that was passed despite Conservative objections in 2007.
Unlike other environment publications, the new report is not readily available on the federal department’s website. Instead, anyone looking for it must click on a link, then click on a second link, enter an e-mail address and wait for it to be forwarded.
The 2009 report projected that government measures would reduce carbon emissions in 2010 by 52 megatonnes. But the 2010 report projects this year’s decrease to be just five megatonnes.
The government also admits for the first time in the 2010 report that the federal Environment Commissioner was right when he said last year that Ottawa may never know whether the large sums of money being handed to the provinces to fight climate change are being spent for that purpose.
And this year’s report says that the $1-billion over five years that the government promised last year to spend as part of its Green Infrastructure Fund is “not expected to result in quantifiable reductions [in emissions] by 2012.”
When Environment Minister Jim Prentice was asked for his opinion about the new report, his spokesman, Frederic Baril, said in an e-mail: “While there is still work to be done, improvements in our emissions levels strengthen this government's commitment to continue tackling climate change and reduce Canada's greenhouse gas.”
In its 2007 Turning the Corner plan for greenhouse-gas reduction, the government promised to set targets for big industry by this year. That has not happened, and Mr. Prentice has said Canada will instead release its regulations on carbon emissions on a timetable that matches that of the United States.
Linda Duncan, the environment critic for the NDP, said the new report shows that “not only are they backsliding on the minimal commitments in Turning the Corner, they have now scaled back by a factor of 10 from what they said they’d do last year.”
