Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate chief is ready to detail how Canada will cut its carbon emissions while keeping the energy sector running and moving a vast, cold nation onto electric vehicles.
An emissions reduction plan due this month, as required by net-zero legislation enacted last year, will map out specific actions the government will take to meet its goal of cutting emissions 40 per cent to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
While Canada’s government has long struggled to meet its climate targets, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told Bloomberg News this plan will at last prove the goals are more than “pie in the sky” talk.
Existing policies, including phasing out coal-fired electricity generation and adopting a national carbon tax, already have the country on track to reduce emissions by 36 per cent, Guilbeault said. Getting across the 40 per cent threshold, however, will require “a lot of heavy lifting.”
It also won’t be cheap. The total spending — from both governments and businesses — needed over the next three decades to get Canada to net zero is $2 trillion (US$1.6 trillion), according to a Royal Bank of Canada report last fall, which it said translates to at least $60 billion a year in spending given current technologies.
Guilbeault declined to say how much spending he has requested of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in her upcoming budget. But he conceded more is needed.
“There’s no way we get there without investing year after year,” he said in an interview Thursday, adding the burden can’t only be put on the public purse. “There’s no government that can fund the transition on its own.”
ACTIVIST ROOTS
He pointed to the government’s upcoming issuance of $5 billion in green bonds, a first for the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, as one example of bringing the private sector on board.
Guilbeault, 51, a former Greenpeace activist who was once arrested for scaling the CN Tower in Toronto, said Canada can’t reach its targets without tackling emissions in its oil and gas sector. Energy production accounts for 10 per cent of the nation’s total economic output.
One major element