OTTAWA — The federal government is failing to adequately support more than 170,000 fossil fuel workers whose livelihoods are at risk in the global shift to a low-carbon economy, according to a new report from Canada’s independent environment commissioner.
The conclusion was part of a series of audits tabled in Parliament on Tuesday that poked holes in the Liberal government’s climate policies. Taken together, the reports criticized the government’s commitment to helping fossil fuel workers weather the transition to green energy, questioned the fairness of Canada’s carbon pricing regime, and cast doubt on Ottawa’s claim that it can significantly slash greenhouse gas pollution through its plan to promote hydrogen fuel.
“The climate change clock never stops ticking,” said environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco, who underscored Tuesday that Canada is the “worst” performer in the G7 on emissions reduction in the past 30 years.
“We don’t have a second chance to do a lot of these things,” he said. “Our children are depending on us to get this right, not just to find out later why it went wrong.”
Speaking outside of the House of Commons, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault welcomed DeMarco’s reports and agreed broadly with his recommendations. He said the government is plowing ahead with strategies to support workers and is already keen to improve Canada’s carbon pricing regime, the government’s marquee climate policy.
“Our plan is working, we’re tackling pollution, and (carbon) pricing is one of the many elements that we’re doing to ensure that large emitters are doing their fair share,” Guilbeault said.
In the reports, DeMarco zeroed in on the government’s unfulfilled pledge from 2019 to pass a “Just Transition Act” to support fossil fuel workers in the shift to green energy. He noted the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Canada signed, also includes provisions to support workers with this transition that is deemed necessary — and urgent — to prevent the worst extremes of climate change this century.
“It’s seven years since they’ve had notice that they had to work on this. It’s disappointing to see how slowly they’ve been working,” DeMarco said, comparing the risks facing Canada’s roughly 170,000 fossil fuel workers to the 1993 cod fishery collapse in the Atlantic. Thirty thousand people lost their jobs when the stock of cod in Atlantic Canada collapsed and the government imposed a fishing moratorium, accordingly to the province of Newfoundland, and DeMarco said Tuesday that Ottawa ignored a subsequent recommendation to prepare for similar economic shifts in the future.
The government remains committed to the Just Transition Act, and an official from Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s office said Tuesday that it hopes to introduce the bill in Parliament before the end of the year.
In a recent interview with the Star, federal Labor Minister Seamus O’Regan said he dislikes the phrase “just transition” because “it causes workers a great deal of anxiety” and implies there is “some major plot here to… upend the entire oil industry.”
He also disputed comparisons to the cod fishery, stating “in that instance, the fish were gone; in this instance, the oil isn’t,” and pointed to the government’s new tax credit to encourage companies to spend money on new technology that Ottawa hopes will capture and store emissions from the production of oil and gas.
Another report tabled Tuesday concluded Canada’s carbon price on consumers is more stringent than the system designed for heavy industries like cement, fertilizer, and oil and gas production. That’s because the industrial system only places the carbon price on a portion of a factory’s emissions.
The report said the current industrial carbon price is so “weak” as to potentially undermine the “polluter pays” principle that calls on those responsible for emissions to cover their cost.
The report also concluded groups like Indigenous communities and small businesses also bear disproportionately high costs from carbon pricing, for reasons that include vulnerable individuals who don’t receive carbon price rebates through annual income tax returns, as well as slow rollout of money raised through the tax that is meant to help businesses and other groups reduce their energy costs.
“It’s not fair for everyday Canadians to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden,” DeMarco said Tuesday.
Guilbeault said the government is working to address the impact of carbon pricing on Indigenous communities and is preparing an “equivalency agreement” to ensure the costs of carbon pricing are more comparable across the country.
As it stands, the emissions covered by pricing vary from just 54 per cent in Prince Edward Island to 84 per cent in Ontario and 87 per cent in Nova Scotia, according to Tuesday’s report.
A third report slammed the government for using “unrealistic assumptions” to project that its strategy to promote hydrogen energy, which could help replace fossil fuels in transportation and heavy industry, could represent 15 per cent of Canada’s emissions reductions by 2030. DeMarco said the government calculated this with questionable assumptions, such as the “overly ambitious” uptake of new technologies and “unrealistically” low electricity costs.
The government responded Tuesday with a pledge to draft a new framework to more consistently forecast how policies could reduce emissions.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be a registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)