Watchdog: Canada needs “massive” effort on Kyoto

The country’s chief environmental watchdog, Johanne Gélinas, says Canada must exert a “massive scale of effort” if the country is to achieve the greenhouse gas emission targets that the federal government set when it signed the Kyoto Accord in 1998.

“It’s everyone’s responsibility,” Gélinas said in Iqaluit this past Sunday.

She made the remarks during a talk given to a mostly non-Inuit audience gathered at Iqaluit’s Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, part of a touring road show aimed at explaining her 2006 report to the public.

That report, issued this past September, is a devastating exposé of the federal government’s failure to meet its Kyoto Accord commitments.

Covering the period when the Liberals were in power, her report found the Liberal government that signed the Kyoto deal failed to keep its promises on almost all fronts.

In 1997, when the government of Jean Chrétien, the former prime minister, decided to adopt the Kyoto Accord, they agreed to lower Canada’s emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming to six per cent below their 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

Instead, Canada’s emissions rose at a higher rate than most other industrialized countries.

By 2004, Canada’s booming economy pumped out 758 million tonnes of greenhouse gases at a rate 26.6 per cent higher than in 1990, when the country produced only 599 million tonnes.

Under the federal government’s Kyoto promises, Canada should be aiming for total emissions of only 563 million tonnes, which is six per cent less than what we produced in 1990.

All this means that in 2004, Canada’s “Kyoto gap” stood 34.6 per cent higher than the promised target. As that gap widens, Canada would have to reduce its emissions by as much as 270 million tonnes a year or more to comply with the Kyoto Accord.

In her report, Gélinas found that in the period following its signing of the Kyoto Accord in 1998, the federal government’s failures include:

• No one in charge – though Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada have played lead roles in co-ordinating the federal government’s climate change efforts, there is still no system for ensuring the government is accountable for meeting its targets.

• No effective strategy for reducing transportation emissions, especially from cars and light trucks – emissions from these vehicles have risen rapidly, accounting for nearly half of all emissions in the transportation sector, but Ottawa’s voluntary agreements with the auto industry are unlikely to work.

• Adaptation – Gélinas found there is no federal strategy to cope with the effects of climate change, such as melting permafrost in the Arctic, droughts on the prairies, and more intense heat waves.

• Oil and gas consumption – although the production and consumption of energy produces 80 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, programs under Natural Resources Canada have unclear targets, and it’s difficult to tell whether they’re working.

• Oil and gas extraction – Gélinas said there is no credible plan to reduce emissions produced by oil and gas extraction; extraction activity within the Alberta tar sands now produces 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, a figure expected to rise to 70 million tonnes by 2015.

When an Iqaluit man asked Gélinas if Canada’s Kyoto’s targets were naive, given the country’s resource-based economy, she responded by saying that as an auditor, she’s not responsible for judging political decisions made by governments.

But she did say that even the new Tory government has not withdrawn from the Kyoto treaty, and that as long as those targets stand, they’re the targets she will use to measure Ottawa’s performance.

“If the Kyoto target is unrealistic, then the government should set a new target and come up with a plan for how to get us there,” Gélinas said.

She did say she found some successes within some federal government programs, especially a scheme called Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which hands out money to entrepreneurs developing green technologies.

Gélinas, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, works within the Office of the Auditor General of Canada.

Her job is to act as a watch dog over the federal government’s environmental and sustainable development programs and to identify environmental liabilities.