‘Pathetic, Painful’ Provincial Pushback: It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

Canada’s 2035 climate target is the Trudeau government’s final capitulation on national climate policy. With major trading partners stepping up, 2025 has to be the year we get back on track.

Dec 15, 2024

Sunnier Days: front, left to right: Premier Rachel Notley of Alberta, Christy Clark of British Columbia, Kathleen Wynne of Ontario, Philippe Couillard of Quebec. Back: AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Environment and Climate Minister Catherine McKenna, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, Conservative environment critic Ed Fast. Photo: Prime Minister’s Office

In Canada’s always-divided, always-divisive system of federal and provincial authority, it’s become an automatic reflex for any self-respecting politician to shift blame to some other order of government, rather than taking responsibility for getting anything done.

But it hasn’t always been that way on climate policy, and it didn’t have to be that way now.

There was a moment almost a decade ago, when the Trudeau government was new and the Paris climate summit was in full swing, when the country was close to a political consensus on confronting the crisis of our lifetimes.

“Canadians itching to see more co-operation from political leaders—or at the very least, more civility—may have reason to be optimistic,” The Huffington Post wrote on December 1, 2015. “At the COP21 climate change conference in Paris Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted the kind of photo that would have seemed improbable not so long ago.”

The story ran with an image from social media—back in the day when Twitter was a mostly civilized platform that you could name-check in polite company. It captured “the prime minister and two of his key cabinet ministers posing with the premiers of Canada's four most populous provinces, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, a key Conservative critic, the leader of the federal Green Party, and an NDP leader who, just last month, fiercely battled Trudeau on the campaign trail,” HuffPo wrote.

"To fight climate change, we're all in this together," Trudeau wrote at the time. "Canada is back."

Two points leapt out at me when I went back and found the photo this week: how exhausted Trudeau and newly-appointed Environment and Climate Minister Catherine McKenna didn’t look, and that then-Conservative environment critic Ed Fast was in the picture, literally and figuratively.

It all set the stage, painfully, pathetically, for the understatement of the year if not the decade: That was then. This is now.

Provinces Led, Ottawa Followed

Think back to a time when provincial governments were leading on climate change and Ottawa was playing catch-up.

We had just come through a decade of federal leadership that was actively hostile to emission reductions, climate solutions, and anyone who advocated for them, helmed by a prime minister whose first major overseas speech after winning the 2006 election called for Canada to position itself as a fossil energy superpower. With the climate crisis already deepening, many provincial governments stepped up, producing a patchwork of policies and action plans to fill the gap.

In contrast to a Stephen Harper government behaving like a fossil industry proxy on steroids, the policy development and momentum had to come from the provinces—never all of them, but once up on a time, most of them.

With the adoption of the Pan-Canadian Climate Framework in December, 2016, Team Trudeau could join 11 of 13 provincial and territorial premiers in a plan that aimed to incorporate and harmonize the steps many of them had already taken in carbon pricing, climate resilience, and a wide menu of carbon-cutting measures based largely on Alberta’s.

And then it all began to unravel. In Alberta and Ontario, in particular, changes in government brought in nouveaux régimes that were ostentatiously, opportunistically resistant to any federal action to reduce emissions, deliver clean electricity, protect the environment, or even to cut home heating costs by boosting energy efficiency. Provincial jurisdiction, backed by an endless flurry of often performative legal challenges, became a cudgel to delay action, bash away at federal credibility on climate, and wait out the clock until a more supportive federal government could win an election.

Unfortunately, the unrelenting assault from Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan took its toll on public opinion and patience. Ottawa didn’t help itself with a doomed effort to balance its climate plans with its support for an expanding fossil fuel industry, or with its perpetual inability to communicate on key policies like carbon pricing.

Meanwhile, as McKenna recounted this week in a post for the Toronto Star, the fossil industry was deploying its own version of an inside/outside strategy, proclaiming its support for the climate plan in public while undermining it behind the scenes. She wrote that:

It turns out the consensus was a mirage. Or, more accurately, a sham. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that our industry partners were working against us from the inside. After all, oil is their business, their bottom line. It was only after I left politics that I came to understand the truth: The oil sands sector and the politicians they sponsor aren’t just greenwashing a product. They are working to brainwash Canadians into buying a version of reality that no longer exists. One where oil will forever be the hero of the Canadian economy rather than an impediment to Canada’s future prosperity in a low carbon, climate-safe world.

And they won, at least for now. Oil and gas, particularly the oil sands sector, is the only part of the economy where emissions are rising dramatically, and set to continue in the same direction. And they’re getting away with it. For months, it’s been clear that the federal government is too beaten down to defend its own policies or deliver on the details of its largely performative program announcements. Which brings us to a policy announcement this week that should have been a source of pride, but is instead receiving international recognition as Canada’s shame.

Cutting Emissions by 1% Per Year

So much for “treating it like a damn emergency”.

Scarcely a month after Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco warned that Canada is on track to miss its 2030 emission reduction target of 40 to 45%, Ottawa released a 2035 goal of just 45 to 50%—less than its own Net-Zero Advisory Body (NZAB) recommended earlier in the year, and far short of the 57% that would be needed to stay on track to net-zero emissions by mid-century.

“We chose a target which we felt was both ambitious but achievable. I want to be as ambitious as Canada can possibly be, but the federal government can’t do it alone,” said Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault.

“Let’s be very honest with each other: some provinces are refusing to act on climate change, even recognize that climate change is a problem,” he added. “I’m hoping that over time, in the coming years, this will change and we will be in a different space. But right now, this is the political environment.”

When it comes to defining “achievable”, the often unspoken key ingredient is the fossil fuel industry itself—its hammerlock on the national climate conversation, and its dominant influence in a federal-provincial system that makes it virtually impossible for any one government to mandate effective action on its own. Not even in common sense areas like methane controls, where fossil companies can make money by embracing the most promising options for rapid emission reductions by 2030.

All of those factors make the 2035 target a loud, flashing warning sign that Ottawa has lost control of national climate policy. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“With stronger national emissions-cutting plans a key deliverable ahead of COP30 in Brazil, Canada has disappointed even its own official advisory body with the new 2035 target it announced on Thursday,” wrote UK-based Climate Home News in its influential international newsletter.

NZAB advisor Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, called the new target “incredibly disappointing”, noting that it amounts to a 1% emissions reduction per year for the crucial period between 2030 and 2035.

“This is frankly pathetic given the pace of pollution cuts we’re already seeing from our major trading partners—the U.S., UK, and EU decreased their emissions by 3%, 5%, and 8% respectively in 2023 alone,” she wrote this week. “It’s painful to see a government that has spent most of the last decade working hard to revolutionize Canadian climate policy put out a target that projects those policies will fail to do what they’re designed to.”

The Devil We Know

Calling out key provinces and the fossil fuel industry doesn’t absolve a federal government that seems set to give up on its most ambitious climate policies. But we’ve seen the playbook often enough by now that we should all know it by heart: Ottawa proposes some new measure, one or more provinces vilify it as a scurrilous attack on their autonomy and file their latest lawsuit, the industry lobbies to undercut the policy while throwing endless resources at public greenwashing campaigns, then the cycle repeats after the federal government compromises on its original plan.

We’ve seen it with the federal Impact Assessment Act, the federal cap on oil and gas emissions, the Clean Electricity Regulations, and more. It’s exhausting to watch. It must be exhausting to have to face head on, day after day. And it has successfully tied down a decade for climate action and solutions that we couldn’t afford to waste.

The bottom line is that Ottawa can’t realistically promise a better long-term target, or deliver on its current one, without confronting fossil fuel emissions. It can’t confront fossil fuel emissions without a public or political consensus that doesn’t exist. It won’t be able to build that consensus if its advisors aren’t even skilled or savvy enough to deliver the message that most Canadians earn back more than we pay out for the federal carbon tax. And in any case, they won’t be able to do any of those things now that they’ve run out of political runway before the next federal election.

Betraying Our Future

The monumental failure of climate policy on all levels is more than a capitulation by the federal government. It’s more than an industry protecting its own interests as it enters its sunset. More than provinces distracting the news cycle from real, pressing problems by stirring up anger against Ottawa. It even extends beyond the climate risks, impacts, and costs that Canadians are already experiencing.

With other countries moving at warp speed to embrace the clean energy transition, the last decade of delay, compromise, and defeat is a betrayal of our economic future, a sure ticket to continuing the income and affordability crisis that has become governments’ latest pretext for inaction. It leaves behind the workers and communities that are most heavily dependent on fossil fuel extraction and will be hurt first and worst by governments like Alberta’s that make political points by railing against the energy transition, rather than preparing to prosper from it.

That transition is picking up momentum, whether the oil and gas industry and its political allies like it or not.

The International Energy Agency has been projecting for more than a year that demand for all three fossil fuels will peak this decade, then decline from there.

Investors have got the memo, and are largely shifting their dollars to clean energy.

The European Union, China, and until now, the United States have been pouring policy support and billions of dollars into the energy options that will bring us into the future, rather than anchoring us in the past.

Renewable energy capacity has grown 415% globally and 1,817% in China since 2000, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency, compared to 322% in the U.S. and just 57% in Canada.

Looking back to that smiling, optimistic photo from the Paris conference in 2015, the other takeaway is that none of us could have imagined what the next decade would bring. Now we’re falling far behind other countries and regions—and the world isn’t waiting for us. A defining challenge for 2025 will be to build momentum for the practical, affordable options that can bend the curve on emissions, cut household energy bills, and begin building the trust and common ground we’ll need to get the energy transition done.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.