Bill C-12 (Historical)

Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act

An Act respecting transparency and accountability in Canada's efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050

This enactment requires that national targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada be set, with the objective of attaining net-zero emissions by 2050. The targets are to be set by the Minister of the Environment for 2030, 2035, 2040 and 2045.
In order to promote transparency and accountability in relation to meeting those targets, the enactment also
(a) requires that an emissions reduction plan, a progress report and an assessment report with respect to each target be tabled in each House of Parliament;
(b) provides for public participation;
(c) establishes an advisory body to provide the Minister of the Environment with advice with respect to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and matters that are referred to it by the Minister;
(d) requires the Minister of Finance to prepare an annual report respecting key measures that the federal public administration has taken to manage its financial risks and opportunities related to climate change;
(e) requires the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to, at least once every five years, examine and report on the Government of Canada’s implementation of measures aimed at mitigating climate change; and
(f) provides for a comprehensive review of the Act five years after its coming into force.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-12, An Act respecting transparency and accountability in Canada's efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050, as reported (with amendments) from the committee.

Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Anthony Rota]

There are four motions in amendment standing on the Notice Paper for the report stage of Bill C-12.

Motions Nos. 1 to 4 will be grouped for debate and voted upon according to the voting pattern available at the table.

Motions in amendment

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, Minister of Environment and Climate Change]

moved:

That Bill C-12, in Clause 7, be amended by replacing subclause (4) with the following:

(4) The Minister must set the national greenhouse gas emissions target

(a) for the 2035 milestone year, no later than December 1, 2024;

(b) for the 2040 milestone year, no later than December 1, 2029; and

(c) for the 2045 milestone year, no later than December 1, 2034.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

moved:

That Bill C-12, in Clause 22, be amended by replacing line 32 on page 12 to line 9 on page 13 with the following:

“(2) The Minister must make the annual report available to the public within 30 days after receiving it and then, within 120 days after receiving the report, the Minister must publicly respond to the advice that the advisory body includes in it with respect to the matters referred to in paragraphs 20(1)(a) to (c), including any national greenhouse gas emissions target that is recommended by the advisory body if the Minister has set a target that is different from it.”

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, Minister of Environment and Climate Change]

moved:

That Bill C-12, in Clause 22, be amended by replacing subsection (2) with the following:

(2) The Minister must make the annual report available to the public within 30 days of receiving it and then, within 120 days of receiving that report, the Minister must publicly respond to the advice that the advisory body includes in it with respect to matters referred in paragraphs 20(1)(a) to (c), including any national greenhouse gas emissions target that is recommended by the advisory body if the Minister has set a target that is different from it.

That Bill C-12 be amended by replacing, in the French version, Clause 27.1 with the following:

27.1 Cinq ans après la date d’entrée en vigueur de la présente loi, un examen approfondi de ses dispositions et de son application est fait par un comité soit du Sénat, soit de la Chambre des communes, soit mixte, que le Sénat, la Chambre des communes ou les deux chambres, selon le cas, désignent ou constituent à cette fin.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House again today to speak in support of Bill C-12. We are having this discussion at a time when Canada is warming at twice the global rate and the regions in our north are warming at three times the global rate. Meanwhile, Canada is a top-10 emitter of greenhouse emissions on an absolute basis and is firmly entrenched as a top-three contributor to emissions on a per capita basis.

We have signed on to agreements like Kyoto and Copenhagen and made commitments to lower our GHG emissions, but never followed through with the detailed measures that would be needed to meet them. Bill C-12 would change that by requiring transparency in the policies the federal government would bring in to mitigate climate change, as well as hold us accountable to meeting them. Bill C-12 would ensure that Canada follows through on our strengthened 2030 target of 40% to 45% below 2005 levels of emissions that were announced at the Leaders Summit on Climate, held on Earth Day earlier this year.

Bill C-12 would ensure that Canada is on a path to realize net-zero emissions by 2050 and that we can implement our strengthened climate plan that would cut our emissions and allow our economy to thrive in a low-carbon world. For that reason, I urge all colleagues in the House to join me in supporting this legislation, but members should not just take my word for it. They should listen to the calls from leading environmental NGOs in this country for the two Houses to swiftly pass Bill C-12. A recent letter co-signed by the Climate Action Network, the David Suzuki Foundation, Équiterre, Ecojustice and West Coast Environmental Law made that particular case. It is hard to believe that just a decade ago, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the member for Pontiac and I were each working for those latter three respective organizations.

The decade that was lost under former Prime Minister Harper, and the efforts described by some as cowardly or even as a pariah in the context of UN-led climate change negotiations, is a big reason we are here today. Climate accountability legislation is long overdue. Since Bill C-12 was first tabled, I have spoken with hundreds of constituents and dozens of organizations, both within and outside of my riding, that wanted to know more and had ideas for this legislation. People like Daniel Huot have reminded me as recently as today why it is important that people who represent the public are accountable for the commitments they make, and climate change is no different.

I have spoken with members of all parties about this legislation and I know there has been a tremendous amount of engagement with experts across the country since the first reading of this bill. There is proof that improvements have been made. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change stated that he was open to amendments that would strengthen this bill. His actions have shown that he was true to his word. I want to thank all members of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development for taking an already good bill and making it significantly better through a number of amendments. In particular, I want to thank the NDP for supporting the government on the majority of the amendments made at committee.

I also want to thank the Bloc Québécois for the amendments it proposed and for voting in favour of sending the bill back to the House.

In my speech at second reading, I raised a few key aspects of this legislation that needed to be strengthened for it to give the House and all Canadians confidence that this bill would hold the government to account sooner and allow for longer-term planning. Originally, this bill would not have required reporting on Canada's track to achieving 2030 targets until a 2026 report by the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development and a 2027 progress report by the government.

I argued that the progress reporting in this bill needed to occur sooner so that Canadians could judge with confidence whether our country was on track to meeting our commitments for 2030 and averting the greatest challenge the world faces. To that end, the bill has been amended to require the first progress report to be submitted no later than the end of 2023 and that another be submitted in 2025. Earlier and more frequent reporting will provide enough time to take corrective action, or to vote in a government that will deal with the climate emergency and meet our international responsibilities.

Bill C-12 has also been amended to require that any progress reporting related to 2030 must now include an update on the interim greenhouse gas emissions objective for 2026. This satisfies some people who were seeking a 2025 target. It also addresses a concern I had raised that, due to our federal structure, shared responsibility for policies related to climate and the need to consult and accommodate indigenous peoples would have collectively taken a year or more to go through. Setting a short-term target for 2025 would have made that difficult, and it may have also led us to make short-term changes to cut emissions at the expense of changes that may take longer to pay back, in terms of emissions reductions.

I also focused on the long term in my last speech. I argued that we should provide targets and plans looking five years in advance, as the original bill required, as well as look 10 to 15 years ahead to allow the government and the private sector to make the investments now that will get us to our medium-term goals and on course to get to net zero by 2050.

This will allow us to have what the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices calls the safe-bet solutions, which are based on existing technologies like electric vehicles, measures for methane reduction and home retrofits and will help us meet our near-term reductions, as well as to work on some of the wild cards, which are the high-risk, high-reward technologies that we need to get to net zero.

These breakthrough technologies include climate solutions like hydrogen. They can be game-changers in hard-to-abate areas like freight transport. For these technologies to do the heavy lifting to help us reach our medium- to longer-term decarbonization, we need to set the minds of our government to where we are going and also show the private sector where we are going, so that those investments are made today and so that those jobs are also created today.

The testimony I heard as part of my role on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources clearly underlined that this is the certainty that businesses are looking for. They also said it was critical to pair this with a steadily increasing stringency of measures like the clean fuel standard and the price on pollution that will make Canada a destination of choice for low-carbon investment. To this effect, the amendments to Bill C-12 have acknowledged this by requiring emissions targets to be set 10 years and a day in advance.

I want to run through a number of the other important changes as well.

The content of the reporting has been improved to require the inclusion of more detail in projections for annual emissions reductions by each economic sector, and also to show what additional measures could have been taken to better ensure that targets are met.

Amendments have also made it clear that the net-zero advisory body will be independent of government and will also have a role in target setting in addition to its role in meeting those targets. This body has already been set up, with a diverse and exceptional group of 14 experts, including several who have been highly critical of the government's efforts to date. Together they will provide wholly independent advice and annual reports to the minister, which the minister will have to respond to publicly.

In what may seem self-evident, another amendment will require that governments make progressively stronger greenhouse gas emissions targets and ensure that Canada's targets are at least as ambitious as the most recent nationally determined contribution communicated under the Paris Agreement. While these requirements may seem self-evident, they guarantee that our emissions targets do not stale and will instead ensure we achieve and maintain a position at the forefront of global climate action.

If my colleagues think that this piece of legislation, with the Bloc Québécois's amendment, does not go far enough to promote climate accountability, a review will be mandated within five years or less.

Ultimately, Bill C-12 will require the federal government to be ambitious with its climate action, to be transparent with Canadians about the measures it is taking, to be clear with how it could do more and to put them in the driver's seat to holding the government accountable to ensure that we do what we must to address the climate emergency.

I will conclude today with the following: Let us not let one party's intransigence on climate change derail our country for a decade, as it did before. Let us not make the same mistake again. Let us ensure that we deliver the climate action that the vast majority of Canadians want to see and let us pass climate accountability legislation today.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

I would like to hear his thoughts on greenhouse gas reduction targets. At the beginning of the parliamentary session, the Liberals' target was to achieve a reduction of 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. In the budget, the government proposed a 36% reduction. On Earth Day, the target turned into a range of 40% to 50%. Not too long ago at the G7, the Prime Minister joined the other countries in aiming for a 50% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030.

In spite of all these targets—and no one quite knows which one we are aiming for—the government has not managed to put a figure in the bill. Since Kyoto in 2012, Canadian governments have been systematically incapable of meeting their targets.

Does my colleague truly believe that the current version of Bill C‑12 will help us meet our greenhouse gas reduction targets?

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question. I think it is a good question, because we already have our work cut out for us if we want to hit our current target. We have to respect what science tells us to do.

Under our current plan, we can implement measures in this budget to reduce our emissions to 36% below 2005 levels. We have to do even more. I think this legislation will help because it will force the government to be transparent. Ultimately, that is what will help individuals support and encourage the government and make sure it does what it said it would do.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague is familiar with the recent work by the International Energy Agency in modelling what a pathway to net zero by 2050 would look like. Notably, that modelling calls for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure this year. I wonder how he justifies the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline in the context of that pathway to 2050, especially given that the Prime Minister signed a communiqué at the G7 that specifically noted the IEA's pathway.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for his question and his important work as part of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to get these important amendments passed.

Absolutely, the IEA report is an eye-opener. It is a report the Government of Canada asked the IEA to put together, along with a number of other nations. It makes some very important conclusions on the rate and speed of the transition we are already experiencing today. As my colleague mentioned, after this year there would not be a need for new exploration or new production going forward, which is going to cause some major changes in the way that energy is produced all around the world, including in Canada. That is something we need to take into account.

One of the things I mentioned in my speech earlier today was hydrogen, which could very much be a fuel of the future for some of the hard-to-abate areas I mentioned. Blue hydrogen and green hydrogen offer opportunities and are part of the picture of what our energy sector is going to look like into the future.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and pleasure to speak tonight to this important bill. I am going to take a bit of a different slant on this.

As members know, I was first elected in 2019, so I am a relatively new member of this House. This period of time just before the session ends for the summer is a very busy time, as I understand. This is my first experience with it. It is the first time I have gotten to see the government trying to complete its agenda, which is kind of lagging. What I have been expecting is the very best the government has to offer to get its agenda through before the House rises for the summer.

My background, really briefly, is that I come from the accounting world, and specifically the management accounting area. Efficiency was one of the things I really focused on. I worked in a manufacturing plant and I helped people figure out the easiest way to do their job so that it required the least amount of labour and we could produce the best product, most efficiently, at the best price. Essentially, it is where I learned one of my mottoes, which is “Work smarter, not harder.”

As I have watched what has gone on here in the last couple of weeks from my lens, a relatively new lens, I have witnessed the exact opposite of efficiency. It has been quite fascinating. In fact, I imagine that when our Prime Minister was on his way back from his vacation trip to Europe a couple of weeks ago, he had to stop in a quarantine hotel like all other Canadians, except that he of course stayed in a special hotel that was close to his house and was only there for a few hours—but I digress. He probably would have called his government House leader to ask how things were going and how the legislation was coming along. Unfortunately, the government House leader would have had to give him the sad news that nothing had happened, that in fact everything had stalled out because of the many mistakes made by the government. In fact, everything was in chaos, as he could see if he looked at Bill C-30 or Bill C-10 or anything else.

As we look at this bill, the government House leader has denied many times that the Liberals are going to call an election shortly, saying it is the event that just is not going to happen. However, in April, on this bill, the Liberals seemed to suddenly realize that they needed to pass something, and that is where Bill C-12 came into the picture. They needed to pass something just in case the event that is not going to happen happens.

After months of inaction on this bill, suddenly there was a big panic. Why is the government willing to ram through a flawed bill just before the summer? It is just in case that event that is not going to happen happens. Of course, the Liberals could wait until September, but here we are instead. It is the last panic time before the event that is not going to happen happens. This is hypocritical, and it is very disrespectful to our democracy.

I want to look at Bill C-12 through my new eyes. I had a front-row seat to this bill because I am on the environment committee. I have been able to see this first-hand. One of the questions I was asking myself was, “How do we have success when creating a new law?” Of course, the first step is to write a good bill. When the minister came to our committee, the first thing he said was that he was open to amendments. I am assuming he said that because he knew that the bill was not well written and that it had many flaws.

He just opened the floodgates, because there were 114 amendments that came to committee, and 17 of those came from the government itself. The bill was only 10 pages long at that point. That is over 11 amendments per page, or four per clause. That is a lot of amendments. Those numbers alone should prove that this bill was flawed.

Every morning we are led in a prayer by the Speaker, and one of the lines in that prayer is “Grant us wisdom....to make good laws....” I cannot sit back and watch this law come into force. It is a bad law. The number of amendments also showed that this was true.

The second way that we could have success when creating a new law is to get feedback. There was a lot of feedback. There were 75 briefs received by the environment committee, which is great. A lot of Canadians put in a lot of hard work to write reports and provide information to the committee. The bad news is that only eight of those briefs were received before we started our study. That was because the study was jammed in. It was rushed into committee with a very short deadline.

That means that 67 briefs were received after we did our study. It means that the work of many Canadians was ignored, and the government was happy to ignore it. It was not particularly interested in listening to the views of people who submitted the briefs. It had a plan, an idea of what it wanted to accomplish, and that is what it was going to do.

The third way we could make sure to have success in creating a new bill is to let the committee do its work. The first thing the government did was make a deal with the NDP. It did not want the committee to get bogged down in any details of actually providing useful information. It wanted to be able to ram things through.

The Liberal-NDP coalition did exactly that. It rammed this bill through the committee. Almost every single vote at the committee was marked by the Liberal-NDP coalition. The Liberals and the NDP made no bones about their coalition.

The NDP member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley posted to his Twitter before the clause by clause started, “[T]he NDP will be proposing amendments that the government has agreed to support.... We have also jointly agreed to a number of other amendments.”

What was the practical result of this? The New Democrats and the Liberals fell silent. They did not ask questions. I am not even sure they read many of the amendments or even understood what they were. They had a plan. They just knew to vote for this and not vote for that. Therefore, it fell to the Conservatives and the Bloc MPs to scrutinize these amendments. As for me, I asked reasoned and thoughtful questions of the departmental experts as to the consequences of certain amendments, but the problem was that there were 114 amendments, as I said.

As I also mentioned, the government put forward 17 of its own amendments. That means that on 17 separate occasions, the minister messed up drafting the bill and he needed his MPs to fix it. That is like us buying a new car, driving it off the lot and just as we are leaving, the salesman says he has scheduled 17 appointments for us to come back for maintenance because the dealer messed up and there are a bunch of problems with the car. Therefore, we drive it off the lot, go back tomorrow and the dealer starts fixing it. It makes no sense.

The Liberals and the New Democrats on the committee were only interested in their amendments. They refused to engage with us on our amendments. To prove my point, there was kind of a funny example.

Subsection 7(4) of the original bill required that the minister would set national targets five years in advance. The government and NDP wanted to change that to 10 years in advance. The problem was the Greens put forward an identical amendment and because they got there first, we dealt with their amendment first.

As was the practice of the government and the NDP members, they did not want to support anyone else's amendments and certainly not the Greens'. Therefore, the Green amendment was voted on and was rejected. Next up was the government amendment that was literally identical. The chair, rightly so, ruled that it was inadmissible because we had just dealt with this at committee and we had decided not to proceed with it. That was a big problem. Everybody wanted to vote for that second one because the members actually wanted the amendment. However, I do not think they read the first one from the Greens, which was the same, and they did not realize they had just voted down, essentially, their own amendment.

In the end, after a very long discussion and a lot of time wasted, the government members finally realized that instead of saying 10 years, they could say “9 years 366 days”, which was different enough to get it passed. I found that quite humorous, that the government members were not able to accomplish this.

I have an amendment that was read tonight, and it is in a section of the bill referring to the work of the advisory body, specifically the annual report that it has to submit. My amendment would require that the minister make the annual report public and, further, that the minister publicly respond to this report. It would require the government to actually take action, which is something we all know the Liberals are quite allergic to. The Liberals tried to make an amendment on this section at committee, but theirs was sloppy and it left the legislation in very bad shape.

Essentially, the Liberal-NDP amendment added words but it did not remove redundant words, so the bill as it is written right now makes no sense in that section. It still includes a long sentence that should not be there and it starts with a partial word. It just does not make a whole lot of sense. My amendment allows that wording to make sense again.

The Green Party put forward some really good amendments. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands was quite frustrated at committee. I want to quote her because it is quite telling. She said:

I have to say that this is the most dispiriting process of clause-by-clause that I've experienced in many years. Usually amendments are actually considered, people actually debate them and there is a good-faith process....

I condemn this government for what it has done: for telling people like me, who believed in good faith that there would be an actual appetite for change to improve the bill and who accepted it and prepared amendments, only to show up here and watch Liberals stay mute, the NDP stay mute and march through their amendments, passing them in force, and not listening and not caring about the possibility that other amendments might work.

What happens when there is a flawed committee process? Flawed legislation results. Bill C-12 is flawed legislation.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. I have some interesting numbers here. In recent weeks, the International Energy Agency clearly stated that achieving net zero by 2050 means reducing global oil production by 50% by 2040 and by 75% by 2050.

The government made it clear in this bill that it wants to achieve net zero by 2050. However, its own projections and those of Natural Resources Canada indicate that oil and gas production in this country will continue to increase until 2045. In 2045, we will produce even more than we produced in 2019. Considering those numbers and the current version of the bill, does the member think Canada will achieve its greenhouse gas reduction targets?

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, what we have to understand is that right in the numbers she provided there will be oil and gas used in the world for many years to come. I want to ensure that Canada is the country producing and supplying that oil and gas to the world.

We have some of the toughest rules when it comes to human rights, labour policies and environmental legislation. We do not want oil that will be produced in the world to come from jurisdictions where they do not have the tight and very difficult rules we have. That is clearly what we want, and Canada can lead the world in that way.

We also have to remember that our oil and gas producers are very good with technology, and they are developing new technology all the time, which reduces the carbon footprint of our own gas production. Through technology and good legislation, we can be leaders in the world and we can produce the oil and gas that the world will need for many decades to come.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank colleagues on the environment committee for the work they did, at least those who collaborated on the bill. The outcome is really a testament to their hard work on behalf of Canadians.

For my colleague who just spoke, I am looking for a very simple yes or no on this. Does he believe global warming is a fact and that human beings are the primary cause of that phenomena? If he does believe in it, what will he do to get his Conservative colleagues, who still are on the fence or outright deny global warming, to realize the facts and reality on the issue?

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, yes, global warming is real and yes, we need to do something about it. It is not other politicians that need to be convinced of this, it is people. Where people struggle sometimes with this, is the fact that many of the proposed solutions to this point will affect them deeply. They are going to take away their jobs. They are going to take away their livelihood. They are going to take away things that they are used to. That is why we have to be smart in how we do this. We cannot simply outlaw things without proper solutions to replace them with.

It is incumbent upon us as leaders to ensure that we have the tools in place to reduce our greenhouse footprint, absolutely, but we need to do it in a way that does not get rid of jobs, does not throw people into poverty, that allows people to live their lives, but do it in a better and more environmentally friendly way.