Environment Committee on Nov. 21st, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Okay, for now, we'll tell the clerks to go ahead.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

It's on the agenda, Mr. Chair, the discussion about this one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

That's true. Obviously the clerks need some guidance, and I wanted to give them that.

Witnesses, we welcome you today. We appreciate your being here—some of you on very short notice, filling in and doing the job for us.

We will start off by going in the order. We'd ask you to keep your comments to 10 minutes. Then we will go to our members to ask you questions, so you should get a chance to finish up.

We will start off with Mr. Burton, please.

[Dr. Ian Burton, Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It's a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to speak to this committee. I congratulate the sponsor for introducing a bill that gives us an opportunity to think about climate change and the Kyoto Protocol in a particularly focused way.

I want to direct my comments to the subject of adaptation. Some members may feel this is a bit tangential to the main thrust of the bill. Nevertheless, I think it is an important issue that needs to be considered whenever we begin to think about an appropriate strategy for Canada and for the international community on climate change.

As members will know, the Framework Convention on Climate Change recognizes two approaches to climate change. One is mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The other is adaptation, doing what we can to reduce the impacts of inevitable, necessary, unavoidable climate change, which we are facing now, to reduce our vulnerability and perhaps expand our resilience in the face of a changing climate. This can mean strengthening and redesigning and setting new design standards and codes for infrastructure; dealing with the thawing and melting permafrost and the impact that has on our Arctic communities; and enhancing and improving water conservation in various ways where we might suffer water shortage. It can mean looking at crop varieties and alternatives in places where we're faced with drought, such as the Prairies; thinking about how to manage the invasion of insect pests, such as the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia; or dealing with extreme events, such as the floods and droughts to which many parts of the country are exposed.

In the near to medium term, there is some opportunity for substitution between mitigation and adaptation. That is to say, the more we can adapt in the short term, the more time there will be to mitigate the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and to reduce the damage for a given level of concentration. This is only a partial and temporary solution. I do not suggest that adaptation can in any way deal with the major impacts of climate change. But in the short term, it is something to which we should, and must, turn our attention.

One of the fundamental questions to ask is how much can adaptation achieve? How much can we reduce our vulnerability to climate change by taking the sorts of adaptation approaches that I've mentioned in relation to climate risks?

My thought is that this bill and, for that matter, the Clean Air Act are taking a heavily mitigation-focused view of the climate issue. Before we can understand what the costs and benefits are of one strategy or another, we need to know more about what can be achieved by adaptation, both in Canada and globally.

There are important differences between these two approaches. Mitigation is something we have to agree on and pursue globally and internationally. It's something that happens by international agreement that we form, participate in, and then implement. The benefits that come from mitigation are globally spread because they're the reduction of the rate of climate change. They are globally spread benefits. Different countries will get different amounts of those benefits according to their existing level of vulnerability. On the other hand, adaptation is something that we do for ourselves. The benefits from adaptation fall where the adaptation measures take place.

My conclusion from this reasoning is that Canada should consider how much it needs to allocate to adaptation and, in so doing, consider what the degree of urgency is for us with respect to the amount of mitigation we want to pursue. We need to do this in the Canadian context, but we also need to do this in the negotiations that are ongoing with respect to the post-2012 regime that will follow after the termination in 2012 of the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

I think both in Canada and internationally, the climate issue has been too narrowly conceived, with too heavy a focus and emphasis on mitigation. There's a lot we can do in adaptation to reduce the near-term impacts, and we need to find ways of giving more attention to doing that.

This really raises a question about Canada's national interests, and I would like to see that in two parts. One is what is best to do for ourselves, in a rather narrow self-interest, in which case I think the case for adaptation is very strong. The other is what we need to do as a good global citizen, to help maintain a stable world society and economy, and there we have a responsibility to play a role and, if possible, a leadership role in the area of mitigation.

But I should make it clear that in mitigation, we can lead by example, we can demonstrate, but what we do does not make an awfully big difference in terms of global climate change. Canada contributes less than 2% of global emissions, so what we do in practical actual terms of reducing climate change does not make an awful lot of difference. We have major players contributing much more to greenhouse gas emissions--for example, the United States and the major emitters in the developing countries such as India, China and Brazil--and what they do is very important. We need to go into the negotiations with full awareness and cognizance of what they are going to do and how we might influence their choices.

So the question is, if you like, by putting our own house in order and reducing our own emissions, does this leading by example help in that direction, and how much might it help?

There is a lot we can do domestically. We could follow the example of the State of California and take some of the steps that have been taken there. We might find ways of joining with California and the northeastern United States in a carbon cap and carbon ceiling trading market. So we might get to some sort of Kyoto arrangement, not in a top-down controlling way, or not only in that way, but also by looking at the bottom-up things we can do on a regional basis with other partners in North America and potentially also Europe.

Let me make one further point about adaptation. Adaptation is not new. While we call a lot of things adaptation because of climate change, we have been doing a lot of these things already. So is it just a case of doing what we have been doing more and better? Well, partly, but we are in fact not dealing with our current weather and climate risks as well as we might be. We currently have what I like to call an adaptation deficit in relation to current climate and current climate variability. Our losses from climate variability and from climate-extreme events are in fact increasing, and if you look at the payouts that are being made by Canadian federal assistance to provinces to deal with natural disasters, you see that they have been going up quite considerably.

In dealing with climate change, we can add the concern that we have in catching up with the way in which we should be dealing with climate variability and the disasters that are associated with extreme climate events.

I'm suggesting that it's time for Canada to think about more of a balanced, two-track approach to climate change in which we address mitigation as vigorously and effectively as we can, but at the same time pay attention to adaptation for our own country and of course, where we can, through organizations like CIDA and IDRC, help the most vulnerable developing countries to deal with their own adaptation problems.

Thank you very much for hearing me. I circulated in advance a short written version of this testimony, which I understand is available in both English and French, and I would be glad to respond to any questions you have about that or my remarks.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sauchyn.

[Dr. David Sauchyn, Research Professor, Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, University of Regina, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I appreciate this opportunity to participate in your study of Bill C-288.

The preamble to this bill accurately describes climate change as one of the most serious threats facing humanity in Canada, one that poses significant risks to our environment, economy, society, and human health.

First, I want to make the observation that scientists do not believe in global warming. They don't have to. Global warming is not a religion. Global warming is a fact. It's not a question of whether you believe or not. The evidence for global warming is extensive, conclusive, and overwhelming. There no longer is a scientific debate about global warming. The debate has shifted to the analysis of the appropriate institutional, corporate, and individual responses to climate change.

As Dr. Burton pointed out, there are two categories of response, and those are mitigation and adaptation. My message will be similar to Dr. Burton's, although I take the slightly different approach in that I'm going to provide a review of the objectives of Bill C-288, and in particular, relative to the other proposed legislation, Bill C-30.

I'd like to congratulate the proponents of Bill C-288 for their attempt to restore Canada's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. This international treaty is a first and major step in the effort to control greenhouse gas emissions, and thereby the rate of global warming. It establishes a common language, targets, and objectives. A single protocol supports international collaboration and cooperation. We have research projects in Chile and Ukraine, and I can tell you that because they are parties to the Kyoto Protocol, it very much facilitates our international research because we are speaking a common technical language.

A made-in-Canada solution, on the other hand, separates us from a process that was developed and monitored by an international body of scientists and decision-makers. Furthermore, the Kyoto initiative will lead to further action beyond 2012, and Canada must be involved in this further planning of science and policy to deal with the causes and impacts of climate change.

In terms of more meaningful and effective targets for controlling greenhouse gases, Bill C-288 is a major step forward relative to Bill C-30, the Clean Air Act. As climate change policy, Bill C-30 has three major flaws. First of all, Bill C-30 suggests that climate change is an air quality issue. It is not. Embedding climate change in the Clean Air Act is avoiding the real issue. Secondly, Bill C-30 sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions for the 2050s. This implies that by meeting these targets we will somehow bring climate change under control by the middle of this century. This approach demonstrates a misunderstanding of the climate system. The climate of the mid-21st century is being determined today by emissions of greenhouse gases. This is because there is a lag of several decades between activities that modify the atmosphere and the full response of the climate system. As the preamble of Bill C-288 states, the problem of climate change requires immediate action.

I refer to these flaws in Bill C-30 only because Bill C-288 addresses these and avoids them. However, there is a third shortcoming of Bill C-30 that is perpetuated by Bill C-288. Both of these bills address only a small component of Canada's commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. Bill C-288 explicitly deals only with paragraph 1 of article 3 of the Kyoto Protocol. There are 28 articles in the Kyoto Protocol, and article 3 alone has 14 paragraphs.

To this brief I have appended other articles of the Kyoto Protocol to remind the committee that Canada is also obligated to address climate change and its adverse impacts, including capacity-building and adaptation measures, facilitating adequate adaptation to climate change, cooperating in scientific and technical research and developing systematic observation systems and data archives, reducing uncertainties related to the climate system, and addressing adverse impacts of climate change and the economic and social consequences of various strategies.

We're also obligated to implement education and training programs and to strengthen national capacity, to facilitate public awareness, and to share the proceeds from certified activities to assist developing countries to meet the costs of adaptation.

I'm making the same argument we just heard from Dr. Burton, which is that we have a policy vacuum in this country with respect to the impact of and adaptation to climate change. There are no references in either Bill C-30 or Bill C-288 to these important obligations.

Canada needs a comprehensive climate change strategy to avoid the adverse consequences of climate change. Besides the mitigation of greenhouse gases, a comprehensive strategy should address our understanding of the climate system; the influence of human activities; the impacts of climate change; the risks and the opportunities; and the necessary adjustments to public policy, resource management, engineering practices, and infrastructure design.

By focusing public policy on only one of these five components of a climate change strategy, Canada is at risk of failing to meet its treaty obligations, and in general, Canada is failing to deal with climate change.

I want to conclude by describing the impacts of climate change in my home region, the prairie provinces. I'm with a research institute called the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, or PARC, based at the University of Regina. PARC was established with funding from the federal government and the governments of the prairie provinces. We were asked to research the impacts of climate change on the prairie provinces.

Currently, PARC is responsible for preparing the Prairies chapter of the national assessment of climate change that the Government of Canada will release next year. Therefore, I can tell you with confidence that the climate of the prairie provinces is changing dramatically. All the weather records show this. Summer river flows are declining as the Rocky Mountain glaciers are disappearing and as warmer winters are producing less snow and ice for the spring runoff.

The growing season is getting longer and warmer; however, the productivity of the forests and the farms is constrained by declining water supplies. The recent weather has included the worst drought since the Prairies were settled by Europeans. It also has included the worst flooding. The drought of 2001-02 cost the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan $3.6 billion. This is in reference to the adaptation deficit Dr. Burton mentioned.

Ecosystems have begun to change. There are threats to the integrity of the ecological services that support agriculture, forestry, the recycling of water, and the traditional lifestyles of our first nations.

The Rocky Mountain pine beetle has devastated the B.C. forests. This year it skipped over the Rocky Mountains. It now exists in Alberta, and there is a real threat that the boreal forests of Canada will be devastated by the pine beetle because it is surviving the warmer winters.

Finally, these shorter winters are also a problem for northern industries that require frozen ground to move materials and supplies. We are losing the advantages of a cold winter in the interior of Canada.

These are just some of the changes that Canadian scientists have documented for our region. Please note that I made no mention of air quality. The impacts of climate change are occurring first in the Arctic and the Prairies, where air quality is just fine, thank you, except for maybe Calgary or Edmonton.

The rate of climate change and its consequences will almost certainly accelerate through the coming decades, and until we are able to retard the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, as a Canadian citizen and a climate change scientist, I am deeply concerned by actions that would have Canada undermine our international treaty on climate change. I'm also deeply concerned by the lack of action to deal with the climate change and impacts that are presently occurring.

Our children and their children urgently need your leadership to create public policy that will reduce greenhouse gases as quickly and as much as possible. However, we also need your help to enable individuals, institutions, communities, and industries to adapt to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. These impacts are already serious, and we are already locked into more severe impacts in the immediate future.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Teneycke.

[Kory Teneycke, Executive Director, Canadian Renewable Fuels Association]

Thank you very much for inviting me to join you today.

I'm with the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. We're the industry association for ethanol and biodiesel in Canada, as well as for other renewable technologies.

Our industry is really going through an unprecedented global growth spurt right now that is being driven in part by rising energy prices as well as by improvements in technology for producing renewable fuels. Over the last couple of years—a year and a half, I guess—our ethanol production has risen from 230 million litres a year to 520 million litres for the end of this year. We've almost doubled ethanol production, I guess, in 18 months. Similarly, biodiesel production has gone from less than 5 million litres a year to just short of 100 million litres.

So Canada is a part of the global growth that's going on. That's being driven today primarily by changes in provincial policy.

I want to address, as our other witnesses have today, our thoughts on addressing climate change in a comprehensive way and how we would be an example of domestic action. It is our perspective, in terms of Kyoto—I'm just pointing this out—that bold international talk is not a substitute for taking action domestically. Similarly, bold talk about initiatives on the domestic front is equally lacking in terms of delivering what I think Canadians want: measurable, practical, visible steps being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions here in Canada.

We believe we are one of the examples of action that can be taken domestically to improve our domestic GHG emission profile.

We think the policy of having renewable fuel content as a part of our energy sector is positive. It's positive whether you're doing it in the electricity sector, requiring renewable portfolio standards, or if you do it in the transportation energy sector, which we represent.

We're very supportive of the initiatives brought forward by this government to have 5% average renewable content by 2010. I would point out that this is the same policy as two of the opposition parties brought forward as well. We think there is a remarkable amount of consensus on this approach between provincial governments of all political stripes and federal parties, irrespective of which one you're looking at. There is a great deal of consensus on this issue.

This comes with benefits not only to the environment. An average of 5% renewable content would reduce GHG emissions by five megatonnes a year in the transportation sector, which is not a solution to all our climate change problems, obviously, but it is a measurable, tangible, practical step that we can take today that also has economic benefits both for our agriculture sector and our rural economy.

In terms of the specifics of what progress we have seen in implementing this, it's a little bit of a mixed update. We don't have much to report that's changed since the last time I had the privilege of addressing this committee. We were expecting an interprovincial meeting sometime this fall to discuss implementing the 5% renewable standard. That has not happened, nor has a meeting been scheduled to date.

We have also not heard any additional details on what the government's renewable fuel standard will look like. Some provisions of that regulation need to be enabled by changes that have been proposed in the Clean Air Act, and obviously the Clean Air Act is in a state of political limbo.

In terms of some of the changes we're looking for to address parity in terms of tax treatment, we're hoping to see those changes made in the next budget. But of course, it's a bit of a black box as to how decision-making is taking place on that.

I guess the total effect of this uncertainty is that it creates a lot of instability for potential investors who are looking to invest in the facilities to make renewal fuel and to feed the government's requirement.

My message to you would be that the fundamental issues in terms of implementing this step of tax parity and market access still exist. We think the stated direction of the government, the opposition, and the provincial governments is the right direction; however, we're somewhat frustrated by the apparent delays in getting there. We're looking not only to the government but to the opposition parties and the provincial governments to redouble their efforts to make this policy, for which there seems to be broad agreement, actually happen in this Parliament.

With that, I conclude my remarks. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you, Mr. Teneycke.

We'll go to Mr. Cleland.

[Michael Cleland, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to thank you and the committee for the invitation to appear before you today on this important matter.

Let me just take a few minutes to introduce the Canadian Gas Association. We're the association that speaks on behalf of Canada's natural gas delivery industry. Our principal members are the local distribution companies that deliver gas to almost six million Canadian business and residential customers from coast to coast in Canada.

Natural gas accounts for something over one-quarter of the end-use energy used in Canada: 30% of industrial energy, 44% of commercial energy, and 46% of residential energy. As well, natural gas accounts for a growing part, albeit still a small part, of the power generation energy and a small part of our transportation fuel.

CGA and its members have been active participants in the climate change debate for well over a decade, and we take the perspective that the natural gas delivery industry is part of the solution. By that, I mean three things.

First, while our direct emissions from the gas delivery operations are relatively small, we are part of the so-called large final emitters groups of industries, and we have worked and are continuing to work with government to develop a framework to manage our emissions. By that I mean a framework that includes short-term, medium-term, and long-term targets.

We also work with our customers and our regulators to develop and implement demand-side management programs aimed at improving the efficiency with which natural gas is used. Finally, we advance the use of natural gas as a clean alternative in many applications, an alternative that not only can reduce GHG emissions but is also extremely effective at reducing other air contaminants. They can be brought together, though I agree that they are not essentially related.

In short, Mr. Chairman, CGA believes that by using multiple strategies, Canada can cost-effectively manage its greenhouse gas emissions and, over time, begin to reduce them. I think the question of meeting the commitments in the Kyoto Protocol, however, is another matter.

While the intent of Bill C-288 is laudable, with the greatest of respect to members of this committee, I would argue that its substance is ill advised. It is ill advised for two reasons: because it is not possible for Canada to meet the Kyoto target, and because the continuing debate about whether we can or can't do so and who is to blame is a distraction from getting on with solutions.

Let me comment briefly on both of these points.

Why can't we meet Kyoto? Simply put, I would argue that it was conceived with almost no consideration of the underlying reality of Canada's energy system. In 1997 when we signed on, we were well aware of the following things. Greenhouse gas emissions had been growing at something over 1.5% a year for several decades. That growth was a consequence of energy production and energy use throughout the economy. Every individual and every business decision every day affected and continues to affect our GHG emissions. Meeting Kyoto even then would have required us to turn the economy on a dime and get on a trajectory of something like minus 1% a year as compared to the 1.5% a year growth we'd seen for the past several decades. At the time there were no economically available options to capture emissions or to deal with them.

We are now beginning to see that the fourth point may not be true if we can solve the capture and sequestration problem from large emitting sources, and I'm optimistic that we will be able to. But the first three remain true, and indeed, in 2006 there is no meaningful physical possibility for Canada to meet Kyoto. We could buy international credits if we could find them in sufficient quantity, which is in some doubt. But the arithmetic is fairly simple, and I'll leave it to you as parliamentarians to reflect on how government could explain to Canadians that billions of dollars of Canadian taxpayers' money will be sent abroad to meet a commitment that, I would argue, we had no business making in the first place.

More importantly, I think the reason we focus on Kyoto per se as opposed to getting on with climate change is that it distracts us from getting on with solutions. Canada clearly has a very big challenge. We are an inherently energy- and GHG-intensive economy for many historical reasons. That history has left us with an interesting legacy, a strong economy with a heavy proportion of natural resource-based industries, sprawling cities, large houses, large cars, and all manner of energy-using equipment that most of us enjoy having and using. What goes with all of that is a very high level of greenhouse gases per capita, a level much higher than almost any other country.

In these circumstances, it strikes me that we should be focusing on solutions. It is less obvious why we would be focusing on trying to meet a target that is roughly the same target as the European Union. They have very different historical, geographical, and economic circumstances, and indeed, they already had their target in the bank when they signed on to it in 1997.

Mr. Chairman, let me talk about one possible solution that I think is germane to your discussion. My association has been advancing the concept of clean energy for Canadian communities and a strategy to do that. Let me put it in context. About half of the energy we use in Canada is consumed in Canadian cities and towns: about 30% in buildings, about 13% in urban transportation, and about 7% in small urban industries. We all seem to agree that a real climate change plan needs to start action now, but it also needs to look out to around the mid-century and what will involve reductions of 50% or 60%, or more, from today's levels, even though we expect the economy to continue growing. This will entail a transformation of historic proportion, and one part of that transformation needs to be the way we use energy in our cities and towns, in our communities.

To date, the public policy debate on energy and energy and the environment has focused on individual fuels and technologies, and the respective merits or demerits. I would argue that this piecemeal approach ignores the fact that energy is a system of closely interconnected parts and is proving to be suboptimal. We need to do a few things. We need to significantly accelerate our energy efficiency efforts, where the main challenges involve system integration rather than individual technologies. We need to provide an enabling platform for emerging on-site renewable energy sources. We need to reduce the pressure on existing traditional energy delivery systems by ensuring that the right fuel is used in the right place and that we extract the full energy value from the energy delivered.

Energy consumers, businesses, and individuals purchase fuels and technologies to deliver energy services. While consumers want better environmental performance and energy efficiency, they are almost never willing to sacrifice things like safety, affordability, or reliability for environmental performance. We know that from a lot of years of experience. The question is, the challenge is, how do we make sure those factors come together as opposed to being in opposition to each other? That needs a strategy.

Our proposal would be to have something called a “clean energy in Canadian communities” strategy, which would be a platform for moving forward a variety of initiatives that ensure reliability, affordability, and environmental performance delivered at the same time.

Four principles would guide this strategy, Mr. Chairman, and then I'll wrap it up.

One is that we should build on the existing infrastructure and energy service businesses. Canada's energy system is a complex of infrastructure and businesses and customer relationships that we should be making maximum use of in order to ensure that we can deliver those energy services to Canadians using less energy and using cleaner energy.

We should recognize the benefits of diversity, and “diverse” means delivering energy services. We need to bring the grid base—the electricity grid, the natural gas grid— on-site renewable sources, and energy efficiency technologies together to create optimum solutions.

We should develop and deploy new technologies. We should benefit from market-ready technologies today and, at the same time, support the development and deployment of emerging technologies, the full benefits of which will emerge in coming decades.

Finally, we should mobilize stakeholders. We should mobilize interests among new and traditional energy suppliers, equipment and service suppliers, including new technology developers, builders, and community leaders.

In all this, Mr. Chairman, there are many important roles for the federal government, as a partner, working with provincial governments and municipal governments, to move such a strategy forward.

Let me wrap it up by saying that this is a strategy that I believe would receive strong approval from provincial governments. As I say, it could be done in partnership with them without in any way intruding on their jurisdiction. It would improve federal leverage on the efforts that it now undertakes.

Members of the committee, I applaud your commitment to ensure that Canada acts responsibly on climate change, but I leave you with a caution. We have today talked a great deal and done very little to come to grips with our GHG challenge—and other speakers have said this too. We may well be at an historical turning point when we can turn from rhetoric and recrimination and begin to focus on action. In order to do so, we'll need to mobilize every resource at our disposal, every idea, every technology, and every ounce of political will.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you, Mr. Cleland.

We'll go to Mr. Godfrey.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I want to thank all the witnesses for their participation. I know it's a bit frustrating to be brought in at the last moment and then given an assignment that may not play to your strengths or interests.

When we originally drew up our work plan, we thought that it would be useful to have a session that dealt with three things.

One was the various mechanisms for reaching targets. That would be things like market trading systems, carbon trading systems, and so on.

Another issue we wanted to think about was the challenge of target setting. If the way in which we went at target setting the previous time wasn't effective, what would be a better way? How do we then relate the anticipated effectiveness of the various mechanisms so that we can actually make those objectives the targets? We've had some discussion on that.

Finally, the third issue we were talking about was modelling. In this case, I think modelling was really seen as a kind of projection into the future of various impacts. I suspect we've had a fairly good discussion on that by previous witnesses who have basically told us the modelling is getting more and more sophisticated and more refined in terms of what we can expect by way of impacts, and so on.

What I'd like to do, in a way that leaves the witnesses comfortable and not stretching into areas that don't match their expertise, is talk about target setting and mechanisms. I realize people want to talk about other things like adaptation, but that's not really what we're talking about and it's not what the bill is talking about.

As I think Professor Sauchyn indicated, the bill is designed to address a very specific problem, which is the short-term target setting for Kyoto. I think the assumption is that if we can't meet the 2012 targets, how should we recalibrate those targets in a more realistic fashion for the remainder of this period? How do we relate the measures we're going to take with the results we expect?

If I can redirect the witnesses to the question that we're trying to look at today along those lines, I would start with Professor Sauchyn and Dr. Burton. Do you have some reflections on a more realistic way of target setting? How can we relate that to the expected yield from certain mechanisms?

[Dr. David Sauchyn]

First of all, I have to acknowledge that my expertise is certainly not in the technologies by which greenhouse gases are controlled, although I share a building at the University of Regina with some of Canada's experts in that field. They tell me, as Mr. Cleland said, that this technology has advanced significantly in recent years such that it's probably worthy and it's probably necessary that we at least attempt to achieve the targets that are specified under Kyoto. We'll never know if those targets are achievable unless we try.

I appreciate the constraints that Mr. Cleland identified. We are in fact currently working with the energy sector in the Prairies to identify options for adaptation and mitigation. Our experience has been that industry is showing a lot of leadership. In fact, in my opinion, industry is quite a way ahead of government in terms of taking action on climate change, and ultimately it's their responsibility.

I can't honestly say from a scientific perspective whether the Kyoto targets can or cannot be achieved, but we'll never know unless we try. Certainly, the targets the government is currently speaking about or proposing are disturbing.

Once again, Mr. Cleland referred to targets for the 2050s. If other countries took the same approach, if we took greenhouse gas concentrations for the 2050s and put them in a climate model, the climate becomes catastrophically warm. The impacts are so extreme that the cost of the damage of climate change well exceeds the cost of mitigating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I'm sure the committee is well aware of the recent report that came out of the U.K. by the economist Dr. Stern. He indicated that under a business-as-usual scenario, the cost of the impacts of climate change will be in the tens of trillions of dollars and will greatly exceed the cost of mitigating climate change in attempting to achieve as much greenhouse gas reduction as possible in the short term.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Dr. Burton, do you have anything to say on target setting?

[Dr. Ian Burton]

Yes. Mr. Godfrey, I was interested in the phrase that you used, “recalibrate the targets”. I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.

It seems to me that thinking into the future about the use of targets, how those are going to be calibrated or recalibrated is going to depend very much on the international negotiations. So my thought about that is that we need to be much better prepared in the negotiations this time than we were in the last time around, and we need to have a much better understanding of what the economic consequences are for Canada of one target or another. The last target we picked just more or less came out of the air, frankly. So it seems to me that there will likely be a new set of targets.

There'll be some new goals set out in this second period of the Kyoto commitment, but it's impossible to state at this stage what they're likely to be. The indications are that they will be much more variable and flexible than the single aggregate lump target that was agreed to in the first commitment period under Kyoto. It seems unlikely to me that agreements will go forward unless a broader set of players is brought into the agreement, and the broader set of players are insisting on a more flexible way of expressing, calibrating, if you like, those targets, thinking of targets by sectors of the economy and things of that nature. It suggests to me that we need to think much more carefully about the economics of the targets or the calibrated targets that we are accepting.

What does this mean in the short term for the next few years, until the expiration of the first commitment phase in Kyoto? I am not sure. It presses the bounds of my expertise. I'm inclined to agree with those of my colleagues who say, let's get on with it. Let's focus on doing what we can now, practically and effectively, in the short term. We have lots of options that have been put on the table. We tend to be talking about them rather than getting on with them.

I hope that helps.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

I believe Mr. Cleland wants to get in.

[Michael Cleland]

Mr. Godfrey, I think you put your finger on an important question, and I don't think anybody's going to be able to give you a simple answer. But let me give you four ways that are worthwhile thinking about as you think about targets.

One is that you have to bring aspirational top-down targets together with bottom-up targets; you need both. You need to think about how they come together. Kyoto was purely aspirational, top-down. It was out of the air. It was never connected to the ground. You have to do both. If you only stay on the ground you'll be conservative, and you won't move it forward. So that's one thing.

Secondly, you have to take a long-term perspective or a perspective consistent with the scale, the scope, and the weight of the problem. This one needs a longer-term perspective than almost any other, but it needs milestones. It needs something along the way. It needs a trajectory. One of the problems with Kyoto is that we always focus on the gap. Instead of focusing on the gap, we should be looking at the trajectory. What is the slope of that line and what do we need to do with that line if we're going to get there?

Think about a band of possibilities as opposed to a point. If it's a point, it becomes an accounting exercise, a “gee, I met this number” or not. If it's a band of possibilities, it's more consistent with the way the real world actually works.

Finally, whatever target you've set up needs to send a signal that is believable, that is taken seriously by policy-makers and by economic decision-makers. I would argue that one of the problems with Kyoto is that it doesn't have that character.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

You're at 10 minutes. One final 30-second question.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I guess, then, the question is--and I'll refer to Mr. Cleland--if you're going to establish a trajectory, you can't establish it for the medium term and the long term; you actually have to start in the short term.

[Michael Cleland]

Absolutely.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

So what the Commissioner of the Environment said to us was, if you can't meet the target that you thought you could, set another one. I guess today's exercise is really about trying to figure the best way of doing it. This bill at least says, try to figure out a realistic way of relating the measures you take with the results you expect so we can get on to the right trajectory.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Bigras.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome to this session of the Bill C-288 of the committee.

Thank you Mr. Burton and Mr. Sauchyn for reminding us of the importance of adapting to climate change. Mr. Godfrey told us that this wasn’t the objective of the bill, but we have to admit, especially after the Nairobi conference, that this issue of adapting to climate change is becoming increasingly important. In Quebec, there is a group that you have no doubt heard about, the Ouranos Consortium, which deals with adapting to climate change and which revealed, just two weeks ago, that the estimated cost of the effects of climate change on the St. Lawrence is $1 billion. This shows how important it is to fight climate change.

In Nairobi, the President of Switzerland proposed providing funding for climate change adaptation programs. He proposed a CO₂ tax for industry and consumers. I would like to know what you think of this system that would put a tax on CO₂ emissions, with the revenues going into a climate change adaptation fund. I have always found that adaptation has often been the poor cousin in the federal strategy. Do you think that a CO₂ tax to fund adaptation initiatives would be effective for industry and consumers?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Who wants to jump in on that one?

Mr. Teneycke.

[Kory Teneycke]

With respect to a carbon tax, we followed the proposal in Quebec with some interest. The concern I raise with any dedicated tax is that revenues go into general revenues, and our experience with dedicated taxes in the past hasn't been very encouraging. The road tax doesn't go to roads, the GST doesn't go to the debt, the health care tax in Ontario is not related to health care funding, and it's unlikely that a carbon tax in the long term is going to actually change the amount of revenue governments put in to deal with these issues.

There are useful measures that could be taken through the tax code to address cost differences between new technologies and traditional technologies. That would probably yield some outcome in what you're looking for. But we just haven't seen a lot of examples of these dedicated taxes being used for what they were initially prescribed to deliver on.